Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Controversy over attached garages

[Pablo Halpern (phalpern]

> From dadams Wed Aug 24 00:18:20 1994
> 
> >  ...  Generally, for houses with drive
> > parking, the "front" of the house faces the pedestrian lane and the "ba
> > of the house faces the driveway. Our architects are geniuses.
> 
> Sounds great!  What I meant to say is that garages at least hide cars wit
> them.  The Cornerstone site currently has no parking lot, driveways, or 
> garages.  The cars (mostly trucks) all pull up on what would be the 
> sidewalk.  It makes what ought to be a beautiful hillside into a mess.  I
> think all we'll be able to do is make the "streets" much thinner, and set
> a couple of areas of head-in parking.  There's no space for parking on th
> outsides of the community.

I guess I don't understand what you're saying. Surely the town of Arlington 
will require that you supply enough dedicated parking to have at least two 
spaces per house (?). I'm also confused about Cornerstone in general. What 
stage of development are you in?

I want to clarify something about our site plan. Just under half the houses 
have drive-up parking. The only way *all* of the houses could have drive up 
parking would be either to compromise the pedestrian path or to have a road 
going all the way around the permiter of the built-up part of the site, 
separating the houses from the open space. Neither option is very 
attractive, so don't get the mistaken idea that you can easily have a 
pedestrian village *and* provide drive-up parking for all residents.

The large amount of drive-up parking that we do have came at a cost. The 
houses that back up to the driveway may have to have fences or hedges to 
visually screen them from the road and to prevent children from running 
into the road. Cars also have a certain psychological "energy" to them and 
I personally think we are just on the edge of having that energy encroach 
on the feel of the community. Nancy and I chose a house that does not have 
drive-up parking. It backs up to some woods and a meadow, so there is no 
hard edge to our back yard. We will hardly see the cars from our house and 
we expect to walk past our neighbors every day when going to and from our 
cars.

- Pablo

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Pablo Halpern              (508) 435-5274         phalpern [at] world.std.com

New View Neighborhood Development, Acton, MA
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