9 ms·
Parking reform legalized most of the new homes in Buffalo and Seattle (2023)
- davidw 2y agoSightline does excellent coverage of various housing affordability and urbanism topics. I feel pretty lucky to know one of the authors there. Here's another article from Catie on some possibilities opening up in Oregon now that we did parking reform ourselves: https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-vanishing-across-oregon/ https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-va... I was proud to speak in favor of my city's implementation of this when it went through city council.
- robertclaus 2y ago"Buffalo, like many other cities, let builders request special permission to deviate from city-determined parking ratios." Having an exception process seems like a very logical approach to rolling back parking mandates gradually. I've seen both massive lots with no cars (clearly an outdated mandate in effect) as well as brand new suburban neighborhoods inundated with packed street parking (clearly a miss by the builder). It feels to me like rolling these rules back thoughtfully will be important to avoid companies from dropping parking from new low income housing that may legitimately need it.
- davidw 2y agoMost cities have had parking minimums for a while, so any new housing without parking is competing against existing housing with the imposed parking ratio. Meaning, if you are shopping around for housing, you can choose housing with more parking. Which means that to compete with it, housing with less parking will have to compete in other ways, like, say, lower prices. Which is more important than automobile storage in a lot of places with a housing shortage and the consequent skyrocketing prices. I wrote up something using that corny professor and the rocks analogy: https://bendyimby.com/2022/05/11/cities-are-for-people/ https://bendyimby.com/2022/05/11/cities-are-for-people/
- aidenn0 2y agoI heard a slightly different version of the jar story in which after the sand, the professor pours a beer into the jar, then the rest of the analogy is the same until the end when a student asks what the beer is supposed to represent, to which the professor says "That just shows that no matter how busy your life is, there's always time for a beer"
- aidenn0 2y agoSuburbs naturally need more parking, since they tend to be both further from mass transit and larger units.
- ars 2y agoSuburbs don't have this problem, there is plenty of parking automatically since people have more space there. I've started to notice that all the car problems are just in dense cities: Nowhere for kids to play, noise, lack of parking, cost, safety, etc etc. None of those issues exist in suburbs and rural. (PS. They don't need more parking just because they have larger units.) Once the city is dense enough then it's all mass transit. If it's not dense you use cars and there is no trouble with them. It's those cities right in the middle that have all the problems.
- CalRobert 2y agoSadly current rules make it hard to transition from low to high density
- ars 2y agoWhy would you want to? The people in low density like it that way, and the people in high density like it that way. It's a good thing that it's hard to change the city from under them! Leave the density alone and let people move to whichever they like better. Just be extra cautious about the medium density cities.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoWho pays for low density? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-reason-houston-is-going-broke https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...
- CalRobert 2y agoThere are lot of people in low density who would _like_ to be in high density. However, these places are absurdly expensive (despite often being more efficient and cheaper to provide with services) because they've been illegal to build for 70 years, so the stock has been stagnant or declined while the population has grown.
- CalRobert 2y ago"suburban neighborhoods inundated with packed street parking (clearly a miss by the builder)." That seems like a miss by the city planners, not the builder.
- ZoomerCretin 2y agoHaving an exception process is ripe for abuse. We have laws for a reason: it is generally a good thing for the same rules to apply to everyone. When you require an exception, you can easily threaten and extort whatever you want, because the "default" is to deny an exception to a rule. We see this all the time with planning: planning commissions extract expensive "concessions" from developers all the time. "Oh, you technically can build that much, but it won't be profitable with all that parking we mandate. We'll gladly grant an exception, if only you capped heights, and have fewer studios."
- bruce511 2y agoSome percentage of people don't have a car. It's safe to assume that trends to lower income. So parking mandates are also a form of (hidden) economic apartheid. If my city mandates say 2 spaces per apartment, it's intrinsically reducing housing stock for "poor people" - hence "more exclusive neighborhoods." Which sounds good, except that the services needed (often done by the poor) get hard to supply. Cynical me suggests that selective zoning creates 'pockets of poor' - but pragmatically me points out this is good for clustering car-alternatives making them more effective. On balance I think it's a win - and frankly is good for everyone.
- davidw 2y agoThe history of zoning is very much about keeping certain people out of the "nice" neighborhoods after Buchanan v. Warley declared explicitly racial zoning to be unconstitutional. This book has a concise and very readable history of zoning in the US: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801479878/zoned-in-the-usa/ https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801479878/zone... has a deeper dive into the history of zoning here compared with other countries.
- 4death4 2y agoEverything is interconnected. People who commute to work need a car. If parking is unavailable, then commuters cannot live there. If workers can't live there, then property taxes are lower and less money enters the local economy. You can't apriori say what impact these parking policies have.
- pjc50 2y ago> People who commute to work need a car Quite a lot of lower income workers can't afford to commute by car. Breaking that "need" relation is the #1 priority for people trying to design lower-car cities.
- viknesh 2y agoThe article does a good job of addressing the nuance, but the headline and most attention grabbing parts of it don't. Most of the new housing built may have been illegal under previous parking rules, but it doesn't logically follow that similar housing couldn't have been built without the parking rules change, just that it's cheaper to build without it. The article/quotes acknowledge this, > “It’s impossible, really, to tie a specific code change to changes in the market,” explained Brennan Staley, a strategic advisor for Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development. Other local regulations, housing prices, and international finance markets all play a part in the real estate market. Michael Hubner, who works on long range planning in Seattle, agreed: “It’s very difficult to point to a causal relationship.” and also note that off street parking is still present in the majority of new housing > In both cities, the majority of new buildings still included off-street parking voluntarily
- imgabe 2y ago> but it doesn't logically follow that similar housing couldn't have been built without the parking rules change, just that it's cheaper to build without it. Yes, you can build anything with an infinite budget. In practice, budgets aren't infinite and increasing costs means fewer projects will get built.
- ZoomerCretin 2y ago> but it doesn't logically follow that similar housing couldn't have been built without the parking rules change, just that it's cheaper to build without it. Cost is a very real and important constraint. You can't just throw more money at a problem if the problem is that you cannot profitably provide a good at a price that is affordable. You cannot change the price the market will bear, but you can cut your costs by lobbying your city government to cut parking minimums.
- bobthepanda 2y agoRight. If either bankers or developers will not make a positive return, they will simply do nothing.
- ars 2y agoI hope people don't take from this that no parking at all is necessary, since that's not what they found. They simply found that you have have a bit less parking than what the code required if you implement it in a way where you need an exception - presumably to show that in this case you don't need it. The code is a bit of a blunt instrument and giving some flexibility to it seems logical. Getting rid entirely of parking minimums does not. Also nowhere in this do I see a survey of residents to see how they like living in these lower-parking homes. People might be very very annoyed, but just deal with it because they have no other good option.
- alistairSH 2y agoMaybe I’m missing something, but in the context of housing+parking, what is the market failure that requires the excessive minimums? VS letting the market solve the problem? Seems like a developer has an incentive to provide enough (and only just enough) to sell/rent the new units. If there isn’t enough, people will look elsewhere.
- ghaff 2y agoThe usual theory is that developers would underspec the number of private parking spaces relative to residence requirements (and of course residents and requirements can change over time). Common parking would then be oversubscribed including for residents/visitors in the area who don't have private off-street parking.
- alistairSH 2y agoWouldn’t a prospective tenant ask about parking, and if there isn’t enough, look elsewhere? Or find a commercial lot to park?
- ghaff 2y agoInformation is often imperfect especially during a quick buying/renting process. A buyer could easily figure they'll use the private spot for one car and they can always use on-street permit parking for the second car even though there are a bunch of houses that depend on that parking for their vehicle. (Or whatever scenario--don't get hung up on the details of that specific one. The general concern is that new construction may lean on a shared resource to keep its own costs down.)
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- BrianHenryIE 2y ago[flagged]
- deviance 2y agoNext thing home owners are selfish. Next thing existing is selfish. You people have a problem. Go out in nature. Breathe! Stop hating on other people
- BrianHenryIE 2y agoThat's a bit of an odd response. I just spent the weekend in Yosemite (I took Amtrak). I live in Sacramento, by the river. Car ownership is objectively, measurably bad. Are you pretending it's not? https://www.strongsactown.org/2024/03/17/suburbs-drive-sacramento-into-debt/ https://www.strongsactown.org/2024/03/17/suburbs-drive-sacra...
- gonzo41 2y agoI live in Australia, like America, it's a really big place that doesn't have the European benefit of having the roman empire putting down footpaths everywhere for a thousand years. Cars are required. But I do agree, I think the trend should be towards smaller cars. And I try and live my values, I share 1 hatchback with my wife.
- piva00 2y agoThat's a more understandable way of living: not requiring a car for most of the time, share one if needed, demand better public transit infrastructure to not depend on a car for most of your day-to-day trips. As much as Australia and the USA are big, most of the trips are very much under 30-50 km of distance, those are easily covered by intercity trains, and in cities mass transit is a much more efficient way to transport people inside of their borders. If there's need to go somewhere unpopulated in a large landmass where this system doesn't cover, I'm totally ok with cars, the issue comes from not having other options that reduce the car dependency. Comparatively to the total population, in the USA, Canada or Australia very few people are using a car most of their time to cover large distances in swaths of undeveloped land, being a big place correlates to almost never going to the very far off unconnected places exactly because it's so far away and inconvenient. Cars are required due to urban development policies and lack of passenger rail connecting cities, not because the place is big, in Australia most of the population live relatively close by [0]. [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EW9YTD2XsAIFYNx?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EW9YTD2XsAIFYNx?format=jpg&name=...
- iknownothow 2y agoI think everyone should watch the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel especially their series on Strong Towns [1]. It shows just how bad parking mandates are and just how bad American car centric city planning is. As they article pointed out, you need such vanguard cities to pave the way for better cities, with less parking and fingers crossed, fewer cars. [1] https://youtu.be/y_SXXTBypIg?si=N8PF71wMhVv6aH9G https://youtu.be/y_SXXTBypIg?si=N8PF71wMhVv6aH9G
- p0w3n3d 2y agowhy not both? why not good parkings and nice bicycle routes?
- iknowstuff 2y agoParking takes space. Outdoor parking keeps everything far apart, less walkable and unpleasant for anyone outside of a car. It also costs a fuck ton of money and is environmentally damaging. If you want good parking you gotta be willing to shell out its real unsubsidized cost of $10-$20/h in a multilevel garage.
- antonkochubey 2y ago$10-20/hr is $7200 - 14400 per month. Is rent of 10 square meters really that expensive whereever it is that you live?
- iknowstuff 2y agoShort term parking is indeed that expensive, depending on the garage. Obviously cheaper in less desirable areas.
- close04 2y agoGP was probably referring to the value of the land. There are very few places in the world where land is rented for ~$1500/sqm/month. I don't live in the US but took San Francisco as a reference for an expensive city in terms of land and parking. A quick look on real estate websites [0] suggests you can buy land in San Francisco quite central for $10k-15k per square meter. If we take the value of the service, parking prices for San Francisco [1] are as high as $7/h and as low as free (at night). Unless I looked in all the wrong places or my math needs triple checking, the numbers you're very adamant about look wildly misaligned with reality even for peaks, let alone for average or median. That doesn't bode well at all for any opinion based on them. And it encourages the other side of the conversation to come with equally unrealistic claims about the cost and impact of "my biking lanes". In your top comment you recommended the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel. But it either didn't correct these views or worse, it encouraged them. Not a stellar recommendation. [0] Zillow but the URL us ungodly long. Easy to check it by yourself though. [1] https://www.sfmta.com/demand-responsive-parking-pricing https://www.sfmta.com/demand-responsive-parking-pricing
- euroderf 2y agoThis is a bit surprising given that Buffalo has a not-so-good public transport system, including a subway to nowhere.
- apexalpha 2y agoThis is one of those things where Europe and the US are worlds apart. In my country we have maximum parking requirement, not minimum.
- thomasfl 2y agoThe world needs more walkable cities. What prevents more walkable cities form being built, is zoning laws, parking regulations, and industrialized housing production. Walkable cities is good for the economy, environment and people... in the long run. Too bad so few sees the long term business opportunity in building cities like this.