Yajaira Adorno recalls sleeping in her car with her children on one of the many nights she couldn’t finding parking in Norwood.

“I’ve circled for hours on a regular basis. I would say I did it for a good five years. Every day I would get home and I’d spend an hour, every single day after work, looking for parking,” Adorno said.

Adorno is one of 11 respondents to a Norwood News survey asking local residents to share their experiences with parking in the neighborhood. Some cited illegally reserved spaces, double-parking, and abandoned cars taking up otherwise free spaces as some of the parking issues they’ve observed.

“The parking situation has been an issue since I was a little kid. I remember my uncle struggling to find parking and he lived in the same building as me. I remember as a little kid, he’d be like, ‘Hold this spot for me,’ and I’d have to stand in a spot for him,” said Adorno.

Car ownership in the Bronx has only increased in the years since Adorno was a kid, with nearly 30,000 more registered vehicles in the borough since 2007. With more cars on the street, the availability of public parking has decreased, and city officials have openly admitted to having no plans on helping drivers ease the search for parking.

Norwood residents have found parking spots to be few and far between. With sparse on-street parking, some residents depend on municipal and private garages, residential parking and commercial garages to secure their cars. Not finding nearby parking at night can be particularly burdensome to some residents who’ve parking blocks from where they live.

Residential parking has been a central topic for city lawmakers in recent weeks, with two bills introduced last month that propose implementing residential parking permits. One bill suggests a citywide permit system while the other focuses residential parking permits north of 60th Street in Manhattan.

Not all city officials are convinced that residential parking permits are necessary, including City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who says the ultimate plan is to “disincentivize cars in New York City.” Regarding the two bills, which were introduced to the City Council on April 25, Johnson said that he sees “pluses and minuses” to implementing a residential parking permit system.

Plans to decrease car use in the city progressed recently with the banning of vehicles in Central Park drives, which will begin next month.

In March 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a bill that would require the city Department of Transportation (DOT) to develop a pilot program to reserve some off-street and municipal parking for car-sharing programs, like ZipCar or Car2Go. The effort makes car-sharing vehicles more widely available, though it knocks out parking spots for regular cars.

De Blasio has made it known his intention to put drivers second to public transit commuters. At a May 2017 news conference, de Blasio said building parking garages is “not the solution to the problem.”

“We’re going to gain about half a million people in this city. We could be building parking garages all day long,” said de Blasio. “The solution to the problem is to make more mass transit available.”

Yelena Raffoul, 28, says relying on public transportation is not a viable option for her, since her job as a face-painter often brings her to the outskirts of the city, areas where public transit is less than dependable.

“What am I going to do if I have a party in Park Place? Take public transportation to Wakefield? I don’t think that plan is even beneficial because the MTA is struggling. A lot of people are already unhappy with it, and to force more people to use it without actually fixing the issues we see now is insane,” Raffoul said.

A 2017 transit audit released by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found that the MTA’s most delayed lines from January 2015 to February 2017 were the 2, 4, and 6 lines, which all run through the Bronx.

Raffoul says scouting for parking can make her late to work, cutting into her daily pay. “I always have to hire someone to come with me, to sit in the car. I use SpotHero, which allows me to park in garages, but you know, that’s an extra $20 to $30 for every single gig. That cuts into my salary,” Raffoul said.

New York City has over 1,100 parking facilities, and real estate trends forecast less parking garages and more residential and commercial development.

Cynthia Tuohy, 59, pays $325 every three months for her parking spot at Norwood’s only municipal parking garage. The Jerome-Gun Hill Municipal Parking Garage is one of five city parking facilities in the Bronx, with 204 permitted parking spaces.

Although Tuohy has managed to secure a local parking space, she admits to “living in fear” of the Jerome-Gun Hill garage closing. She laments, “There literally is no place to park off-street, and it’s not a matter of money. All the money in the world will not buy a parking spot that doesn’t exist.”

Danilo Rodriguez, 38, lives around the Reservoir Oval in Norwood and says finding a parking spot can take him upwards of an hour daily. Rodriguez says that since moving to Norwood from Manhattan last year, he and his wife have had to structure their day around moving and parking their car for street cleaning.

“It definitely feels as though my life revolves around parking in this neighborhood,” Rodriguez said. “It drains you mentally and physically driving around in circles, cursing every lucky soul that finds a spot seconds before you do.”

Meantime, Adorno of Norwood says the neighborhood’s parking problem drove her to give up ownership of her car, relying instead on public transportation. “I’m not going to spend an hour to two hours a day looking for parking,” Adorno said.

On the weekends, Adorno rents a car for $40 a day, which affords her all the benefits of driving, without the hassle of parking. Adorno says, “It’s crazy. We spend so many hours of our time looking for parking.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.