10 ms·

I hold no love for parking minimums, and would love to see them abolished, but proposals like "we should turn 10% of all current parking spaces into low-income

I hold no love for parking minimums, and would love to see them abolished, but proposals like "we should turn 10% of all current parking spaces into low-income housing" just make me roll eyes. That's not an actionable proposal, the closest that gets to an actionable proposal is to demolish existing parking structures and either put public housing projects on top of them or incentivize real estate developers to build actual low-income housing. Telling real estate developers to build low-income housing in areas where they could easily build high-income housing is, well, let's just say cities promise this all the time and developers never do it. "Build more housing" is probably the answer to the homeless problem, but the ownership issue needs to be fixed first. The author made all these cute graphics of studio apartments superimposed on parking spaces. Cool, I like density, my condo is 650 sqft, like 3 or 4 spaces without egress. Are we talking about literally taking parking from existing owners and building housing on the bare pads? Are we talking about building vertically on top of them and leaving the space underneath for cars? I'm not saying these are bad ideas. But can we fully bake them first? So a politician can actually hand it to a bunch of legislators and come up with something he can actually put on his platform? Sure let's abolish the minimum. But that won't do a darned thing to help congestion and the housing shortage other than make LA more like Atlanta where there's an island of density around a bunch of ugly sprawl with more dense pockets springing up in the periphery. We're still waiting for market conditions to fix the city. And market forces don't care about what we want. Promising low-income housing in desirable real estate markets doesn't work but is the only thing politicians can put on their platforms that people will vote for.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Absolutely this fetish for getting rid off street parking will just lead to third world traffic jams. BTW I am a non car driver here
- pkulak 7y ago
  Seems like an inability to store private vehicles for free on public property would reduce cars and traffic.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    No did you not see the TG special where they tried to drive through a big African city. And do you think the fact that in third world countries there is a market for poop bags you carry in the car to shit into - might support my position.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      How would getting rid of street parking mean third world traffic jams where people have to go to the bathroom in their cars? Are you 100% sure that street parking is the only difference between these two situations?
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    Street parking doesn't need to be free.
    - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
      It does for people who already live there and don't have parking on their property.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    It’s not ‘free’ it’s paid for by property taxes. Just because in certain areas it’s not worth it to actually enforce permits doesn’t mean the city won’t at the request of the homeowners or businesses.
    - timerol 7y ago
      Free here means free at point of use. I pay property taxes and don't own a car. You pay property taxes and do park a car. We both pay the same toward parking, therefore it makes sense to say parking is free.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Without alternatives it will simply reduce commerce in that area which, sure, will reduce traffic. When these suggestions are made HN seems to forget people still need to live the time between when this pain is enforced and if/when a solution arises.
- sachdevap 7y ago
  "Third world" traffic jams are what you get when you have enough population density. And for that, you don't have to go to this "third world" you speak of, look at NY.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    While I don't agree with the GP, traffic in NYC is nothing like what it is describing (i.e., significantly better than the "third world").
    - sachdevap 7y ago
      I am not making a direct comparison. I am using NYC as a case for how population density affects traffic. That does not have much to do with a place being "third world". He/She could as well make points about better infrastructure instead of disparaging places as "third world" countries. The notion of bucketing countries is derogatory, and does not add to the argument. And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world"
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        > I am not making a direct comparison. I am using NYC as a case for how population density affects traffic. Yes, you are. You said: > "Third world" traffic jams are what you get when you have enough population density. then proceeded to throw out NYC as a non-"third world" example. > He/She could as well make points about better infrastructure instead of disparaging places as "third world" countries. The notion of bucketing countries is derogatory, and does not add to the argument. > And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world" Yes, it could have, and the use of "third world" as shorthand for "lacking proper transportation infrastructure" was unnecessary and somewhat derogatory. However, your initial response doesn't address that. It just puts the cause of traffic jams as population density, then compares NYC's density (and, implicitly, traffic), to the places being referenced.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  I am not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that a lack of street parking is what causes traffic jams rather than a lack of sane traffic infrastructure or public transportation. But, it doesn't make sense from first principles, at least. Could you explain how you came to that conclusion?
atoav 7y ago
> Telling real estate developers to build low-income housing in areas where they could easily build high-income housing is, well, let's just say cities promise this all the time and developers never do it. Where I currently live developers are required by law to build. Certain percentage of square meters of social housing for every square meter of higher class housing they build. When my house got build they had to build social housing right next to it. If I understood it correctly, the city ties this to the building permits. So if you wanna build new stuff you need to show that your plans include these social and affordable flats as well. A city should in my opinion regulate to maximize the happieness of it’s inhabitants and not it’s developers (to some degree these two overlap anyways). Certainly you could also try to change things via the market, but unless your city has a lack of developers why should you?
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I have heard that, in the long run, these kinds of legislation tend to really kick the housing affordability problem into turbo mode. What ends up happening is that developers need to raise the rents on the non-subsidized units, because they're the ones that subsidize the subsidized ones. Which creates a constant upward pressure on housing prices that ends up squeezing everybody. I'm not sure what the solution is, and I'm no economist, but it seems plausible. Looking at it from a 3,000 meter perspective, I would assume that, however well-intentioned San Francisco's housing policies were, we should probably expect that emulating them will yield the same outcomes that San Francisco is currently experiencing. That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either. I would also suspect that emulating Detroit would also tend to lead to the sorts of outcomes that Detroit is currently experiencing.
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    > That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either. This isn't something we do, it's something that falls out of a free real estate market. Money either finds itself and accumulates, making prices soar, or it flees the whole area throwing prices through the floor. There is no magical world where the forces of supply and demand just happen to create income-diverse neighborhoods. We have to force that to happen if we want it. Ultimately this, like every other problem resulting from income inequality, must be resolved by fixing the inequality, not by forcing people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.
beamatronic 7y ago
Bring back street cars. Then not only will there be public transportation for everyone, there won’t be room for the cars anyway
- gbjw 7y ago
  Come to Toronto - they never left! (and have their own set of problems)
  - winslow 7y ago
    There was a cool documentary about the Toronto trolley and other cities trolley systems. http://www.stephenlow.com/project/the-trolley/ http://www.stephenlow.com/project/the-trolley/
- munk-a 7y ago
  Street cars lose against cars on the open road. I think they end up performing best on otherwise pedestrianized streets - assuming good attention is paid to safety design.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  Street cars will totally work for getting from Long Beach to Pasadena. OH WAIT
fountainofage 7y ago
I realize this is a tired trope, but I firmly believe it: If California got rid of prop 13 and allowed by-right zoning, market forces absolutely would build what we want.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Market forces build things like Uber. Are we actually going to get public transit this way? I really doubt it.
  - achenatx 7y ago
    yes. Imagine public shuttles using uber based technology. So the shuttles come pick you up and drop you off at your destination. They can do transfers to other shuttles or other public transit on fixed routes to optimize the routes. The govt would never come up with rideshare type algorithms.
    - isbjorn16 7y ago
      https://crosscut.com/2019/08/seattles-microtransit-experiment-drives-people-light-rail-it-working https://crosscut.com/2019/08/seattles-microtransit-experimen... Maybe just an exception to the rule, but still worth pointing out.
    - jayd16 7y ago
      And none of that needs a change in regulations. That could all happen now save for those exact market forces. Haven't you just described Uber pool which already exists? Assuming our prayers will be answered by just deregulating things is silly.
    - cannonedhamster 7y ago
      Yeah because the single largest logistics system in the world knows nothing about transportation. You free market only people really are blind to reality. The US government is the single best move of people and goods on the planet. We literally run our military on logistics. Show me any real private industry that runs their transportation as efficiently as a government one with the limited resources and requirements for service that public does. You know how the private market makes money? They cut out the poor people and inefficient routes which public industry can't do because their mission is to actual serve the community instead of shareholders.
timerol 7y ago
"we should turn 10% of all current parking spaces into low-income housing" wasn't a proposal on the site. It was more of a demonstration that, if we could do that, we would satisfy the entire deficit of low-income renters that currently exists in LA. The actual policy proposals were at the end: 1. No universal parking minimums. Developers choose how much parking the market requires. 2. Parking Maximums in Transit Oriented Communities. 3. All new parking garages must be built with a flat floor and a high enough ceiling to allow future conversion into office, studio, or living space. 4. 20% of parking spaces must include EV charging, with the rest install ready. 5. Garages must include an equivalent number of bicycle/micro-mobility parking spaces. I would say suggestions 2-5 get progressively worse, but suggestion 1 is really good and backed up by the data presented.
- nradov 7y ago
  Suggestion 1 is terrible unless it's combined with a limited permit scheme for street parking. Otherwise you end up with a mess where everyone buys a car anyway, then ends up circling the block around and around hunting for a space.
  - novok 7y ago
    Eventually people learn to not do that anymore, like many do in downtown areas today... Eventually they might reduce the amount of cars they have, because doing that is a pain in the ass. Or they pay for their parking spot vs. freeloading on 'free' parking.
    - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
      REALLY? They learn not to come home after work or buying groceries anymore? And who is freeloading? If you're talking about the people who moved into a new building and then started taking the existing neighbors' parking, then yes that's freeloading... but how are they supposed to pay for "their" parking spot when it was never built?
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I'm cool with that, maybe they'll learn not to buy a car anyway. I do think that 1 would need to be tempered with some handicap minimum though.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> "Build more housing" is probably the answer to the homeless problem, but X needs to be fixed first. There is always an X to be fixed first, and housing is never built.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Housing is built all the time, to serve the needs of the market it's built to serve.
  - bronson 7y ago
    Housing development is winding down in many places. > From 2010 to 2015, San Mateo County added 72,800 jobs but only 3,844 homes: that's 19 jobs for every home https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-peak-housing-dysfunction-in-california https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-pe... That's low enough that, as far as the market is concerned, it's effectively stopped.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
Low income housing is the wrong solution to a simple problem. Zoning laws introduce too many restrictions to keep the market from running efficiently. This is why you see "housing crises" everywhere in the world right now. If the market could solve the problem, it would. The market can't solve it, so the problem persists and aristocrats get to keep watching their land values skyrocket and rent-seek another day. Zoning isn't a cure-all. Housing is getting pretty expensive in Houston, one of the only large US cities with lax-to-non-existent zoning laws (and also high property taxes). Also, I think most people want some restrictions on what can be built where. I don't think many parents want strip clubs built next to preschools, and I don't think many people want a cement factory to be built across the street from a public park. I also don't think many people want the zoning laws we have either. They just want to see their land value increase as fast as possible, but that's not really sustainable either. I thought we might reach a tipping point as we reach a majority renter population. But Europe has been a majority renter society for a long time, and I would argue Europe's housing (to buy) is more unaffordable than US housing. Strangely, the price to earning on real estate makes 0 sense in Europe (even with respect to interest rates), and renting is somehow much more affordable in Europe (even though buying isn't).
m463 7y ago
Why not keep the minimums and use the boring company to dig parking belowground? :)
ErotemeObelus 7y ago
Build all parking spaces underground and ban parking lots.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

Absolutely this fetish for getting rid off street parking will just lead to third world traffic jams. BTW I am a non car driver here

pkulak 7y ago
Seems like an inability to store private vehicles for free on public property would reduce cars and traffic.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  No did you not see the TG special where they tried to drive through a big African city. And do you think the fact that in third world countries there is a market for poop bags you carry in the car to shit into - might support my position.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    How would getting rid of street parking mean third world traffic jams where people have to go to the bathroom in their cars? Are you 100% sure that street parking is the only difference between these two situations?
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  Street parking doesn't need to be free.
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    It does for people who already live there and don't have parking on their property.
- Spivak 7y ago
  It’s not ‘free’ it’s paid for by property taxes. Just because in certain areas it’s not worth it to actually enforce permits doesn’t mean the city won’t at the request of the homeowners or businesses.
  - timerol 7y ago
    Free here means free at point of use. I pay property taxes and don't own a car. You pay property taxes and do park a car. We both pay the same toward parking, therefore it makes sense to say parking is free.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Without alternatives it will simply reduce commerce in that area which, sure, will reduce traffic. When these suggestions are made HN seems to forget people still need to live the time between when this pain is enforced and if/when a solution arises.
sachdevap 7y ago
"Third world" traffic jams are what you get when you have enough population density. And for that, you don't have to go to this "third world" you speak of, look at NY.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  While I don't agree with the GP, traffic in NYC is nothing like what it is describing (i.e., significantly better than the "third world").
  - sachdevap 7y ago
    I am not making a direct comparison. I am using NYC as a case for how population density affects traffic. That does not have much to do with a place being "third world". He/She could as well make points about better infrastructure instead of disparaging places as "third world" countries. The notion of bucketing countries is derogatory, and does not add to the argument. And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world"
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      > I am not making a direct comparison. I am using NYC as a case for how population density affects traffic. Yes, you are. You said: > "Third world" traffic jams are what you get when you have enough population density. then proceeded to throw out NYC as a non-"third world" example. > He/She could as well make points about better infrastructure instead of disparaging places as "third world" countries. The notion of bucketing countries is derogatory, and does not add to the argument. > And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world" Yes, it could have, and the use of "third world" as shorthand for "lacking proper transportation infrastructure" was unnecessary and somewhat derogatory. However, your initial response doesn't address that. It just puts the cause of traffic jams as population density, then compares NYC's density (and, implicitly, traffic), to the places being referenced.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
yowlingcat 7y ago
I am not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that a lack of street parking is what causes traffic jams rather than a lack of sane traffic infrastructure or public transportation. But, it doesn't make sense from first principles, at least. Could you explain how you came to that conclusion?

atoav 7y ago

> Telling real estate developers to build low-income housing in areas where they could easily build high-income housing is, well, let's just say cities promise this all the time and developers never do it. Where I currently live developers are required by law to build. Certain percentage of square meters of social housing for every square meter of higher class housing they build. When my house got build they had to build social housing right next to it. If I understood it correctly, the city ties this to the building permits. So if you wanna build new stuff you need to show that your plans include these social and affordable flats as well. A city should in my opinion regulate to maximize the happieness of it’s inhabitants and not it’s developers (to some degree these two overlap anyways). Certainly you could also try to change things via the market, but unless your city has a lack of developers why should you?

mumblemumble 7y ago
I have heard that, in the long run, these kinds of legislation tend to really kick the housing affordability problem into turbo mode. What ends up happening is that developers need to raise the rents on the non-subsidized units, because they're the ones that subsidize the subsidized ones. Which creates a constant upward pressure on housing prices that ends up squeezing everybody. I'm not sure what the solution is, and I'm no economist, but it seems plausible. Looking at it from a 3,000 meter perspective, I would assume that, however well-intentioned San Francisco's housing policies were, we should probably expect that emulating them will yield the same outcomes that San Francisco is currently experiencing. That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either. I would also suspect that emulating Detroit would also tend to lead to the sorts of outcomes that Detroit is currently experiencing.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  > That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either. This isn't something we do, it's something that falls out of a free real estate market. Money either finds itself and accumulates, making prices soar, or it flees the whole area throwing prices through the floor. There is no magical world where the forces of supply and demand just happen to create income-diverse neighborhoods. We have to force that to happen if we want it. Ultimately this, like every other problem resulting from income inequality, must be resolved by fixing the inequality, not by forcing people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.

beamatronic 7y ago

Bring back street cars. Then not only will there be public transportation for everyone, there won’t be room for the cars anyway

gbjw 7y ago
Come to Toronto - they never left! (and have their own set of problems)
- winslow 7y ago
  There was a cool documentary about the Toronto trolley and other cities trolley systems. http://www.stephenlow.com/project/the-trolley/ http://www.stephenlow.com/project/the-trolley/
munk-a 7y ago
Street cars lose against cars on the open road. I think they end up performing best on otherwise pedestrianized streets - assuming good attention is paid to safety design.
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
Street cars will totally work for getting from Long Beach to Pasadena. OH WAIT

fountainofage 7y ago

I realize this is a tired trope, but I firmly believe it: If California got rid of prop 13 and allowed by-right zoning, market forces absolutely would build what we want.

jayd16 7y ago
Market forces build things like Uber. Are we actually going to get public transit this way? I really doubt it.
- achenatx 7y ago
  yes. Imagine public shuttles using uber based technology. So the shuttles come pick you up and drop you off at your destination. They can do transfers to other shuttles or other public transit on fixed routes to optimize the routes. The govt would never come up with rideshare type algorithms.
  - isbjorn16 7y ago
    https://crosscut.com/2019/08/seattles-microtransit-experiment-drives-people-light-rail-it-working https://crosscut.com/2019/08/seattles-microtransit-experimen... Maybe just an exception to the rule, but still worth pointing out.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    And none of that needs a change in regulations. That could all happen now save for those exact market forces. Haven't you just described Uber pool which already exists? Assuming our prayers will be answered by just deregulating things is silly.
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    Yeah because the single largest logistics system in the world knows nothing about transportation. You free market only people really are blind to reality. The US government is the single best move of people and goods on the planet. We literally run our military on logistics. Show me any real private industry that runs their transportation as efficiently as a government one with the limited resources and requirements for service that public does. You know how the private market makes money? They cut out the poor people and inefficient routes which public industry can't do because their mission is to actual serve the community instead of shareholders.

timerol 7y ago

"we should turn 10% of all current parking spaces into low-income housing" wasn't a proposal on the site. It was more of a demonstration that, if we could do that, we would satisfy the entire deficit of low-income renters that currently exists in LA. The actual policy proposals were at the end: 1. No universal parking minimums. Developers choose how much parking the market requires. 2. Parking Maximums in Transit Oriented Communities. 3. All new parking garages must be built with a flat floor and a high enough ceiling to allow future conversion into office, studio, or living space. 4. 20% of parking spaces must include EV charging, with the rest install ready. 5. Garages must include an equivalent number of bicycle/micro-mobility parking spaces. I would say suggestions 2-5 get progressively worse, but suggestion 1 is really good and backed up by the data presented.

nradov 7y ago
Suggestion 1 is terrible unless it's combined with a limited permit scheme for street parking. Otherwise you end up with a mess where everyone buys a car anyway, then ends up circling the block around and around hunting for a space.
- novok 7y ago
  Eventually people learn to not do that anymore, like many do in downtown areas today... Eventually they might reduce the amount of cars they have, because doing that is a pain in the ass. Or they pay for their parking spot vs. freeloading on 'free' parking.
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    REALLY? They learn not to come home after work or buying groceries anymore? And who is freeloading? If you're talking about the people who moved into a new building and then started taking the existing neighbors' parking, then yes that's freeloading... but how are they supposed to pay for "their" parking spot when it was never built?
- munk-a 7y ago
  I'm cool with that, maybe they'll learn not to buy a car anyway. I do think that 1 would need to be tempered with some handicap minimum though.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> "Build more housing" is probably the answer to the homeless problem, but X needs to be fixed first. There is always an X to be fixed first, and housing is never built.

vinceguidry 7y ago
Housing is built all the time, to serve the needs of the market it's built to serve.
- bronson 7y ago
  Housing development is winding down in many places. > From 2010 to 2015, San Mateo County added 72,800 jobs but only 3,844 homes: that's 19 jobs for every home https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-peak-housing-dysfunction-in-california https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-pe... That's low enough that, as far as the market is concerned, it's effectively stopped.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

Low income housing is the wrong solution to a simple problem. Zoning laws introduce too many restrictions to keep the market from running efficiently. This is why you see "housing crises" everywhere in the world right now. If the market could solve the problem, it would. The market can't solve it, so the problem persists and aristocrats get to keep watching their land values skyrocket and rent-seek another day. Zoning isn't a cure-all. Housing is getting pretty expensive in Houston, one of the only large US cities with lax-to-non-existent zoning laws (and also high property taxes). Also, I think most people want some restrictions on what can be built where. I don't think many parents want strip clubs built next to preschools, and I don't think many people want a cement factory to be built across the street from a public park. I also don't think many people want the zoning laws we have either. They just want to see their land value increase as fast as possible, but that's not really sustainable either. I thought we might reach a tipping point as we reach a majority renter population. But Europe has been a majority renter society for a long time, and I would argue Europe's housing (to buy) is more unaffordable than US housing. Strangely, the price to earning on real estate makes 0 sense in Europe (even with respect to interest rates), and renting is somehow much more affordable in Europe (even though buying isn't).

m463 7y ago

Why not keep the minimums and use the boring company to dig parking belowground? :)

ErotemeObelus 7y ago

Build all parking spaces underground and ban parking lots.