Carver residents discuss parking issues

Carver community residents are trying to obtain parking permits to park in their neighborhood to prevent VCU students, faculty and staff from parking on the streets in front of their houses.

The Carver community includes Lombardy to Belvidere streets and from Broad Street to I-95 and I-64. This includes Marshall, Clay and Leigh streets.

“Every street except Leigh Street is a bad street,” said Barbara B. Abernathy, a Carver resident who works with the Carver-VCU Partnership. “Even on Leigh Street when they are having big events at the Siegel Center then parking is bad (there too).”

This parking problem, Abernathy said, has been occurring since VCU moved to Broad Street and opened the Siegel Center, Ackell Residence Center (known as West Broad Apartments), and the Broad and Belvidere Apartments.

Students living in the Ackell Residence Center have parking privileges in the West Broad Street Deck included in their rent. Resident students must park on the top levels while commuters park on the lower level.

Abernathy disagrees with that regulation.

“If students’ rent includes a parking space, then they should have the prime spots on the first and second floors,” she said. “And who comes on a daily basis (commuters) should go higher, and that is the way it is in most parking decks.”

The students living in Broad and Belvidere housing facility do not have parking included in their rent, but do have a parking garage in the building and pay an extra fee to park in it, because of this, many park on the streets in the Carver neighborhood to avoid paying the extra fee.

Virginia Baccus, a resident who lives on the 700 block of Clay Street near the Broad and Belvidere Apartments, said she sees students parking around her house all of the time. This, she said, causes her to walk many blocks to get to her house.

“When I got home today at 4 o’clock there was no parking on any sides of the street (Clay) or around the corner,” she said.

Abernathy said she, too, has had to park down the street and around the corner.

To solve this problem, Carver residents turned in 21 petitions at its community meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 29, to Bill Pantele, their area Richmond City Council member.

At the meeting, Pantele told the residents that he will introduce city legislation for the restricted parking. The entire process will take about three to four months. The city will notify residents if and when the restricted parking districts begin.

“I have believed for a long time this would make a huge difference in Carver,” Pantele said. “The parking (problems) is the number one thing I hear from this neighborhood.”

But he said it is not limited to the Carver community.

Jackson Ward, Oregon Hill, Randolph and the Fan District face the same parking problems, and VCU continues to expand, thus the problem will only get worse.

“I’m not against VCU,” Pantele said. “I’m for VCU but they moved their student population from about 24,000 to 28,000 in the last few years – and they are on their way to 33,000. That combined with the shift to bring in more resident students is really putting a lot of pressure on all the neighborhoods around VCU.

“I am not trying to punish students, kick them in the teeth and write ticket after ticket after ticket,” he said. “But you have to have some kind of balance between the neighborhoods around VCU and absorbing all the parking from (VCU’s) growth.”

Abernathy, however, said parking districts and restrictions will not fix everything.

“If I was to have a party like for Thanksgiving where you have family come over for dinner and you have two parking passes, what do you do?” she said.