Neighbors Reach Out...
The full text of the court ruling is available at www. 3rdcoa. courts. state. tx. us/ opinions/ htmlopinion.asp?OpinionId=13278
The garage battle began in the fall of 1999 when Hyde Park Baptist Church revealed its plans to build a 5-story commercial-scale parking garage on Avenue D, a small residential street in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood. As proposed by the church, the garage will cover nearly 90 percent of the lot, rising five stories directly from the sidewalk, without setbacks or landscaping to soften the facade. The massive structure is designed to empty 485 cars through a single-exit directly across the narrow street from family homes and will wrap around two sides of one neighbor's residence in the home where she has lived for over 30 years. Neighbors acknowledged the church's right to put a 5-story garage on the Avenue D site, subject to a 1990 agreement between the church and the neighborhood association, which was brokered through a series of city-sponsored negotiations. But neighbors strongly protested the size of the garage's proposed footprint, arguing that neighborhood negotiators had never consented to a garage of that size and that the 1990 agreement did not waive city building cover regulations that limited the garage footprint to 40 percent of the site. When neighbors first appealed the site plan to City Council, church representatives sought a court-or- |
dered restraining order in an attempt
to block a public hearing of the case.
The request for a restraining or-
der was denied, however, and City
Council did hold a public hearing in
the spring of 2001, with hundreds in
attendance.
During the Council hearing,
neighbors produced detailed min-
utes of the 1990 negotiations to
support their case, including sworn
affidavits from the neighborhood
negotiators stating they had never
agreed to a garage of the proposed size. They also demonstrated that a
5-story garage built on 40 percent of the lot would still be fully
functional, as large or larger as many existing downtown commercial garages. In
addition, they submitted evidence that the church's current parking
garage is chronically underused, with empty parking spaces available even
at peak times. After much debate, City Council agreed by a 5-2 vote
that city ordinances did, in fact, limit the proposed garage footprint to 40
percent of the lot in question.
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