The first of March begins the Spring season and it sure feels like it. The azaleas are blooming, the spring rains are here, and the weather is near perfect. We have a few big ticket items in March, including a joint meeting with County Commission, votes on downtown parking, land conservation, and more.
First, Some Good News
Gainesville was ranked the number 1 place in Florida to call home by USA Today. We were also ranked the number 4 best place to retire in Florida by GoBankingRates.
Mayor Harvey Ward did a phenomenal State of the City address earlier this month. You should also check out his op-ed in the Alligator on how Gainesville used our federal funding to save lives.
Gainesville Fire Rescue received their international CFAI accreditation. The Gainesville Airport broke ground on their new multi-level structured parking lot, which is just one of many improvements they’re doing thanks to an influx of investments from Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act.
The downtown sidewalk on NE 1st is set and looking good. It’s a wide sidewalk that will do more than just save two trees in downtown, it will be a much nicer and airy walk through our main downtown street. Take a look at the curb in place next time you’re in downtown. And speaking of downtown….
Downtown Parking Changes
For as long as there have been cars and a downtown the City has been trying to solve the issue of parking downtown. As I mentioned in my article “The Fall of Downtown Gainesville” how to park cars has been the first and last thing we’ve talked about for decades in revitalizing downtown. Millions of dollars have been poured into downtown to expand parking, including multiple parking garages, lots, and street parking, totaling over 2,000 parking spaces.
There’s some wisdom to this: cars are the main way people get around, and parking your car should be convenient and simple when you come downtown. If not people simply won’t come downtown.
But that comes with tradeoffs, big trade-offs. Parking takes up a lot of space: 320 sq. ft. per spot. To make more we’d need to either tear down existing buildings or build structured parking lots, which costs $29,000 per spot on average. None of those ideas are realistic, so the best way to deal with this is to play with pricing to ensure the right spots are open when needed so people can easily find parking using the spaces we already have.
On March 22nd city staff will be bringing us an update to the downtown parking plans to better align where free and paid parking is located. Essentially, the plan swaps where free and paid parking is located in a way that makes more sense than the backward way we have it now.
This map is kind of confusing so let me break it down a bit. The green highlights are areas where parking is becoming free/cheaper/longer-lasting than it is currently and blue highlights are where it’s becoming paid. The various color dashes correspond to what the cost will be in the end: either free, 25¢ per hour, or 50¢ per hour.
This new plan is a more moderate rollback of the 2022 plan that was passed and then halted by the Commission. That plan priced every spot between 50¢ and $1 with only a handful of free parking spaces available. This new plan cuts that cost in half, opens up 118 spaces of free parking lot spaces around downtown, keeps much of the existing free parking block from downtown and makes all the street parking along NE 3rd free. In exchange, the parking along Main Street and in the main downtown area will be $.50 an hour. You can pay via an app, but there will also be a physical pay kiosk for those who don’t want to use an app. At night parking will still be free.
Here’s the goal: when you are coming downtown and you just want to get in and get out you should be able to find one or two spots in the main downtown area even if it costs a little bit. If you want to stay longer than a few hours, or you’re dead set on finding free parking, you can find that too, but you’ll need to park 2-3 blocks away. That way long-term parking is a little further out and cheaper/free, and short-term parking is closer in and paid.
Economist and parking guru Donald Shoup calls this the “Goldilocks Principle” of paid parking: charge too little and the spots will always be full, too much and they’ll be empty. The right price in the right spot should be about 80% full at any given time. That way you are maximizing the space you have but cars can find a spot anytime they come downtown and customers will more efficiently cycle through the area. Here’s a good but dated video of Donald Shoup explaining why this is a best practice:
The way we set up our parking in downtown is completely backwards of this. Right now all the free spots are right in the main downtown area, along SE 1st and Main, while paid parking is just outside of this area. The result is that it’s nearly impossible to find parking near the business center of downtown while parking spots a few blocks away are empty. That’s because people who get in early to downtown will park in these primo spots and stay there all day for free, while the people who want to just get in and grab a bite to eat have to search blocks away and pay for the privilege.
It gives the impression that there’s no available parking in downtown, when our studies have shown that there are ample empty parking spots all across downtown at every time of the day. According to the most recent parking study at the absolute busiest time downtown only 51% of parking spots are being parked in.
Doing downtown parking right means being strategic about the role each parking spot plays in letting people enjoy themselves downtown by pricing them accordingly. Doing it right means increasing business revenues by cycling customers/cars through more efficiently. It means fewer cars circling and looking for spots. It’s the best option we have in-lieu-of of bending the laws of physics to concoct parking lots downtown in space that doesn’t exist.
Preservation of the Hogtown Creek
One of the joys of Gainesville is the incredible amount of trails and green space we have. Gainesville doesn’t have an ocean, but our waterways like Paynes Prairie, Sweetwater Wetlands, Newnans Lake and Bivens Arm are amazing, hosting an incredible amount of hikes and trails that are the jewels of our area.
The Hogtown Creek is one of those great natural amenities of Gainesville. Running north-to-south from Hogtown Creek Headwaters to Split Rock Conservation area just past I-75, it has long been the dream of urban land conservationists to preserve the land around the Creek to ensure it is enjoyed by future generations.
Last year the City Commission unanimously approved a proposal I brought forward to prioritize land acquisition around the creek with hope of creating linear greenspace that runs through our city. That’s been slow moving with so much else going on, but on March 7th City staff will come back to us with the purchase of a critical parcel: the NW 39th parcel.
It’s a beautiful piece of property, tucked behind the Publix on 13th and 39th, this 9.68 acre property hosts about 1/3 of a mile of the Hogtown Creek. Walking along it you are still within the city, but it feels like a million miles away from it. Only the sounds of the creek and the birds overhead can be heard. Here are some photos I took when I checked the property out so you can get an idea:
There are no immediate plans to make changes to the property, but acquiring it is a critical part of connecting the creek north and south, allowing a linear park from Hogtown Creek Headwaters through the city and out past I-75. For now it’s being placed in conservation, ensuring that this beautiful portion of our creek is preserved for generations to come.
The money is coming out of tree mitigation funds, which are funds collected from developers when trees are cut down for larger developments. Their payments go into this fund to help protect and plant more trees in their place. It’s a perfect use of these funds, preserving our tree canopy and creating green space throughout our community.
Expanding beds for homeless residents
Homelessness came charging onto the City’s agenda once again last month after a big increase in tent encampments along SE 4th near Haisley Lynch Park. It’s a visual reminder of the rise of our unsheltered homeless population which has been increasing recently as housing prices have shot up, following a drop after GRACE Marketplace opened in 2014.
Homelessness is, at it’s core, a housing issue, as study after study and expert after expert has found. It’s true that homelessness is often secondary to other societal issues (mental health, substance abuse, etc.) but the strongest predictor of homelessness in a community isn’t those things, it’s the cost of housing in that community. Right now every shelter bed, from GRACE Marketplace to Family Promise to St Francis House, is completely filled up. The housing voucher list has a backlog in the thousands. The low-income, affordable market-rate homes that used to be within reach for those on fixed income are being fixed up and moved to middle-cost rents.
In this environment simply sweeping tents does nothing but push our neediest residents somewhere else. That is both dumb policy and unnecessarily cruel. Thankfully we have a solution, all thanks to the American Rescue Plan1.
Using an additional $660,000 that fell through on an affordable housing development we will be rehabilitating and expanding beds at GRACE Marketplace. That means 20 new permanent beds will be used to give temporary housing every night, with food and services to go with it.
It’s a solution to a long-term issue that is only going to grow as housing gets more expensive. A lot more needs to be invested in our housing crisis and for our neediest residents, but this is a more positive, humane way to deal with these tent encampments.
Local Business of the Month
If you’ve never been to Chun Ching Market on 8th Ave it’s well worth a trip. A mix of exotic fruits, Asian trinkets, and tasty snacks wrapped in indecipherable Chinese writing, it’s everything you’d want from a neighborhood Asian market.
If nothing else go in and stock up on their great selection of sauces and spices you can’t find anywhere else. I’d also recommend the shiitake mushrooms and vegetables for a special Asian-style dinner. it’s all very tasty and locally owned.
Local Music
Jordan Burchel is a longtime staple of the local music scene. Jordan doesn’t really fall into either of the big camps of Gainesville staple music: Punk or Americana. Jordan is a bit of an outlier in his steadfast commitment to dreamy indie-pop stylings, and they’re very good.
That’s partially thanks to his endless output of new work. He recently announced he was committing to writing one song a day for a year, despite having a new kid on the way. As of this writing he’s on day 305 of 365. His output also includes hilarious music-themed TikToks to his thousands of followers there. His Tik Toks are as good as his music, as the thousands of likes he’s amassed on there show.
Check Jordan’s many singles, 2016 ful album, and more on Spotify or wherever you get your music.
Thanks Biden!
I agree mostly on the parking issue, but I still wonder why it's free at night. That seems backward to me and a missed opportunity for the city. At night, parking fills up with people drawn to the great bars and restaurants downtown. Discouraging drunk driving, even in a somewhat subtle way through paid parking close to bars, seems like a good goal.
At its core SITUATIONAL HOMELESSNESS is a housing issue. Let me break this down for you, Here in Gainesville we have those that choose to be homeless. They choose tents rather than buildings. They choose drugs over responsibility. And the city chooses to put these types of homeless first rather than supporting the families that are situational homeless, and choose responsibility over being homeless, but they had a hard time staying stable due to the rising prices in housing, and the high GRU rates being that the commission were the reason for this destroying the utility to the tune of 1.8 billion dollars. I doubt that you have actually spent anytime with the homeless, in either case. I can tell you I have had converstations with a few guys over accross from the 12 Ave Walmart, they prefer to be homeless. along with the one lady that is the significant other of one of the men. And then there are those at Saint Francis and other families that would like to be able to be stable.
When the City provides funding to the enabling homeless center of Gracemarket place in a two and a half month period (12/1/2023 to 02/12/2024) at 425,000+, and nothing to Saint Francis House, or Family Promise. This speaks volumes to what the city cares about and why Grace really is to the city of Gainesville. Do not give me the speal you attempted to give me before about federal funding because Grace not only receives funding from the city, but also county, state and federal. Hmm that then makes me wonder why there has not been built any more buildings to help those that sleep in the parking lot. You all should be ashamed of yourselves!