The holidays are here, and with them, the season of Hallmark Christmas movies. Connecticut has become, in recent years, a bit of a staple in the genre, as many have been filmed in town greens across the state. The quaint, old-school charm of the traditional New England villages endures.
Although I am not quite a true aficionado of the genre (my wife is the one watching them, I swear!), these movies have some well-known tropes. The main characters (librarians, ad agency creatives, writers, or lawyers) end up stranded for the holidays in some impossibly cute town due to some unfortunate event (blizzards abound). They meet the locals, go to festive events, and rediscover love and/or the true meaning of Christmas. They are sweet, lovely, predictable romps that tend to share one nagging problem: most of the towns depicted in them are illegal in our state, or close to it.
People in these movies walk a lot. They take nice strolls to cute little town greens with Christmas fairs; they go to nice shopping areas with bookstores, art galleries, antique shops, and hardware stores. They linger in coffee shops and diners, go to festive balls and pageants, and embrace in cute little gazebos, often without a car in sight. Although there are some places in our state where you can do that (eagerly used as movie sets every year), this kind of walkable, pleasant, welcoming, vibrant town center is increasingly rare across our state—mainly because our zoning rules and regulations make them completely unfeasible.
Let’s take, for instance, the parking and loading regulations of a random Connecticut suburb, the town of Orange (I am not picking on them for any particular reason; these regulations are pretty similar to what you will find in the vast majority of towns in our state). A well-appointed bookstore might need about 4,000 square feet of retail space; per town regulations, it will be required to have 20 parking spaces in close proximity. The average parking spot requires around 300 to 350 square feet, including egress; as a result, our quaint bookstore would be required by law to be surrounded by 6,000 square feet of asphalt. The same will go for the hardware store and antique shop; our cute little retail corner will have three nice establishments and close to half an acre of dismal car lots.
This beautiful sea of concrete and metal, however, is only the beginning. Both the coffee shop and diner also have parking requirements; a modestly sized diner will have around 3,000 square feet, seating around 120 people. This requires thirty more parking spaces, or another 9,000 square feet. Add roughly the same for the coffee shop. The cozy little theater for the Christmas pageant might seat 200 people; that would entail 50 more parking spaces. If our happy, cheerful characters do something wholesome like bowling, parking requirements are even higher (one space for every three occupants), adding up to more and more concrete.
You can get a sense of what kind of “downtown” this kind of town ordinance might produce: a few small buildings, surrounded by immense, endless parking lots. The result is as far as possible from the quaint villages in Hallmark movies; unwelcoming, car-centric, deeply ugly, and unpleasant. No one goes to walk around and enjoy the Christmas spirit in a strip mall, but parking regulations across the state essentially make building anything but a strip mall illegal.
If we want town centers like the ones we see in the movies, there is a very simple way to do it: eliminate minimum parking requirements. The rules setting how many parking spaces each shop or restaurant needs are arbitrary; they are not based on research, but on the whims of town planners. They are, more often than not, wholly excessive and end up fully outlawing the gently dense, charming retail downtowns we seem to love so much. Bookstores, diners, toy shops, and other small businesses should be able to decide by themselves how much room they want to dedicate to cars, instead of being forced to pave half of downtown.
The most common outcome of these regulations is that business owners suddenly realize that many of their customers would rather not drive to their front door. They are perfectly fine walking a couple of blocks, especially if the streets around them are not built around cars with endless surface lots. Density also makes serving the area with public transportation much easier. And if we are building some housing close by or even on top of our nice retail spots (because you can mix uses in a single place, although most of our zoning regulations outlaw that as well), they don’t even need to travel to them.
To start with, however, let’s keep it simple and straightforward: to bring back the (Hallmark) Christmas spirit and the cute Connecticut towns we all seem to love so much, we must abolish parking minimums across the state. They make our cities unwalkable, waste tons of space, force us to drive everywhere, and make housing much more expensive. Fixing that is literally free and would make our state a much better place to live. It is really not much to ask.
Now, if I may, I have some Lacey Chabert, Danica McKellar, and Candace Cameron Bure tales of jolly cheer to catch up on. Happy holidays, everyone.