Parking

I know there are several forums on parking but they are from years ago, so I am starting a new one.

Our development is only 40 townhomes and are rules state that parking is in the garage and driveways first and only 1 vehicle per unit is allowed to park in the visitor spot when needed and all other vehicles should be parked outside the community. We are gated and our roads are private. There are 4 parking spaces outside both entrances of our gates. Of course we have many residents who take up 2 to 3 visitor spaces because they own several vehicles or those who only own 2 vehicles they feel it is an inconvenience to park in their driveway behind a spouses car and have to move vehicles. We also do not allow parking in front of units but that is also happening. We even had a board member's family parking 3 of their vehicles in a section of the road that was not designated for parking until a homeowner complained and now he takes up 3 visitor spaces.

Obviously the developer did not design the development for homeowners with more than 3 vehicles. However with the economy we have adult children living with their parents, and tenants that have several other family members living with them. Between two units on my street there are 12 cars!!

One of our board members brought up assigning one parking space per unit (we probably would need to create more spaces to get 40 spaces. This has been considered before but we would need to do a parking study to see how many spaces we have and where we could make more parking spaces.

Question - would the board need the homeowners vote to change parking in our development or would the board be able to amend the rules and regulations regarding parking and assign one parking space per unit. Just wondering if other problems would arise from this (ie parking in street, etc) or would this alleviate the parking issues.??

Make plans AFTER y'all have some facts/info.

Maureen,

Typically, the Board has full authority over the common areas. If the parking lot is common area, then it's likely no membership approval is needed (as always, check your governing documents to be sure).

However, it's best to have membership involvement (at least the opportunity for feedback) prior to creating any new policy. This will make the policy more acceptable to the membership and the Board may get a solution they hadn't considered.

To echo John, you obviously need to get facts/information solidified prior to developing a parking plan and presenting it to the membership for feedback.

Tim

You have scarce resources.
You want to use them efficiently.
Your problem is an economic one with an economic solution: charge what the market will bear.

Our HOA is similarly constructed. Single dedicated spot for each unit, plus a limited amount of spaces in the common area. We divide the common spots up roughly according to demand: about 2/3's of spots are rented out for a modest monthly fee, and 1/3 of the spots are designated as visitor spots, to be used on a temporary basis only.

There's always a few people who don't want to pay for a reserved spot but repeatedly park in the visitor spots. We warn once (written flyer left on windshield) and tow on the second violation. In the past 8 years, we've only had to tow 2 owners. In practice, daytime enforcement is very difficult, so we concentrate on overnight violations.

One problem we are working to resolve is that some owners have access to a wide array of cars - both involved in dealerships. So it's not always obvious if the same owner is repeatedly abusing visitor spots with different cars. We're considering requiring hang tags to be displayed while parked in visitor spots so that we can quickly identify the owner of any particular car.

Many devlopements are like this as is ours. We are so limited for parking and street parking outside the community is also a premium. I wish you the best on solving this issue.