PROVIDENCE –– Some Federal Hill residents will soon get a privilege that few others in the city enjoy: leaving their cars at the curb overnight.

Mayor David N. Cicilline’s administration has created a program to modify the long-standing city policy banning overnight on-street parking.

About 1,900 households in the West Broadway and Armory sections of Federal Hill will be allowed to purchase a $25-a-year permit per vehicle to park between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.

The program, which will start at the end of July and run for two years, extends only to single-family houses and apartment buildings with no more than five units. If the two-year run is successful, the permits will be offered to all neighborhoods that want it.

Anthony C. Pella, who owns a three-family house on Spencer Street, was among 55 Federal Hill residents who listened to a presentation in June by city officials about the new program.

“I’ve got three units that are completely empty. People say they love the apartments, but the problem is there is only one parking spot,” he said. “People need parking. This will help a lot.”

Residential parking permits, a practice common in most major cities including Boston, have never been implemented citywide in Providence. A section of about 2,000 households in Washington Park is the only area of the city currently enjoying on-street parking under a parking permit program launched in 2006.

Residents of the college-student-heavy East Side and of the working-class Valley neighborhood have been clamoring in recent years for a change in the city’s nearly 90-year-old parking policy banning overnight street parking.

Parking has become harder to find in the city as the number of cars has steadily grown and parking lot and garage costs have also risen. In neighborhoods, the parking squeeze has forced many to pave over yards to make space for added vehicles.

Yet the ban on street parking at night has remained. “No one knows why it’s there, but it is,” says Ernest Carlucci, the city’s new parking administrator.

Opponents to overnight parking say that cars left on the street overnight could make snowplowing, street sweeping and garbage collection difficult (the city says that parking bans during snow emergencies will remain in effect).

Some have even feared that the prospect of rows of cars along city streets might degrade quality of life and bring down property values.

On College Hill in particular, the debate has heated in recent years, with some residents fearing that cars belonging to college students, if they qualify, would clog the streets and lead to packed and unsightly roadways.

City officials say that the program will be extended only to Providence residents who own or rent in the designated parking zones, not to students from outside Providence who are temporary renters.

The Police Department has expressed concern that enforcement of the new parking rules would be nearly impossible with the boundaries for the new parking zones being so varied.

Carlucci, whose position was created this year under the Department of Public Works, will supervise the pilot on-street parking program and parking enforcement policy generally.

He said he does not anticipate problems related to street maintenance and city services. Carlucci, who was Cranston’s director of administration under former Mayor Michael Napolitano, also said that the city will create adequate signage to state clearly where a residential parking zone begins and ends and which sides of the street are available for parking.

City Director of Operations Alix Ogden stressed that the city will not impose overnight parking on an area that does not demonstrate at least majority support for it. Right now, 55 percent of residents in a given area need to submit to the city a petition affirming that they would support an on-street parking permit. A geographic area, under the current program, could involve anything from a few blocks on a street to an entire neighborhood.

Ogden added that will also be a period of time before any program is launched when the city will consider objections from residents. At least 33 percent of households in an area need to object before their area is removed from a permit zone. (For Federal Hill, that deadline is July 20).

For more information about the city’s parking permit program, how to sign up, and the boundaries of the new residential parking zone on Federal Hill, visit www.providenceri.com/rpp.

pmarcelo@projo.com