Minimum Parking
Here’s a pretty good AP article about the parking minimums debate in DC and around the country. It leads with the story of Jeff and Alice Speck who live in my neighborhood and built this cool house on an otherwise unusable corner triangle lot:
Alice and Jeff Speck didn’t have a car and didn’t want one. But District of Columbia zoning regulations required them to carve out a place to park one at the house they were building. It would have eaten up precious space on their odd-shaped lot and marred the aesthetics of their neighborhood, dominated by historic row houses. The Specks succeeded in getting a waiver, even though it took nine months.
I think there are absolutely no valid reasons whatsoever for maintaining parking minimum mandates. The minimums are economically inefficient and hamper growth. They’re inequitable, with the burdens falling hardest on the poor. And they’re bad for the environment. And for public health. They’re really, really bad — vestiges of a 1950s mindset that lacked any empirical track record about the relationship between automobiles and urban planning (not their fault, it was new technology) and was also just unduly in love with central planning schemes. There is, however, one extremely powerful political argument in favor of minimum regulations:
In old D.C. neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and Georgetown, where parking is scarce, opponents of the change fear that if new homes don’t provide off-street spots, competition for on-street parking will worsen.
Since hypothetical future residents don’t get to vote, this can carry the day. On the merits, the right policy response would be to deal with the on-street parking crunch with performance parking rules. But parking minimums are so pernicious, and the opponents of reform so self-centered, that I think the best way to go is to crudely buy them off. In a city like DC that gives out zone-based residential parking permits, you could just offer incumbent permit holders a guarantee of a lifetime free permits, while saying that all new on-street parking permits will be auctioned or sold at some high price. That’s not quite optimal policy on the merits, but if it could grease the wheels and get minimums eliminated it’d be a deal well-worth making.
23 Responses to “Minimum Parking”
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September 29th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
And they thought a parking space would ruin the aesthetics of the neighborhood?
September 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
In Portland, OR, we used to have a maximum cap on downtown parking. The number of parking spaces, both on street and in lots was capped in order to improve air quality. It worked (the air is better) and also generated a huge advantage for the current owners of parking lots. People who commuted by car saw parking rates climb well above the cost of monthly bus/light rail passes.
It was recently lifted in order to swing a deal where a parking lot will be turned into a park (with underground parking below it). We’ll see what it does to the livability of downtown.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Yeah, these laws are crazy. Streetsblog has been following some debate in NY, and they recently revealed that the minimum parking requirements for new construction in Brooklyn are actually set much higher than the parking provided by the existing housing stock.
In other words, if you buy an apartment building and knock it down, you cannot build an identical apartment building in the same lot without violating the minimum parking requirement!
Developers can’t respond to the demand for housing in walkable/non-car-centric neighborhoods because any new construction is required by law to deny the very characteristics that are driving demand in the first place…and so prices for existing structures continue to inflate while uninhabitable buildings and vacant lots sit unrenovated and undeveloped. It’s absolutely insane.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Lifetime parking passes would be a huge gov’t giveaway and lead to lots of abuses (renting parking passes, trying to sell them, etc). I’m strongly opposed. Let existing residents support mandatory parking thinking they are accomplishing something. Then when building a new home, simply install a small one-bay garage under the house then seal it off with a garage door and use it as a walk in closet. Or use it for your bikes. And if you have a car, park it on the street along with everyone who has lived there for 20 years. That’s just the way of the world.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I don’t know if its the parking requirements that are per se the problem, but the extreme rigidity to which they are enforced. Variances are extremely hard to get in most cities, when governments should instead factor in the type of neighborhood the variance is being requested in and allow flexibility when it makes sense.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
There is no reason to require parking spaces with a building permit, but there are better ways to ensure good behavior.
First: ban on-street parking. If off-street parking is environmentally bad, on-street parking is worse. Every oil leak goes right down the storm drain, they also dissolve the pavement unless it is concrete. Eliminating government subsidized non-green on-street parking is just good policy.
Second: regulate how cars can be parked on property so that they don’t impact the environment or the aesthetics of the community. Basically, parking areas need to drain into a treatment system to remove oil and any other toxins. This is cheaper to do under cover where rainwater doesn’t need to be handled.
Those developers who build communities waste a lot of money building roads, roads take up lots of space and make yards smaller. Cars parked on roads reduce the usefulness of the road and create hazards for pedestrians and kids.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
The most striking thing to me when I read The High Cost of Free Parking was the total absence of any empirical basis for the various parking mandates across the country. It’s like one municipality picks a number out of its ass, and when a nearby municipality is looking to fix a number for its mandate it looks at what the first one did and just copies it. Through the process of inertia this has been replicated all over.
To get sensible, you virtually have to start all over, with no preconceived ideas based on existing parking requirements.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Eliminating government subsidized non-green on-street parking is just good policy.
Yup. The most striking thing about on-street parking is that you are, in essence, building a road 33-50% larger than it needs to be, simply to accommodate – at huge public subsidy – stationary cars.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I wonder if it is the same Jeff Speck of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU)? If so, he’s kind of an activist (albeit an activist I agree with wholeheartedly).
- g
September 29th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
A solution is to have meters with market rate pricing in these neighborhoods, or even above market. Then residents get a free pass. Guests will always have a spot, and the free parking when other people have to pay will seems like a sweet deal.
And if the neighborhood gets denser, the free permits will be even more valuable.
MY thinks that people don’t have a property right in the level of density in their neighborhood. That kind of thinking is going to PO the majority of homeowners in neighborhoods that are getting denser.
Perhaps a better solution is higher property taxes and lower income taxes. This will induce both more density in the urban areas as more people want to take advantage of the lower taxes, and also encourage property owners to increase the income stream of their land.
In general, property taxes are too low and other taxes are too high in urban areas. California is the most extreme example of this with many property owners paying under 0.25% per year of the actual value of their property, and almost nobody paying more than 1.75%.
September 29th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Apparently no one lives in L.A., where very nearly the only option you have is to own a car, and because of permit parking in every neighborhood and miles of curb space taken by ridiculous, yawning driveways there is nowhere to park. Your options are to circle the block incessantly, or pay absorbent rates to usurious parking-lot crooks. It’s a toss-up which is more expensive. Not only do I think that every homeowner should, rather than use their garage for storage, have to maintain not one space off street, but three. Or maybe five. It seems to me that if you own a car, or might ever own a car, or know anyone who owns a car, or if anyone who owns a car might conceivably visit you, you should have to provide off-street parking. Your aesthetic be damned. Either that, or get rid of cars altogether. Unfortuanately, the same people who insist on permit parking but don’t want rules about where they park their own SUV, are always the ones who don’t want mass transit in their neighborhood. Just ask the Santa Monicans.
September 29th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Yes it is the New Urbanist Jeff Speck.
September 30th, 2008 at 6:17 am
poor Jefferson is an ass but he raises one valid point.
Permit parking in LA is always in the nice single family home neighborhoods and never in the dense apartment dweller regions.
In essence the wealthier are receiving a private benefit that is generally not available to their poorer neighbors.
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