Paid Parking Is Coming to Montrose. Here's Who It's Actually For.
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
"It would be the hugest mistake to make parking free for everyone as long as they want, because in front of businesses, you're going to have the worker, the barista from Coffee Bean, parked in front of your store all day long, not moving, when your customers that want to buy your products and your services are going to be squeezed out."
That's Glendale City Councilmember Ara Najarian, explaining his vote in favor of paid parking in Montrose Shopping Park. Read it twice. He's not talking about tourists hunting for a spot before dinner on Honolulu Avenue. He's talking about the person who works there, whose car has been sitting in a customer space since the morning shift.
That distinction is the whole story. The city just approved paid parking for Montrose, and if you live nearby, the version you've probably heard is "they're charging for parking now." The more accurate version is narrower and more interesting: the city spent seven years trying to figure out how to stop employees from occupying the spaces customers need, and pricing turned out to be the tool that worked.
The Glendale City Council adopted the ordinance on April 28 by a 3-2 vote, following an earlier 4-1 vote on April 21 to approve the underlying strategy. Here's what the new rules actually do to the numbers on the meter:
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| On-street rate (Honolulu Ave) | $1.50/hour | $2.00/hour |
| Off-street lot rate | Free | $1.00/hour |
| Streets covered | Honolulu Avenue | Honolulu Avenue, plus portions of Wickham Way and Broadview Drive |
| Card payment at the curb | PayByPhone app only | New pay stations accept cards directly |
That last row matters more than it looks. Right now, if you want to pay for street parking in Montrose with a card instead of coins, you need the PayByPhone app. The city plans to install 15 to 20 new pay stations that take cards on the spot, which is a genuine convenience upgrade even for people who'd rather not download another app for a fifteen-minute stop at the dry cleaner.
Montrose isn't short on parking. The study area contains close to 900 public spaces, split roughly between 660 off-street spots in the lots and 221 on-street spots along the curb. The problem was never total supply. It was concentration.
Consultant Dan McKinney of Transpo Group, the firm the city hired to study the district, told the council that occupancy is highest in Lots 2, 4, 6 and 7, and that a large share of vehicles in those lots stay parked well past the existing three-hour limit. That pattern points to employees, not shoppers running errands. A customer parks for an hour and leaves. A shift worker parks for eight.
The fix the city landed on isn't just "charge more." It's a low-cost employee permit program that steers workers toward designated lots away from the busiest curb spaces, paired with pricing that makes it less attractive to camp in a customer spot all day. Take away the free three-hour lot and give employees a cheap, dedicated alternative, and the theory is that the spot in front of the shop actually turns over for the person who came to buy something.
If this feels like it appeared out of nowhere, it didn't. The city's first parking study of Montrose was completed in 2019. The pandemic shelved it. Staff went back to Transpo Group in 2024 to redo the analysis with comparable data collection methods, then brought updated options to the Transportation and Parking Commission on February 23, 2026, before the council acted in April.
One detail that might surprise residents who assume this was imposed from above: the Montrose Shopping Park Association, the merchant group that represents the businesses along Honolulu Avenue, told the city it unanimously supported the paid-parking option. Their reasoning tracked the city's own logic. A business owner would rather see a $1-an-hour parking lot with regular turnover than a free lot permanently occupied by employee cars from three doors down.
Not everyone was on board. Beth Brooks, a Montrose resident, told the council during public comment that "Montrose is a special, community-oriented place" and that "monetizing parking risks changing its character." Other speakers, including Alex Balekian, pushed back on the survey the city used to gauge public opinion, arguing it never offered a clear "keep it free" option and pressed staff on whether past consultant revenue projections had actually panned out.
That tension shows up in the vote itself. The council approved the initial strategy 4-1 on April 21. A week later, when the ordinance came back for final adoption, the vote tightened to 3-2. Councilmember Vartan Gharpetian, who'd voted yes the first time, flipped to no. His stated reason was straightforward: he wanted a free 90-minute grace period built into the plan, and it wasn't in there.
If your only real exposure to Montrose parking is the weekly trip to the farmers market or the annual pilgrimage to a street festival, the news here is good. The council was explicit that paid parking will not apply on Sundays, specifically to protect the Montrose Harvest Market and other weekend events from the new rates.
That matters more than it might sound. The Montrose Arts & Crafts Festival, held every June along the 2200, 2300 and 2400 blocks of Honolulu Avenue with more than 250 vendors, is one of the largest single public events in Glendale, and the Harvest Market itself runs on Oceanview Boulevard every Sunday as part of that same footprint. Whatever changes on a Tuesday evening, the Sunday rhythm of the shopping park stays as it was.
City staff put a number on the upfront cost: procuring the 15 to 20 new pay stations will run about $50,000. Projected revenue from the new rates is roughly $300,000 a year, which means the city expects to recover its equipment cost within a few months of the meters going live.
Glendale's parking manager, Tad Dombroski, told the council where that money is meant to go. Montrose's lots have been sitting on deferred maintenance for years because there wasn't a funding source to fix them. The plan is to reinvest the new revenue into EV chargers, repaving the lots themselves, and ADA accessibility upgrades, the kind of physical improvements that don't happen without a dedicated budget line.
As of this writing, the city hadn't announced a specific date for when the new pay stations go live. Council members repeatedly described the rollout as incremental, one member called it "baby steps," with staff directed to monitor the effect on businesses and report back before making further adjustments to rates or time limits.
If you live in Montrose or the Sparr Heights area and use Honolulu Avenue the way most residents do, here's the short version:
The headline version of this story is "Montrose is getting more expensive to park in." The more useful version is that the city spent seven years trying to solve a turnover problem, the merchants who'd know best signed off on the fix, and the group the pricing is really aimed at isn't the person popping in for coffee. It's the car that's been sitting in front of that coffee shop since it opened.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Glendale is actually worth to live in day to day, that kind of detail is the difference between reading a press release and understanding a neighborhood. Let's make it personal. G&C Properties has spent decades paying attention to exactly this kind of local detail in Montrose, Sparr Heights and the rest of Glendale's Foothill communities. Reach out to talk about what's happening on your block.
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