By Hexel Colorado on August 29, 2023

In this post, I summarize four stories of small-scale businesses negatively impacted by outdated parking mandates.

This list focuses on how minimum parking requirements stifles growth in the city. I encourage you to read the full stories from their original authors.

Key Takeaways

• Only dedicated off-street parking counts toward a business’s mandated minimum, even when they’re surrounded by thousands of other available spaces.
• “Delta points” are imaginary parking spaces given and taken from historic buildings using an arbitrary points system.
• Shared parking is disincentivized because parking code requires leased spaces to be encumbered by a deed restriction, which many landlords are loath to grant.
• Small business owners pay thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for plans and studies that have no guarantee of satisfying the CPC and the Board of Adjustments over parking.

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Old East Dallas: Wine Bar & Bottle Shop

April Towery wrote on this story for CandysDirt.com.

Chase Beakley leased space in a long-vacant 102-year-old building on Swiss Avenue, near Baylor Medical to open a wine bar and bottle shop. The historic structure was originally the Hartgraves Cafe, the workplace of Bonnie Parker before her crime spree with Clyde Barrow — giving it historic and cultural significance for Dallas, especially for true crime buffs.

There are 8 off-street parking spaces attached to the historic building. Reviving as a cafe would require 46 off-street parking spaces. It’s prohibitively expensive to build a parking lot twice the area of the building itself, so Beakley paid a consultant $50,000 to reconfigure the space and game the parking code so he can open shop without adding parking.

“Ultimately, we decided to sign our lease without being sure we could meet the parking minimum requirements,” says Beakley.

“This was a huge risk that many entrepreneurs wouldn’t have been able to take.”

Ironically, according to real estate developer Nathan Barrett, a thousand spaces surround the old Hartgraves Cafe in parking lots, parking garages, and curb-side parking. The city only counts dedicated off-street parking towards the minimum.

• Location: 3302 Swiss Circle
• Current land use: vacant
• Desired land use: wine bar and bottle shop
• Estimated required parking: 46
• Parking counted toward code: 8
• Available actual parking: ~1,000

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Lower Greenville: Val’s Cheesecake

Renee Umstead wrote on this story for Advocate Magazine.

Valery Jean-Bart opened Val’s Cheesecakes in 2017, selling cheesecake and wine bottles to-go from his small shop on Greenville Ave. He has 6 parking spaces. City code requires 2 additional spaces before he can legally allow customers to eat and drink in-store. There is no space for more parking in his tight street corner, so customers eat their cheesecake on the sidewalk and drink their bottled wine at home.

Jean-Bart asked neighboring businesses if anyone would lease parking spaces but all said no. Not even the Blue Goose across the street would share; the goose has since flown away and closed its doors, so nobody may park there at all now.

The lack of neighborly support isn’t caused by pure greed. “Current parking code requires leased parking spaces to be encumbered by a deed restriction which many landlords are understandably loath to grant.” explains Nathan Barrett on Twitter. “This makes off-site parking very challenging.” Deed restrictions are a form of city legislation, making them prohibitively difficult to form and undo.

“Basically, once you put on the deed restriction it never goes away” tweets Barrett. “Who wants to commit to that?”

“The idea is that leases can be broken and difficult to enforce by the city. A deed restriction ensures the parking agreement is more durable. It is a bad and dumb system.”

• Location: Val’s Cheesecake, 2820 Greenville Ave
• Current land use: cheesecake and wine to-go
• Desired land use: cheesecake and wine dine-in
• Required additional parking: 2
• Available eligible parking: 0
• Available actual parking: hundreds

Lowest Greenville: Late Night Boba, Yoga, and Hair

Renee Umstead wrote on this story for Advocate Magazine.

Three businesses - Feng Cha (boba tea), Balanced Being Yoga & Wellness, and Sugaring NYC (hair removal studio) - had their requests to stay open until 10:00 pm denied by the City Plan Commission. Currently, the businesses must close by 7:00 pm.

For them to stay open late night, the city requires more parking. There are two ways to satisfy city code without building new spaces: leasing and delta points.

As described earlier for Val’s Cheesecake, neighboring businesses are disincentivized from sharing parking. Leasable parking can only be found on shared lots, but supply is limited and gobbled up by big players on the block like Trader Joe’s.

Delta points are “imaginary parking spaces” available to tenants of historic buildings. Nathan Barrett wrote a piece in 2017 explaining how the point system works. Suppose you open shop in a century-old building with 10 delta points, and parking code requires you to have 15 spaces. You’d need to have 15 - 10 = 5 parking spaces.

How many delta points does Feng Cha have?

Zero.

Delta points can be lost for arbitrary reasons. In this case, the building was empty for a couple years. Meanwhile, over 1,400 parking spaces at Sprouts, Fiesta, Sams Club, Mockingbird Station, and the abandoned corner CVS are unleasable.

• Location: Multiple, 1917 Greenville Ave
• Current land use: boba, yoga, hair until 7:00 pm
• Desired land use: boba, yoga, hair until 10:00 pm
• Required additional parking: Unknown
• Available eligible parking: ~0
• Available actual parking: 1,400+

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Downtown Elmwood: Graph Coffee

Nataly Keomoungkhoun wrote on this story for D Magazine.

Germán Sierra is the owner and roaster of Graph Coffee, which has been producing wholesale and retail coffee beans in Dallas since 2017. He purchased a house in the Elmwood neighborhood of Oak Cliff in 2020 hoping to turn it into a community-focused coffee shop. The house is at the northern tip of the neighborhood’s downtown district, which is dotted with restaurants, auto shops, hair salons, and other businesses within walking distance of some 1,500 homes.

The building lot is about 6,300 square feet. According to the parking code, Sierra needs 18 parking spaces. An average parking spot takes up about 350 square feet, so to comply means building a parking lot as large as the house lot. He appealed to the Dallas Board of Adjustments, offering to provide 3 of the 18 requires spaces. Sierra also submitted letters of support from nearby residents.

“We welcome a coffee shop we can walk to,” read one letter. “In the occasion that walking isn’t an option, the street parking options are plentiful.”

Another letter reads: “I understand that due to the laws written over 50 years ago the city is requiring this house to have a significant amount of parking, which makes no sense and conflicts with the current direction, aspirations, and investments of this neighborhood.”

The long struggle over parking for Graph Coffee still isn’t over.

• February 2022 - Sierra filed appeal to Dallas Board of Adjustments.
• April 2022 - Sierra met with Board of Adjustments, who denied his appeal and told him they needed more information and a traffic study.
• Sierra did the traffic study himself after approval from a city traffic engineer. The city’s traffic engineer didn’t see an issue with Sierra’s traffic study results.
• 33 neighbors within walking distance of the property gave letters of support.
• June 2022 - Sierra returned to the Board of Adjustments and presented his study, findings, and letters of support. The board denied his appeal, asking Sierra to hire an outside company to conduct another traffic study, which he says cost him about $3,000.
• July 2022 - Dallas-based engineering company DeShazo Group conducted another traffic study and concluded that because there was enough parking along the streets near Graph, the city could make a parking exception.
• August 2022 - Sierra returned to the Board of Adjustments with approval from the city’s traffic engineer. He was denied again.

Instead of going back to the Board of Adjustments, Sierra has chosen to file parts of the building under zoning codes allowing office space and general merchandise or food store. The total parking spaces would come out to four—which fits on the land he has—though it means more construction, more permits, more approvals, and more waiting.

“I always heard people saying the city is a pain to deal with when it comes to permits and reviews, but I never realized it was going to be this difficult,” Sierra says.

“I walked in there thinking there was going to be more support from the city of Dallas to recognize what I’m trying to do here and the type of positive impact that it can create for the community, and instead they turned a blind eye to that.”

• Location: Graph Coffee, 1805 S. Edgefield Ave
• Current land use: single-family house
• Desired land use: coffeeshop
• Required additional parking: 18
• Possible additional parking: 4
• Walkable people and businesses: ~1,500
• Wasted money out-of-pocket: at least $3,000