Government legislation ministry rules out apartment parking on natural green land

The government legislation ministry said that parking for apartment residents cannot be built on the natural green portion of a site that also includes a general commercial zone.

The interpretation concerned an apartment planned for the commercial section of a plot that straddles a natural green zone, with its proposed ground-level parking lot in the green section. The case assumed that the green portion was larger than 330 square meters, requiring construction and land-use rules for each zone to be applied separately. Natural green zones are intended to preserve urban green space and limit development to unavoidable cases. Although local ordinances can permit certain multifamily residential buildings, they expressly exclude apartments.

The ministry treated the lot as an accessory use of the apartment because it would serve residents' parking needs, rather than an independently functioning facility. Under the enforcement decree, an accessory structure is subject to the construction restrictions governing the main building. The ministry said the same restrictions apply even though the ground-level self-parking lot is not itself a building, because limits on buildings extend to nonbuilding facilities.

It also found that the lot was not an automobile-related facility, a category local ordinances can permit in natural green zones. The ministry said a parking lot falls in that category only when parking is its principal use, not when it is installed as an accessory to another main use. Allowing apartment parking separately would undermine the exclusion of apartments from the permitted housing category, it said.