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• Cars of Students in CPH’s New Hinarr Hu Moulik Dorms Are Eating Up Road Parking

There’s an unbroken, unmoving line of cars as far as Arcata’s Eye Street goes, all the way down to Cal Poly Humboldt’s Hinarr Hu Moulik dorms. If any of them had been occupied with the intention of driving them anywhere, it’d be a traffic jam; but they are, at the moment, empty. Most of them are not owned by the residents along Eye Street, who have to compete for street parking with the almost 600 students at the end of the road, who have a parking lot with space for 328 cars. Almost since the moment the dorms opened in August, it’s been a contentious issue, brought up more than a few times at city council meetings and the topic of dozens of emails sent to the city — but an end to the parking problem may be at hand. 

Eye Street residents recently presented a petition, signed by around 50 people, to the city council and the Transportation Safety Committee asking them to extend permitted parking down to the end of the street and a side street off of Eye. A city employee confirmed Monday that the item was on an upcoming agenda and will likely pass, though he was unsure when the change will happen. 

To get a parking permit, the applicant has to prove with a copy of the lease or a utility bill that they live in one of the three zones Arcata regulates resident parking in. The Group B parking zone ends just a few dozen yards down Eye Street. The permits are free. 

The parking glut has had its tolls. Lea Nagy, 81, lives and operates an Airbnb on Eye. She herself is an HSU graduate, likes living in a college town, and doesn’t have any beef with the students, who she said were “sweet” and sometimes helped her with her groceries — she just wishes their cars didn’t take up so much space and block her mailbox. 

Guests renting out her Airbnb often have a hard time finding space to park their cars. Many of them, she said, are older and disabled and need to be near the entrance, but sometimes they have to park blocks away. Returning customers tend to be flabbergasted at the change.

“They make comments like, ‘Oh my god, there’s no parking,’” Nagy said in an interview with the Outpost. “They go, ‘God, what happened to your street?’” 

She and her neighbors also worry that a fire truck wouldn’t be able to fit down the road, which was narrow to begin with and is squeezed even tighter with the dozens of cars parked along the side. 

Nagy said she felt supported by the city council and the university; CPH even built her a fence separating her yard from campus and washed her windows. 

“They are good kids,” Nagy said of the students. “They just don’t realize the impact and want to park close. I don’t blame them.”