Developers want to spend $15Million on a super-sized parking garage instead of providing for real community needs: affordable housing, improved transit, healthy food access, safe streets. We say no.
The Giant Eagle Shakespeare site is a chance to reverse East Liberty’s legacy of gentrification and displacement. It is an opportunity to show what truly equitable transit-oriented communities can look like.
The site is across the street from the East Liberty Busway Station, and there are dozens of other high-quality transit lines that pass it frequently. It literally has some of the best service in the entire transit system. Yet, the developers want to spend $15,000,000 on a 500-space parking garage.
Over-building car parking in this dense, walkable, transit-rich, amenity-rich neighborhood would be misguided (…to put it lightly). More car parking will only lead to more driving, more traffic congestion, more expensive rents, more costly products, more pollution, and more dangerous streets. Studies have already shown that there are hundreds of unused, publically-subsidized parking spaces within a block of the site. Why should an entire community pay by trading their personal health, clean air, and quality of life for a new building’s overbuilt parking? Why spend millions on a luxury amenity like car housing when our neighbors need affordable housing? There is a better way to create community equity and you can help make it happen.
Advocates for affordable housing, public transit, and food justice are coming together to demand that the parking garage money, and other public/private dollars go towards increasing the affordability of the rents, providing free bus passes to residents, ensuring access to healthy food, and building out safe streets.