From the 1100 block of 10th St, SE, Washington, DC. In the background, note the ongoing demolition of the Most Beautiful Bridge (elevated highways and viaducts category) of 1972. The demolition is part of the 11th Street Bridge project.
Tag Archives: Parking
What would happen without parking requirements? Part 2 – Process
CC image from Joe Philipson
Following up on the previous post…
Matt Yglesias links to Michael Manville’s paper, also highlighting the dual areas of inflexibility with zoning parking requirements: that the requirement is fixed at a level above market demand, and that the parking must be provided on site. On top of the rules themselves, the additional process required to earn flexibility from the requirements adds substantial time and cost to any applicant seeking flexibility.
Matt highlights a piece from Aaron Wiener in the City Paper’s Housing Complex column that demonstrates the real-world impact of these requirements, not just for real estate developers but also for entrepreneurs looking to open a business in an under-served neighborhood:
It’s a challenge that’s playing out across the city, with some developers opting to apply for exemptions from the parking minimums, which are usually granted, while others are discouraged from undertaking projects. But it’s a particularly acute problem in Anacostia, where retail is sorely needed and the market is still sufficiently unproven that developers are reluctant to take risks on ventures that could lose money. A requirement to build parking or apply for a variance adds an extra expense that can scare would-be retailers away—particularly when there’s not even space on site for parking, a common scenario in the historic neighborhood.
The documented example of the former H St Playhouse (looking to move to Anacostia) is a contrast to the flexibility in LA, where the adaptive reuse ordinance allows for developers to provide parking off-site. In Anacostia, the theater has control of the required spaces, but those spaces are not located on the exact same property. One could argue that the law mandating parking is misguided, but even when a business seeks to address the spirit of that law, it gets stuck on the letter of the law.
Some flexibility from the rules can be granted, but that requires a great deal of additional costly process for the applicant. So much real estate development simply follows the path of least resistance, meaning that cities should ensure that the path of least resistance leads to the city’s desired outcomes. More from Wiener:
“The city gave $200,000 in a grant to renovate [the Playhouse space],” saysDuane Gautier, CEO of the nonprofit ARCH Development Corporation, referring to funding last summer from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; ARCH also provided a $50,000 interest-free loan to the Playhouse. “So basically one part of the city government is hurting the other part of the city government who wants this done quickly. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
A change like LA’s ARO is a strong step in that direction. Similarly, DC’s pending zoning code re-write is also a step in the right direction. The process spelled out by law matters a great deal and has tremendous impacts on the outcome (the kind of ‘seriatim decision making’ highlighted by David Schleicher).
I’m also reminded of another good DC parking article from previous Housing Complex writer Lydia DePillis one year ago, containing many anecdotes from developers with underutilized parking and/or experiences where the parking requirements forced them to reduce a development in size or abandon it completely.
What would happen without parking requirements?
Downtown Los Angeles. CC image from Nadia Kovacs.
The paper of the day, from Michael Manville: “Parking requirements as a barrier to housing development: regulation and reform in Los Angeles”
Abstract: Using a partial deregulation of residential parking in downtown Los Angeles, I examine the impact of minimum parking requirements on housing development. I find that when parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also that developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces. The research also highlights the importance of removing not just quantity mandates but locational mandates as well. Developers in dense inner cities are often willing to provide parking, but ordinances that require parking to be on the same site as housing can be prohibitively expensive.
Background: Los Angeles had a lot of underutilized office buildings that were not competitive in the office market any longer. The city passed an adaptive reuse ordinance to encourage the re-use of these buildings by offering flexibility on zoning requirements, including use and parking.
The paper shows how developers for these conversions, given flexibility from the code by right, to build less parking than would otherwise be required (new construction in the area is still subject to the parking requirements of the code). But, unlike the cases in Portland, all of the developers still provided some parking – this is Los Angeles after all (and yet another case for letting the market prevail based on local and regional conditions).
The second key area of flexibility is in parking location – developers wishing to re-use properties downtown could provide parking for tenants off-site, often allowing for shared use parking in under-utilized office garages nearby. Traditional requirements not only arbitrarily set the level of parking to be built, but also demand it be provided on site, even if off-site options may be more feasible and cost-effective.
In terms of the housing stock, this code flexibility allowed developers more flexibility in their target market. Those targeting the higher end provided more parking, but the lack of a hard requirement allows devleopers flexibility in which markets they target. Parking has a great market value, of course, so the units built with fewer or no parking spaces would rent for a lower price, allowing the market to create a wider range of products.
The end result is more housing, a wider range of housing price points, a smaller supply of off-street parking spaces, and re-use of under-utilized buildings.
While this paper focuses on LA’s adaptive re-use ordinance, the same pricinples apply to zoning and parking requirements in general.
Managing on-street parking: zoning is not the way
Park sign. CC image from Pixel Jones.
We don’t manage our limited parking resources very well. However, that leaves us lots of room to improve our policies.
A recent Freakonomics podcast entitled ‘Parking is Hell’ provides a nice entry-level synopsis of the challenges involved in using market forces to better manage this valuable resource. The podcast features interviews with parking scholars, including Don Shoup. They address the fallacy of the idea of ‘free’ parking, the idea of using price to better allocate this resource, and the practical challenges to better management of on-street parking (such as the abuse of handicapped parking placards, as well as the rampant illegality in parking practice).
Despite the cold, hard logic behind the idea of performance parking, it’s not an easy political sell. Similar experiences with de-congestion road pricing in Stockholm show reluctance at first, and then broad support for the program once the benefits can be demonstrated, and revenues directed towards locally-controlled improvements. Still, no one likes the idea of someone proposing an increase to your daily costs in exchange for uncertain benefits.
That risk-aversion applies to parking, too – and perhaps explains a great deal of the reluctance to embrace a whole host of parking reforms, both for on-street parking management, but also for zoning code off-street parking requirements. The evidence for the ineffectiveness of these requirements in managing on-street parking is huge; the unintended consequences are large.
Zoning requirements won’t manage on-street parking for you. Consider this case from Boston, where air quality regulations capped the total supply of off-street parking garages, but the city fails to manage on-street parking effectively:
The steep costs at our garages mean that only the well-off and the truly desperate ever wind up parking in them. The rest of us find ourselves in a never-ending chase for metered street parking, which is an absolute steal. Because the price is absurdly low for such a rare commodity—there are around 8,000 metered spaces in Boston—drivers are willing to circle the block for as long as it takes to find an opening, like vultures in search of prey. The $10-an-hour difference between a garage and a metered spot in Boston gives “drivers a license to hunt,” says Mark Chase, a local parking consultant,“but it’s not a guarantee of a parking place.” The result, naturally, is congestion. Studies from around the country have shown that as much as 34 percent of all traffic in downtown areas involves drivers just looking for parking spaces.
Meanwhile, Boston has set aside a ton of spaces for resident-only parking in neighborhoods, and it charges nothing for the permits to use them. And what happens when it doesn’t cost anything to keep cars parked on the street? They stay there. Today more than 311,000 vehicles are registered in Boston, and more than 87,000 of them have residential parking permits. Each of those cars takes up around 160 square feet—the size of a street spot—of prime city real estate.“You have some of the most valuable land on earth, and you’re giving it away for free to cars,” says Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking. “It’s preposterous.”
Enter a new development proposal, aiming to build car-free, promising not to rent to car owners and therefore not make Boston’s off-street parking problem even worse:
Paul Berkeley, president of the Allston Civic Association, said residents support Mariscal’s plan for an airy, green building, but said the no-car idea would not fly.
“It’s well-intentioned and it could be successful, but people felt that in that location there was too much of a risk of people having cars and just putting them in front of houses nearby,” he said.
So, they tried to reconfigure the development with 35 spaces for the 44 units. Even that is not enough to satisfy the zoning code, as the article notes that the current code requires an absurd two spaces per housing unit. Patrick Doyle notes that the real problem here is not with community skepticism about all the new residents being car-free, but with the absurdly low price for on-street parking. Such ignorance of the basics of supply and demand is not a recipe for good management.
Consider the opportunity costs. It’s not as if requiring parking only hits a developer in his/her pocketbook (though it does). Parking takes up a lot of space, and the geometric requirements for cars to circulate into a garage and have appropriate turning radii to get in and out often do not match up with the geometry of small urban lots ripe for infill development. In Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger writes about the same Boston development:
His proposal also highlights the hidden reality – true in cities everywhere – that our modern buildings largely take their first architectural cues from cars.
“When you remove the car component as the main design challenge,” Mariscal says, “your way of thinking about design is completely different. The possibilities that open for a more environmentally friendly and human design – they are endless.”
Furthermore, the kinds of older neighborhoods we love in our cities usually pre-date zoning requirements for parking. Their very existence is non-conforming. When you suddenly add a very different geometry to design around as a legal requirement (the car and associated parking), you fundamentally change the shape and design of the kind of buildings you build and of the city that will result.
Do your requirements actually make sense? It seems like a basic question to ask. However, lots of requirements exist because they were the default when a code was written, often without much in-depth consideration or any easy mechanism to regularly re-evaluate them.
Consider New Haven, CT. The City asked some out-of-town developers what it would take to make New Haven an attractive place for them to do business. In the vein of a dating game show, the city wanted to know what a developer’s ‘turn offs’ might be:
Demands for lots of parking ranked high on the turn-off list.
“You asked what is an automatic turn-off. … Market research shows [the amount of parking] needed is X. We flip open the zoning code and we find out the requirement in the zoning code is two times that,” replied Patrick Lee, co-founder of a Boston firm called Trinity Financial. “It is a lightning rod … Oftentimes we often just say, ‘That one is too, too hard.’ … When the zoning catches up with the market or gets close to it, we’ll come on back and have the conversation [about building]. Even if you’re doing surface parking, it eats up so much land it ends up being a cost-driver in your pro forma.”
This raises the question: why even require parking at all if the market is a) willing to forgo it, or b) willing to build it? Eliminate that problem, and you don’t have to worry about forcing your zoning to “catch up” to the market. At the very least, some mandatory periodic review of the requirements (in the same vein as the zoning budget idea, but for a specific provision of the code) would help ensure the requirements in place make sense.
None of this changes the need for rational management of on-street parking. Zoning requirements cannot do that for you.
Parking tradeoffs – on-street and off-street
Requiring developers to build off-street parking is expensive. That’s the key takeaway from a City of Portland study on the impacts of parking requirements on housing affordability. (This study was linked to in a previous post) To illustrate the point, the city looks at a hypothetical development and considers a number of different scenarios for providing parking to the building. The results show the trade-offs involved. The method of providing parking not only adds to the cost, but also limits the ability of a building to fully utilize a site.
For example, providing parking via an off-street surface lot is rather cheap to build, but has a high opportunity cost – that land used for parking cannot also be used for housing. The study keeps the land area and the zoning envelope constant: that is, the off-street parking must be provided on-site, and you can’t get a variance for extra building height. The trade-offs for this hypothetical development, then, are between cost (and the rent you’d have to charge to get a return on your investment) and in utilization of the site.
Assumed cost per parking spaces are as follows:
Surface $3,000
Podium/Structured (above ground) $20,000
Underground $55,000
Internal (Tuck Under or Sandwich) $20,000
Mechanical $45,000
Apply those options to a hypothetical development site, and you can see the trade-offs emerge. In every case, requiring parking means fewer units can be developed, and each of those units is more expensive to provide.
Requiring parking makes all of the apartments more expensive, but for different reasons. The surface parking is cheap, but the real reason the rent is high is due to the opportunity cost – the surface parking option only allows for the development of 30 units instead of a hypothetical max of 50.
Underground parking is also substantially more expensive in terms of rent, but also in terms of construction costs – the rent increase isn’t that much higher than the surface option (in spite of the $50k per space cost differential) due to the fact that underground parking allows for substantial utilization of the site. Even underground parking does not allow for full utilization, as the ramps to the garage take up space that could be used for housing in the no-parking scenario.
Requiring developers to add parking in all of these cases jacks up the rent they must charge to make these developments pencil out. The underground parking example is a 60-plus percent increase in the monthly rent – and it’s a dollar figure that probably ensures that a developer couldn’t just rent out unused parking spaces and break-even on the proposition. Instead, that cost gets passed through to the renter – both the cost of the space, as well as the opportunity cost of not building more housing.
The other thing to remember from this is that all of those options for how to park a building might not be allowed. Tuck-under parking might make sense (get a few spaces at a reasonable cost), but if the zoning code requires more than 0.25 spaces per unit (as it does in Downtown Brooklyn), that method would not be allowed by the zoning code. Podium parking is also reasonable, but that means you’re devoting the entire first floor to parking – meaning you can’t use it for housing units or retail or any of the other ground-floor uses that make for vibrant streetscapes.
Framing the issue. One other page on Portland’s website does a nice job of framing the issue of zoning code reform for on-site parking requirements. Instead of talk about reducing on-site parking requirements, we’re talking about places where parking is allowed, but not required. Soldiers on the automotive side of the “war on cars” (a phrase worthy of the scare quotes) will frequently frame this as removing parking. This kind of language is both more accurate about potential changes and less inflammatory in skirmishes of this “war.”
More on-street parking isn’t always a problem. One of the fears of these parking-free developments is that not all of those residents will be car-free. The Portland study shows this to be true – but it also shows that this isn’t really a problem. Even at the peak utilization of on-street spaces surrounding these new parking-free buildings, 25% of the spaces are still available (page 2 of this document), meaning that there shouldn’t be a problem for residents in finding an on-street space.
Even if on-street parking isn’t actually a problem yet in Portland (no matter how it is perceived), that can always change. When demand for that parking exceeds the supply, then you turn to parking management.
Managing on-street parking. If we’ve established that off-street parking requirements increase the cost of housing, and we know that not all residents of a parking-less building will also be car-less, then management of scarce on-street parking will be critical. The Portland Transport blog points to a proposal in Portland that has a nice structure.
The proposal would divide part of the city into essentially three kinds of areas:
- Commercial areas: all on-street parking is metered. Anyone may park, but all must pay.
- Residential areas: residents (with permits) are prioritized, non-residents can park for free, but must obey time limits (similar to DC”s current RPP framework).
- Bordering areas: on streets adjacent to commercial areas, all spaces are metered but those with residential permits do not need to pay the meters.
Now, the devil is always in the details for things like permit zone sizes, cost of the permits, meter rates, etc. However, the basic structure does a nice job of shifting the emphasis on what kind of parking should be prioritized in certain areas.
Beyond management. One benefit of allowing more parking-free development would be to increase density in the area, thereby supporting more transit service and key destinations within walking distance. The more parking-free units there are, the easier it gets for residents to live car-free. Each of these represents a bit of the virtuous cycle.
Talkin’ parking on TV
Today I had the chance to talk parking on News Talk with Bruce DePuyt. Fellow panelist David Alpert has a summary at Greater Greater Washington.
Getting WordPress to play nice with embedded videos can be a pain, so please check out either of the links above for video.
(as a quick reminder, the views I express on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer)
Parking, misunderstood
CC image from Atomic Taco
Let’s take a trip up and down the Northeast Corridor and look at recent parking news. All three show some misunderstandings about parking, cities, and markets. Time for some Shoup reading assignments!
New York: Looking to discuss changes to the zoning code parking requirements in downtown Brooklyn, the New York Times comes down with a severe case of windshield-itis:
In traffic-clogged New York City, where parking spaces are coveted like the rarest of treasures, an excess of parking spaces might seem like an urban planner’s dream.
Yet city officials, developers and transit advocates say that in Downtown Brooklyn, there is this most unusual of parking problems: There is simply too much of it.
Admittedly, many urban planning principles seem counter-intuitive at first glance. When you add in the challenge of altering a regulatory status quo (such as modestly changing the zoning code, as is proposed in Brooklyn), the weight of conventional wisdom is enormous.
Still, it’s interesting to see a parking glut framed as an “urban planner’s dream.’ (particularly when compared against later articles from DC) It’s sure not my dream, either in terms of result (excess parking) or process (via the unintended consequences of regulation). Building parking is expensive, so we don’t want to build too much of it. Requiring us to build too much means that those costs just get passed along to the rest of us.
It’s worth noting that New York is not proposing to eliminate these requirements and rely on the market to determine how much parking to provide, they are merely reducing the requirement from mandating 40% of new units have spaces (in a neighborhood where only 22% of households own cars!) to 20%. Why not reduce it to zero?
Likewise, there are likely opportunities for new developments to make use of the excess parking already built. Hopefully, those kinds of arrangements would allow for new buildings to still be parking-free if the market so desires. Nevertheless, a reduction in the requirement is moving in the right direction.
Philadelphia: A few miles south on the NEC, Philadelphia might be backtracking on parking, rather than moving in the right direction. Philly has already altered their zoning code to eliminate parking requirements in the city’s dense rowhouse neighborhoods. Now, members of the city council want to roll those changes back. The council’s interference in a code change that’s only been in effect for a few months is troubling, as is the lack of reasoning. From the Inquirer’s article on the topic:
“Most developers wish that they didn’t have to get approvals from anybody,” says Clarke. “I have to be responsive to the needs of the residents. They don’t have enough parking.”
Perhaps this is where a dose of that counter-intuitive planning wisdom would be useful.
The reasoning put forth for changing the rules back is equally troubling, particularly given the Philadelphia Planning Commission’s charge in rewriting the zoning code: reduce the need to grant so many variances. Attempting to graft a comprehensive zoning ordinance onto a pre-existing (and pre-automobile) cityscape is bound to be a challenge no matter what; but pushing a code to require elements so geometrically opposed to the pre-code fabric is foolhardy. Such changes, often made in the name of providing more parking only end up inducing unintended consequences. From the Next American City article:
Gladstein said the bill’s proposed changes could set Philadelphia back on the path back to when the city issued more variances than nearly any other big city in America because of unrealistic demands in the zoning code.
“There are many instances in rowhome neighborhoods where you simply cannot provide parking by right because of factors like narrow lot lines,” she said. “We thought these changes would send too many cases to the zoning board.”
Gladstein also noted that lack of a parking requirement in the original code was intentional, as on-site parking, which often manifests itself as a front-loading garage, actually diminishes the supply of public parking spaces.
A code that doesn’t respect geometry, doesn’t reflect the city’s history, and achieve its stated goals is a bad code. Here’s to hoping those changes do not go into effect.
DC: In the District, the parking conversations aren’t focused on zoning (yet! – but they will be, and soon), but rather the management of on-street parking spaces. Policy changes take a different tack than in Philadelphia – instead of providing parking for residents via zoning code requirements, the city is strengthening on-street protections for residents with parking permits.
The reaction is all over the map – Ward 1 Councilmember says this is about a future that “discourages car ownership,” yet the goal of enhanced residential permit parking protections is about “striking a balance in favor of those who are residents with stickers who paid for them.” Did those residents pay enough for a scarce resource? If the price reflected the scarcity of spaces, would there be as much of a parking problem? And how does making on-street parking for residents easier discourage car ownership?
Other elements of the Post parking article talk about the difficulty of parking for non-residents visiting the city, as well as the city’s efforts to re-purpose some curb space away from parking and towards other uses (such as protected bicycle lanes) – but fall into the trap of equating all things parking together. Metered, permitted, for residents, for visitors, using curb space for parking or for other uses – these are all big differences, and conflating them all together is problematic, and increases the chances of misunderstanding.
Choice architecture and zoning
Parallel parking on-street. CC image from Eyton Z.
Following up on the previous post, two pieces showing the limits of the zoning code in structuring choice architectures in urban environments:
Parking. Zoning code provisions that require adding off-street parking seriously distort both the urban fabric as well as the decision-making of individuals using those buildings – and thus those parking spaces (some previous thoughts on this here and here). Portland has eliminated minimum parking requirements under certain circumstances (and has had this regulation on the books for many years – only recently have both developers and financiers been on the same page about parking-free development). Of course, a parking-free development is nothing new – huge swaths of our cities built before the imposition of such codes function just fine without the ‘benefit’ of such codes guiding their maturation.
The most recent news about these parking-free developments in Portland is that those living in the parking-free apartments are not car-free themselves:
But a city of Portland study released this week suggests that no-car households are the exception, not the rule, even in apartments that don’t provide parking. And those vehicles have to go somewhere.
…
But it also found that 73 percent of 116 apartment households surveyed have cars, and two-thirds park on the street. Only 36 percent use a car for a daily commute, meaning the rest store their cars on the street for much of the week.
Point being, rescinding parking requirements from zoning codes alone is not enough to change behavior. That doesn’t mean that changing parking requirements isn’t a good idea – it is. As the quote above also notes, very few of these residents use their cars for a daily commute. However, there is a limit to what zoning can do. Parking requirements in the zoning code are a crude form of parking management; rescinding those rules likely warrants better parking management programs.
Portland appears stuck in between market equilibria here: people complain about more parkers on the the street, but those people are only parking there because it’s cheap and available. Likewise, off-street spaces are available for rent, but many are unwilling to pay the price to do so:
But developers can’t count on tenants to pick up the tab, particularly when there is street parking easily available nearby.
“The market is the market,” Menashe said. “If the guy down the street has no parking and he’s able to get $800 a unit, that’s probably all we can get, too.”
Great news for the city, and for consumers who value market-rate affordability in their apartments. This suggests that a) the old requirement for parking was indeed too high, and b) moving some of those cars to the street hasn’t put too much strain on on-street parking.
Nonetheless, the lesson is that zoning can only do so much. Zoning is a blunt instrument, it can regulate form well. To the extent that use and form are tied together, it can regulate use. But you can’t dictate behavior with a zoning code – and trying to do so will likely bring unintended consequences.
The excellent Portland Transport blog takes note of these findings and asks: what policies would get you to go car-lite or car-free? Options within this realm – things like charging for on-street parking permits, encouraging car-sharing services, enabling additional dense development to thus provide more ‘stuff’ within a walkable distance, thereby reducing the need for car ownership, etc. Those kinds of policies are the ones to build into the choice architecture to reduce car use and ownership, and also to reduce the tension from good policy changes like the removal of minimum parking requirements.
Restaurants. Writing at Greater Greater Washington, Herb Caudill calls for the removal of a zoning restriction on restaurants in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of DC. The rule is a part of an overlay zoning district and limits restaurants from occupying more than 25% of the linear storefront footage in the area. The goal is to require a diversity of retail uses in the area. The effect, however, has been for a lot of longstanding vacancies as well as some rather odd tenants (such as a vacuum cleaner repair shop).
Here again, zoning can only do so much. Once you step outside the physical purview of what zoning is good at regulating, all bets are off. Zoning can require that buildings provide retail space, for example – but exactly what type of retail is a lot harder to regulate. Leaving aside the wisdom of even trying to regulate such a thing (rather than allowing the market some flexibility to operate), the goal of diverse retail uses is probably better met with other types of policies than changes to the zoning code.
More on parking requirements and impacts to the city
Portland parking meter. CC image from Ian Broyles
Several tangentially related articles on parking over the past few weeks:
In a previous post on zoning and unintended consequences, I linked to an Oregon Public Broadcasting piece on zero-parking development in Portland, OR – taking advantage of a clause in the zoning code that removes the requirement to provide off-site parking in developments around high-frequency transit corridors. The key word is in removing the requirement, as the developers are free to provide on-site parking if they wish, but are no longer required to do so. And may have decided to forgo off-street parking entirely.
Portland’s Willamette Week followed with a feature piece on the same issue a month later. Unfortunately, the writer frames the rule as letting developers off the hook for something they ought to pay for, like they were building bathrooms without toilets:
The Portland City Council more than a decade ago created this exemption—a huge financial benefit to developers—to increase density and discourage people from owning and driving cars.
If there’s a single fragment in the zoning code that encapsulates the ambition of city planners and the ethos of Portland, this may be it.
But the policy has its costs, and nearby residents such as Gold-Markel are paying for it.
Throughout the article, the ‘problems’ of this policy are presented in terms of spillover parking – that is, the residents of the new parking-less developments did not get rid of their cars entirely, and now park them on the street. One obvious solution would be to manage parking on the street via pricing, permits, and many other available tools – rather than the blunt instrument of parking space requirements in the zoning code. The zoning code works best when roughly governing broad land use and built form. It is not a particularly strong management tool. Nothing is mentioned about the cost to residents and to the city as a whole of requiring this expensive construction.
Along the same lines in DC (which does have some residential parking management programs in place), a local ANC recently signed off on a parking-free development near a metro station – but only in exchange for the promise that residents of the new building would not be allowed to get Residential Parking Permits for their vehicles. On the one hand, the existence of a management program ought to help mitigate the impacts of such construction; on the other, the fact that the DC project had to negotiate to build without parking in the first place opens the door to “excessive localism” in Matt Yglesias’ terms.
Back in Portland:
Hales tells WW that when the city was rewriting the zoning code in 2000 to eliminate the parking requirement, he never thought developers would actually build apartments without parking.
“We were trying to get developers to put in one [parking] spot instead of two,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t smart enough to anticipate that banks would finance projects with no parking whatsoever.”
The simple fact is that parking doesn’t always pay. Often, the economic case for it is quite weak if it isn’t seen as an absolute requirement (in either the legal sense or in terms of feasibility). Another interesting (but very different case) is Yankee Stadium, where several large new parking garages adjacent to the new ballpark have defaulted on their bonds thanks to low utilization.
This situation is different from a run-of-the-mill zoning case, but it dramatically shows the cost (and the lack of a return) in building too much parking. With that kind of cost in providing parking when demand is low, it’s no wonder that one of the developers in the OPB piece made the claim that “Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment.”
In a more quantitative analysis of parking reforms, the Atlantic Cities looks to London:
In an upcoming issue of Urban Studies, researchers Zhan Guo and Shuai Ren of the Rudin Centre for Transport Policy and Management at NYU consider two core questions when it comes to London’s reform. First, does the parking minimum truly create more parking than people want? Second, is a parking maximum necessary to promote sustainable transport, or will the market alone take care of it?
On the first question, Guo and Ren returned a pretty definitive yes. They examined parking supply at 216 residential developments in London approved from 1997 to 2000, when the parking minimum was in effect, and then roughly 8,250 developments approved from 2004 to 2010, after the minimum was removed and the maximum imposed. Before parking reform, developers created 94 percent of the required minimum; after it, they created just 52 percent of the old minimum.
Those parking spaces that were formerly required obviously were not free to build. As for parking maximums (that is, a requirement that a development not build more than a given amount of off-street parking):
Onto question number two: the effectiveness of the new maximums. Since the purpose of London’s parking reform was to promote alternative transportation, the researchers looked at how parking supply fluctuated in areas with high density and transit access after 2004. What they found is that that the actual parking supplied was higher in Central London, where density and access are greatest, compared to adjacent outer areas.
Guo and Ren call this finding “unexpected.” They suspect that local authorities may want to keep a high maximum (and therefore allow more spaces) to avoid a parking spillover onto already crowded streets in Central London. Another explanation is that the market simply wants more spaces there: people who can afford to live downtown are willing to pay a premium for parking.
I can’t see much problem in allowing parking to be built where the market is willing to bear the cost of construction and operation. Likewise, a developer of a non-residential property could easily see value in providing a great deal of parking as a draw to their development.
None of this changes the fact that a robust system for managing on-street spaces will likely be needed in any case. Such a program in Portland could easily soothe the concerns of nearby residents (though many of their concerns seem to be about the very existence of the newer, dense development in the first place); and a more market-responsive system in DC (hypothesis: most of DC’s RPP stickers are far too cheap relative to the demand for on-street spaces) might have avoided some of the negotiations in Tenleytown.
Parking requirements and unintended consequences
Surface parking in Minneapolis. CC image from Zach K.
Writing in MinnPost, Marlys Harris asks why (seemingly) nothing is getting done in Minneapolis. She comes up with three broad reasons: a negative attitude towards new development, economic justifications that don’t pencil out for new projects, and the impact of zoning and land use regulations – often unintended impacts or perverse outcomes. While all three are certainly factors, the real interesting implication is the interplay between them: as an example, regulations that dictate long and uncertain processes, enabling those opposed to new development to organize in opposition, thereby adding time and cost to a building project to the point where it’s no longer feasible.
In the comments, Max Musicant offers an example of these chain reactions on the regulatory side:
[T]he zoning code is very often in conflict with how multi-story buildings are actually built – which also drives the almost constant demand for variances. If one wants to build a multi-story building, you are required to provide an elevator. If you need an elevator, you need to build 4-6 stories to spread out the cost. If you are building that high, you will likely be required to build parking on-site. If you have to build parking on-site in an urban location, it will have to be underground – which is very expensive. All of this can be avoided only if 1) you build one story suburban style or 2) your price points are affordable only to the wealthy.
The parking requirements are particularly onerous. Oregon Public Broadcasting took note of parking-less apartment building projects in Portland back in August. New buildings are going up without off-street parking, taking advantage of a change in the zoning code that allows exemptions from parking requirements under certain conditions. While the article’s narrative focuses on the kinds of people who would live without a car or without a designated parking space, this cultural focus is misplaced – as Max Musicant noted later in his comment, these kind of walk-up apartment buildings without off-street parking were commonly constructed in American cities in the not-so-distant past.
The real takeaway from the OPB piece isn’t about the behavior of the tenants, but of the impact on the bottom line of the builders:
One of those developers is Dave Mullens with the Urban Development Group. He opened the Irvington Garden in a close-in Northeast Portland neighborhood last year. It’s 50 units with no parking places.
“The cost of parking would make building this type of project on this location unaffordable,” Mullens says.
Mullens calls the difference “tremendous.”
“Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos,” he says.
In other words, these kinds of regulations have severe costs. Taking Mullens’s price figure at face value, it’s not hard to see how removing a requirement like this would help market rate development target demand at lower price points. Likewise, it’s not hard to see how seemingly narrowly-focused and well-intentioned regulations can have much broader consequences when layered with other constraints.
Of course, these points are all on the micro scale of an individual project, but the macro scale also matters. The regulations have to allow the market to increase supply in order to meet demand – otherwise bad things happen. In the Washington Business Journal, Montgomery and Fairfax counties in metropolitan DC are concerned about housing becoming unaffordable even for those with six figure incomes.
It’s not until the end that simply relaxing zoning requirements to a) increase supply, or b) lower the cost of development (see the parking requirement discussion) is mentioned. The article does not mention option c), all of the above. Since there would still be a need for deeply affordable dwelling units, relaxing or eliminating parking requirements would be a good place to start in striking the balance between good, well-intentioned, and effective regulations and an efficient marketplace for new development.