The latest Perkins Road overpass area restaurant to open has exacerbated an existing neighborhood problem: a lack of parking for commercial establishments.
When Bumsteer’s, a trendy burger joint with a rooftop patio, opened late last month in the newly renovated building formerly occupied by Crispy Catch, patrons took to parking in a vacant lot directly across Perkins Road.
But the lot is zoned residential, even though there are commercial establishments all around it, so property owner Frank Sagnibene has since roped off the lot and posted multiple No Trespassing signs.
“The lot is zoned A1 and the assumption by my insurance company is that it is vacant and is not being used for parking,” says Sagnibene. “So, I cannot let people who are going to a bar or restaurant park there. It’s a liability thing. But it’s a bad position to be in because you don’t want to create a horrible environment between business owners and customers”
In the days since he posted the signs, Sagnibene says customers of Bumsteer’s, which has just a handful of parking spaces on its lot, have taken to parking elsewhere—on side streets or under Interstate-10, which is used by customers of several area restaurants, including Jimmy John’s, Rock ‘n Sake and Schlittz and Giggles.
It’s a short-term solution but doesn’t address the long-term problem that has been building for years.
Part of the issue are zoning code regulations designed to encourage adaptive reuse of older buildings, like the one that houses Bumsteer’s. Built in the mid-1950s, it was formerly a Kean’s Dry Cleaner and a gas station before that.
The code grandfathers in those older buildings, allowing them to keep the same number of parking spaces they were required to have under their original use—even if that’s insufficient for their new use.
“The code provides that if it is an existing building developed before we had parking regulations we treat you as though you have the parking you need,” Planning Director Frank Duke says. “Otherwise, developers would walk away from these older properties and never touch them.”
In the case of Bumsteer’s, Duke says when the new owners sought approval for their plans last summer, they were given credit for the few spots in their lot plus some of the existing parking spaces under the overpass.
“Everyone in that neighborhood that has redeveloped an old building has been grandfathered in like that,” he says.
But now that the neighborhood is a victim of its own success, there needs to be a more comprehensive solution, according to several merchants. Sagnibene, who owns property on both sides of Perkins Road, has twice tried over the past 20 years to develop his vacant lot into a parking lot but was rebuffed by the Southside Civic Association.
“I can’t afford to do what they want me to do—a concrete slab with wrought iron fencing and brick columns,” he says.
Another potential solution that has been discussed is redeveloping the area under I-10 into a well-lit, paved parking lot as part of the planned expansion of the highway. But the I-10 widening is already nearly a year behind schedule, and work on the Perkins Road Overpass section of the project is still several years away at the earliest, which means the I-10 parking lot won’t be happening any time soon, if ever.
Duke sees just a couple of options: “The only way you’re going to solve this would be for either the people in the area to band together and create a merchants’ association and they set up a shared parking facility somewhere, or for the government to come in and do the same thing.”
