All those angels you mentioned are being worked. We know the owner of the strip mall is extremely problematic and hard to deal with. So we don't expect nothing from it. We are also working on the concept of renting/buying from the city. But it's all very unnecessary to begin with and will cost thousand that will definitely have a effect in building material selection, and cost of renting the units.

I mostly work on code review and design in or planning and architecture firm that works all over the state, but I do have a civil engineering education I do not have a interest in that career path past site analysis and code review. So I've seen/work with my fair share of jurisdictions and their variations on this mandate. As is stated, there are areas where parking make sense and areas where it doesn't. My take is that we have made it a blanket regulation that cover boths those areas to the detriment of the areas where it doesn't.

Hey I'm also not a fan of using taxpayer money to subsidize private vehicle ownership, but we have things like on street parking and have you ever tried getting rid of those or razing the fees to better account for the actual cost of maintaining our roads and putting that on to the drivers wallet and not the base tax payer? Good luck! We unfortunately already subsidize driving and the storing private vehicles on public land at all levels. From more indirect policies like exempt SUV from safety and emission regulations by classifying them "light trucks (bigger vehicles create more damage to the roads), tariffs and restrictions on certain types of foreign import (limiting competition), oil subsidize. To more direct ones like, not having adequate gas tax and user fee costs to account for the actual cost of road related expenses (right now a ever increasing amount of that shortfall is cover by property tax and other general fund sources, this also puts the cost indirectly on local residents as large commercial lot owner pay very little on taxes on their acres of parking lots that out of town users benefit from without much of a direct payment to the infrastructure cost that supports these lots) , all the unaccounted for public costs that heavy car use requires (sewer, utilities, safety, etc that don't get paid directly by users), and the parking mandates themselves (subsidizing car companies by creating a induced demand effect, increasing constructions cost, and influencing development patterns). So at this point who should bare the cost of it and how much government intervention are we supposed to bare? At least with some centralized parking garages we can aglomerate those cost on maintenance and collect fees towards reducing direct tax burdens on locals that might not even use the facilities, and if we then removal of parking mandates we open up ourselves to less government intervention and open our towns and cities up to more creative land use, as we take away one of the biggest financial burden to construction for large and small scale projects. And it's all very geographically driven, in more rural places developers will continue to build parking and these mandates make more sense, they know that is just not going to pencil if they cant draw people in. But in urban areas we shouldn't be forcing it.

We are just not really accounting for our current reality when we create these types of mandates. I'm currently helping a client develop a small 20 unit building in a downtown abandon lot on the Seacoast. It's located on a portion of street that has 60 under utilized pull in on-street parking spots, a large strip mall parking lot that is probably in the the high 100 range in spots, very underutilized probably sits at 30% occupancy at its average peak. Next to it sit a abandoned plant and mill that has almost 400 spots that get no use whatsoever. Then we have dozens or more on-street spots on nearby side streets and a few public lots that probably end up adding 60 more spots to this total. all at 5 min walking range from our site. In a area that, other than the unpleasantness of having to walk by so many empty parking lots, is has pedestrian access to transit, groceries, public services, and entertainment. But the town still requires us to have 2 spots per unit, that's 40 more spots and will account for over 60% of the building site and will probably account for 1/3 of the budget through the site improvements needed to create a surface lot. We had a pie in the sky discussion and she would love to spread does units out to multiple buildings on the whole site and make it a bit more scaled and create a bit more of a historic street front down the length of the site if she didn't have to dedicate so much just to parking. We are trying to see if it's even possible, and if she can't fit 20 units she will not build. In a area where housing, urban rehabilitation, and putting properties back into the tax rolls is sorely needed its seem like cars have more rights to housing than people.

Well if the market is there then the developer will have parking, parking minimum just take the choice out of the equation and creates a government induced demand for car ownership. Even if transit is shitty it's not impossible in Manchester, so why should you force people to pay the premium cost of developing parking garages and lots on property through higher rent? If there is need for parking the town should build a garage.

Like most things the answer lies relatively in the middle, there's definitely a need for better testing, more consequential Enforcment, and safer road design.

I as most people that work in planning and design are more than aware of the limitations at societal, geographical, and political levels. I was focusing here on safety in road design and not by any means focusing on land-use and ped/bike improvements. There's a lot that can be done in just the vehicular right of way to improve safety of just vehicular users especially on route 4 which is a mayor commuting corridor with descent amount of commercial and suburban development.

I really wouldn't describe myself as somebody that prescribe to what Chuck and his beef with engineering has built-up into a bit of an engineering witch hunt, but I don't believe them to be completely absolved from blame either and was pretty clear about that in my last post when I describe the multiple systematic issues outside of engineering.

At the end we need to always try better and not be conforming to bad behavior as an inevitability, you have your thought on addressing it and I have mine and I'm sure we intersect on a few points.

Correct, I do a lot of my work and advocacy in the field of transportation. I know what people are doing and how smart phone are contributing to the sharp increase in automotive related crashes, I also know that the pandemic has sped up a lot of bad behavior especially in areas where traffic disappeared and it just coming back, people got used to having free rain over empty roads and copping with the increase in driving again has not come without a cost.

There's a lot of design considerations that have already been vetted through testing and implementation that can do things like this, we just don't use them in the states. This does need to go in tandem with policies reform and there need to be a heck more public will and that is where the problem lies, not necessary on the engineering side.

We know how to do this; a lot of traffic calming and safe street guidelines exist. We just don't do it because of bureaucratic inertia (engineers that might have the knowledge aren't in positions to change 50+ years of DPW/DOT bureaucracy and archaic policies), political will (politicians aren't willing to stake their careers on safety if it means inconveniencing commuters and getting them voted out) and public opinion/will (people just don't like change especially change that in the short term might inconvenience them, traffic is a very complex and fluid topic that has a lot of counter intuitive aspect to it that people might not fully be able to grasp making it a tough sell unless people are already wanting safety improvements on their street).

It's more than possible to live carless or car-light in NH, people are just too attached to their cars to notice or are not willing to look around for a lot of their neighbors, especially those on the lower social economic spectrum, live pretty carless or car-light lifestyles mostly not by choice and mostly we make it harder for them to do so because "public transit will bring Massholes" or "I don't need it so why do it" mentalities.

Out of experience I know for a fact that is possible, I lived in the southwest corner and between Brat in VT and Keene are both livable without cars. I also had a carpenter friend in Brattleboro that between the bus and ebike with trailer would go to most of his jobs on both side of the border.

Portsmouth, Exeter, Newmarket, and the Tri City (Rochester, Somersworth, and Dover) area on the Seacoast, where i live now, has enough public transit and services in their town center that you can make it without a car as well. They will also have the greenway finished up in the next few years and at least Portsmouth is going to be paving and plowing its section of it with some commitment from Hampton it would be possible to bike from Hampton center to urban Portsmouth on the trail alone.

Lebanon-Hanover-White River is another area where its more comfortable to do so.

Then you have your big obvious ones, Manchester, Concord, and Nashua.

People aren't really ready or want safe streets and all the infrastructure changes that this requires. They just want other "bad" drivers off the roads. It's the "I'm a good driver syndrome", we are all good drivers in our own eyes and its the others that are doing something wrong.

"Why should my drive be inconvenience with these safety designs, we just need to get rid of bad drivers".

But that not how safety works, if we want people to drive in a certain way we need to ingrain that in the actual infrastructure so that laws and enforcement can actually be reflected in the design of the road/street.

And that not even addressing the question of why there are so many drivers in the first place. Which begs us to ask, should we looking at choices for mobility shifting where possible, as a way of providing options and reduce the amount of trips done/requiring a car?

This are the questions we need to be asking, especially around our southern urban center and mayor transit corridors.

I know, I might of been a bit harsh but I did studied it. And even tho I exaggerated and catoonized it I do so out of frustration, because I see my piers so wholly unprepared and pushing archaic priorities when put in a DPW role. That's not to say that they are all like this, there some very competent DPW staff in the Seacoast, for example, that usually get vetoed down by state or local pressure do to lack of understanding, byzantine regulations, or just local pressures and fears of change.

They are crashes not accidents, accidents imply that it's a one off, traffic engineering is just some civil engineering with some extra training videos and the profession as a whole has passed the liability of their poor design almost exclusively to drivers, no to say drivers aren't partly to blame. But road design is inherently unsafe in America, we should be designing to prevent bad behavior and not to tolerate it. But this means people would feel inconvenience or have to slow down, reduce lane sizes or cut down on road expansion and amount of lanes, remove turn lanes, maybe even induce some traffic and we can't have that..

How so? A simple look at suburban Boston and most of NH zoning regulations and you'll find them similar, the same, or actually more restrictive than here. Density of the geographic scale your imagining is not happening anytime soon here, and the type of development you are probably in visioning are the 5 over 1 condo typology. This is already legal in a lot of municipalities here in the 30% or 20% of residential land that allows for any type of multi-family home. It's the only type of multi-family that current zoning and building codes make profitable and so it's the only one that gets built. These is why there's a fear of density.

Let's talk about softer density. Things like duplexes and triplexes, small mixed use building, two or three stories. Lot size, floor area, and building footprint maximums, that manages scale and mass, instead of minimums that promotes larger out of scale buildings. Form base codes, instead of prescriptive ones so we can have a guiding principal of good scale and measured growth. All these where common once in NH (except maximums and form base codes, those are a new idea that attempt to correct the scale and mass issue in modern building development), before suburbs that's how we build, lots of old town centers still have these type of buildings, this is what give them their traditional New England look. But most wouldn't allow them to be build today. We have zoned them out of feasibility. We need to look around and say maybe we should allow them again, near our towns and cities cores, infill empty lots and underutilized parking lots that where ment for storing vehicles for suburbanite growth that never materialize after the economic bust in the late 1900s and the de-investment in smaller cities and towns. If we truly don't want to look like Boston and it's endless sprawl this is what we need to do, allow our towns to grow inwards instead of outwards.

Let's talk about public transit, we need to start serving ourselves. There's this perception that public transit is just for getting to Boston, the dreaded T extension! Some of our communities could use internally focused transit that is reliable, frequent, and practical. Say Portsmouth or Dover, instead of just COAST running routes between towns only and tryin to catch everything in a few lines, which makes service tedious and not practical. We need loop routes that serve the neighborhoods and brings people to services and goods in short intervals under 15 to 20 minutes. Something that is more than feasible in smaller cities like these two. With simpler commuter lines that go between cities and meet the loop buses at different stops or a central stop.

Thank you. I do go to as many as I can here in Portsmouth and although I do more transportation advocacy my background is in housing and urban studies.

Yes and no, The investment firms of today are not causing much of a dent of increase and didn't really create this mess they are just exacerbating the issue, same with AirBNB. As you state . But suburban development corporations and business did play a major role in the suburbanization of our zoning regulations as a means of increasing value and securing their investment. A concerned they passed along to new suburbanites that then enshrined these codes into their local planning ordinances. Add to that classism and racism and you get the disinvestment and destruction of our urban environment as a way to cater to the suburbanite communture.

This is more addressing TheTowerBard, Sure a company should be able to pay their employee a livable wage, but if we have structural issue that prevent that, then shouldn't we look at fixing it? Wage fairness is one of these, but the other is land-use, and a third one is transportation, and there's more but like I said before, land use is a very practical and easy one to work at now, one that we have a reasonable chance of changing with enough political will at a local level.

I agree with you that zoning is probably the most practical of the systemic issue that could be used to address affordability. Land use reform touches a lot of areas and can be used to reduce economic burdens that have to do with wage stagnation and rising cost of services, increase transportation costs, and other "capitalistic" pressures. If land is disproportionately expensive in desirable areas due to its access to work,services and the restrictions placed on new development. There's only two ways realistically that you can create housing that has a modicum of affordability. One is government intervention, either directly through things like subsidies or rent controls, etc or more indirectly like supporting community developments like the german "Baugruppen". Or through increasing the efficiency of the property though thing like upping its density, which before exclusionary zoning (direct government intervention through developer lobbying and community pressures) of the 1900s was just part of the natural growth of a city.

Ok, the conclusion here is we don't like companies building housing for their employees, I have conflicting thoughts on this as well and not particularly comfortable with it. Can we then remove exclusionary zoning so that it's easier for non-companies to build housing? Can we allow people to have low density mix use, i want corner pubs and grocers! Can we push for a elimination of the detach single family home mandates, and all it's associate mandates that increase housing cost through limiting type and supply, and that increases municipal infrastructure cost through the growth of suburban sprawl? Can we focused on better public transit to increase the possibility of having mobility options, vehicles are the second most expensive thing a family has to pay for after housing. Can we stop moving our municipal services out of the city/town core just because it's cheaper to buy a farm plot and put a highschool out in the edge of town? Service spread is a way of guaranteeing that those who can afford to move around through cars are the only ones that get access to a service. While also increasing infrastructure sprawl and the cost associated with this on a municipal level.

It just sound like you both are arguing the same thing...one is focus corporate greed and the other the inherit failures of exclusionary zoning... It's two sides of the same coin.

Last night? There was a Police chase all over the city of Portsmouth. Someone/s in a white van where being chased. They passed by my home on Woodbury Ave and there where like 16 police cars chasing the van. My roommates then told me the where passed by on rt 1 down by the Market Basket and then went up towards town and drove against traffic through some downtown street. That presence might have been to stop them from getting on I-95 or they finally stopped the van there. Wether it was related to the white nationalist activity in recent days, we will just have to wait and see.

I know, I got primos in Maine, New York, Texas, and Florida, and brother in California while our parents still on the island. All of us grew up together in Puerto Rico and had to leave do to the economic devastation that 200 years of colonial rule and neglect from Congress caused and the devastation from Maria and earthquake compounded. It blows that i don't get to be with my family and it hurts when we talk about the shit we have to deal with in the places we ended up. At some point all these experiences do meld together, especially the small ones, the big ones I'll keep to myself and share it with those close to me, I don't like bringing them up, and don't want to turn this into a full-on trauma porn post. Then why share at all? Because I want to, because I think it's important. So yeah, I usually prefer to shared the most absurd examples over the painful ones, it's how I cope with this shit. Sometimes it sound performative, sometime I sound entitled but I'll keep doing it, because I think there some value in doing so. Which all rounds to what I'm trying to impart, this stuff just hits different.

It not the first, it just the first you are aware of. There is a lot of performative reaction to these type of events from the general community, sure no argument there. We are used to it, too. I don't expect any tangible shift in behavior from anyone even as a try to convince you that our realities might be different, and one does negate the other. I have to code switch on the regular to not draw attention to myself yep, it something you learn to do subconsciously. Am I scared when shit like this happens, yeah, does that stop me from trying to live? No, but it does eat at you and can be exhausting. Does that mean every day I'm getting harassed or singled out? No, it can go months before someone says something ignorant towards me, flips me off, yells at me, ask me why I am here, tells me to take that flag sticker off my car, or my favorite one someone told me ones at a party in rural NY "your one of the good ones" after going about a tirade about lazy Puerto Ricans. But I get it, when shit like this is so off most people's radar it's just sound ridiculous and sensational that any sane person could easily think is over dramatic or made up. It's not that we haven't experience much in life its' that as a collective we have experienced a little bit too much of it too fast.

Well in the meanwhile lets treat them as a serious threats because, again, to the hispanic community, to the jewish community, to the african american community, to the indonesian community, and all the other minority communities the difference between a kid screwing around and a organized hate group is very very thin because for us, having the benefit or more aptly, the misfortune, of decades of experience dealing with bigots the jump from a bunch of swastikas on walls or getting called names by some punk to getting beat up or a person shooting up a community center is not that big.

I get it that people want to show that its not a big deal, that this are a minority of people doing this, that we shouldn't give them the time of day and that's a valid reaction. It's still hard for me not to take it with some level of fear, it just hits different. I think the most applicable way I can illustrate this is by comparing reactions I got when I told people. When I told friends from here about it they were supportive, furious, or apologetic to my feelings. When I told my mom back on the island her reaction was a sigh of resignation and just two words "Ten cuidado" "Be careful".

Thank you.

NSC-131 (a active neo-nazi/white nationalist organization) has had active demonstrations in the last two year around the Seacoast. Last year there put banner along I-95, had a protest with a dozen or more people at the Repertoire in Portsmouth and one at the Kittery Trading Post, they also distributed pamphlets and left racist papers over minority own business and homes. So, there is very much an active neo-nazi group in the area and it has a pretty good handle of where minorities work and live in our communities. The majority of people might choose to ignore, see it as something in isolation, or dismiss this, but as a member of a racial minority (I'm hispanic) we tend to be very vigilant and aware of these types of incidents. To most it just doesn't register or might seem off but to us is a day-to-day aggression and moments like these is when the rest of our community gets to see what we deal with. Not to say they are a cabal of well organize super racist and are truly just a bunch of dickheads playing brown coats, but these actions can escalate and have real consequences to some of us in the community.

NSC-131 (a active neo-nazi/white nationalist organization) has had active demonstrations in the last two year around the Seacoast. Last year there put banner along I-95, had a protest with a dozen or more people at the Repertoire in Portsmouth and one at the Kittery Trading Post, they also distributed pamphlets and left racist papers over minority own business and homes. So, there is very much an active neo-nazi group in the area and it has a pretty good handle of where minorities work and live in our communities. The majority of people might choose to ignore or dismiss this, but as a member of a racial minority (I'm hispanic) we tend to be very vigilant and aware of these types of incidents. To most it just doesn't register but to us is a day-to-day aggression and moments like these is when the rest of our community gets to see what we deal with. Not to say they aren't a bunch of edgelords playing brown coats, but these actions can escalate and have real consequences.

Full disclosure I am a member of the Placework design team. It's very early in the pre-design phase of the project so a lot of questions are still being answered and a lot more need to be asked. But I've never seen the level of commitment from a municipality on a similar project like I've seen so far here. I can't speak to funding, that would have to go through the city manager.