Paying Off Incumbents
As Atrios observed yesterday:
Even within dense cities, such as mine, residents push for increased parking requirements for new developments. In isolation, perhaps their demands make sense (though I think often they are self-defeating), but across numerous projects they make the city less pedestrian friendly, ultimately increasing the amount of traffic.
You see this go round and round all the time. In DC, people are afraid that if new developments are allowed that don’t contain vast parking structures, that everyone will own cars anyway and compete with them for underpriced (and therefore scarce) street parking. You can turn around and try to say that the correct solution to this is to stop underpricing street parking, but ultimately people would rather keep their cheap existing parking. I think the solution is to just accept the fact that the interests of people who don’t live in the city but could if more development were allowed are by nature going to be underrepresented in the political process. Then instead of trying to come up with a solution that’s both fair and broadly acceptable, we could just directly buy off the incumbents.
For example, you could drop mandated parking minimums and just say that anyone who applies for a new residential parking permit will need to pay some fee that’s much higher than the fee that applies to anyone who already has an RPP. And you can mandate that the excess revenue generated by the higher RPP fees be used, in the first interest, to finance reductions in RPP fees for incumbent permit holders. You could even make the incumbent RPPs transferable (but one-time only) so that incumbents could directly profit by selling their right to park to a newcomer.
None of that makes much sense on the policy merits. But it ought to be a policy that incumbent permit holders can embrace, and it’s also in the interests of incumbent residents who don’t drive, and it’s better policy than the mandate-ridden status quo. Best of all, over time the silly payoffs will phase out and we’ll be at a new equilibrium with more residents, fewer cars per resident, and less parking scarcity (presumably more cars and more parking overall since even without mandates many developers will want to build parking). Sometimes in the policy world it makes sense to just squarely face the interest group pressures and buy them off rather than trying to find some kind of halfway compromise between doing the right thing and doing nothing.
18 Responses to “Paying Off Incumbents”
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September 19th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Bravo. Of course, in most dense cities there are more RPPs than parking spaces in the RPP zone.
You might find it interesting to think about this on analogy to agricultural water rights. In Australia’s declining Murray-Darling river system, for example, states have sold permits to use far more water than there typically is in the river. The permits are a right to a share of a very unreliable product, much like on-street residential parking.
The only solution that farming interests seem to be able to stomach is for the government to buy back the permits, paying farmers to stop drawing water.
What you propose for RPPs sounds like it’s heading down the same philosophical track, if stopping one station earlier.
Is the government always the buyer of last resort for newly worthless merchandise? It sounds like the bank bailout on a more intimate scale.
September 19th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
http://tinyurl.com/ma2log
Developer in downtown Toronto proposes a 42-storey condo tower with no parking.
September 19th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Stiglitz wrote about this general problem where the best solution is simply to pay off a group that was getting rents from an inefficient regulation. He concludes that the reason this doesn’t happen is that everyone will realize that we’re unjustly paying off some group and the payment will quickly disappear. The government could promise that they will not remove the subsidy, but they have no way to credibly commit to that.
September 19th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I agree. Similarly, it would be much more efficient to just pay all the owners of the insurance companies a few billion dollars to stop lobbying against good policy, then to institute the bad policies they are lobbying for as a cost of reform. It’s too bad there aren’t more politically permissible ways of converting structural political power into one-time cash payments of equal worth for relieving that power.
September 19th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Imagine that, people who don’t live in an area have less political clout than people who do. Matt really does hate Democracy, doesn’t he? “Incumbent Residents”? Really? There’s a word for that already: Citizens.
Nobody can trust that these benefits would ever actually be kept in place.
September 19th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
All car pay the same tax per gallon but their actual congestion is correlated by metropolitan area. Correlations are mixed. Sort of the same problem one gets with universal health care.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Sounds like the California property tax system. New owners pay on the huge prices they paid while old owners pay much less.
It’s worked great!
September 19th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Adrian@2 beat me to the punch. The developer here has been absolved of the normal parking mandate. Instead, they are building 350 bicycle parking spots, and there will be 9 car spots for shared vehicles.
September 19th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Imagine that, people who don’t live in an area have less political clout than people who do. Matt really does hate Democracy, doesn’t he? “Incumbent Residents”? Really? There’s a word for that already: Citizens.
soullite, one of the consequences is that residents actively oppose the sort of development that they themselves live in.
September 19th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
I had an idea about buying out incumbents.
Instead of everyone in a single-family zoning neighborhood having the right to construct one home an a minimum-sized lot, you give them the right to build 1-1/6 housing units. Then, you allow them to sell the rights to their fraction of a housing unit. One property owner builds the fractional rights of six of his neighbors, and he can expand his house into a two-family.
This also has the benefit of incorporating some rental housing (and economic diversity) into a single-family, owner-occupied area, but not enough to scare the locals. Who are counting their money, after having sold their fractional development rights.
The primary motivators of NIMBYism are fear and greed. I think this idea gets at them both.
September 20th, 2009 at 1:21 am
The dynamic Atrios and Matt are describing is a form of NIMBYism. Therefore, there is a potential solution perfectly consistent with democratic principles, which is to locate the decision-making authority at a high enough level such that the relevant NIMBYism loses its force. In most cases, I bet making these decisions on a metro-wide basis would be more than adequate.
Of course that is unlikely to happen in many cases, so buying off the NIMBYists may be the best we can do (if even that is possible).
September 20th, 2009 at 8:32 am
As someone who lives in DC (zone 6 parking), I have always wondered whether you could simply limit each housing unit to one car. IOW, every household would be able to register one car and one car only in DC and get the RPP for that car only.
Of course, this would adversely affect group houses but since a lot of the young people in those living situations either have no car or use a zip car (shared system) it might be okay.
It would certainly prevent the kind of thing I see in my v. crowded hill neighborhood: families that run four cars for 2 drivers and park all four on the street (we have few garages in my area).
It might also have the added benefit of forcing people to become familiar with the public transit options in their neighborhood. I find people who move into the city having always lived in suburban areas, avoid public transit bc. they are unfamiliar with it. Instead, they continue to live as though they were in a suburban area where they need to drive everywhere and then they complain about driving in the city.
What are the potential problems with this idea?
September 20th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
One car per house? A wonderful totalitarian solution (how about one child per family?), but not very enforceable. (”No officer, title to this second car is in my sister’s name and it’s registered at her address.”) And who’s going to pay for the extra “car police” needed?
This is not NIMBY. On-street parking is a form of a “commons” and the provision of new housing without accommodating its parking demand is an example of “The Tragedy of the Commons.” And putting a 24/7 parking meters on the street is asking current residents to subsidize new development — not a fair request.
The answer for the Tragedy of the Commons is to interalize the externalities. Parking for new development can be taken care of without destroying the “pedestrian friendly” space by lots of tricks. Underground parking, alley-loaded parking, space saver parking using elevators (all the rage in Europe), separately or in combination.
September 20th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
This is not NIMBY.
Sure it is. Going to a less car-centric development model would be good for the metro as a whole (see more below), but what residents in any given neighborhood would like is to preserve their current parking options and relegate all that less car-centric development to someone else’s neighborhood.
On-street parking is a form of a “commons” and the provision of new housing without accommodating its parking demand is an example of “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
But you are assuming car-centric development is the best use of the commons. In fact once you look at the entire commons on a metro-wide basis, and include in your definition of the commons environmental issues, road congestion, public health, long-term development issues, and so on, it is actually a poor use of the commons. So again, the incumbents insisting on preserving the car-centric model in their particular neighborhood is a form of NIMBYism, because if every neighborhood insists on preserving this model it ends up using the commons poorly.
September 20th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
If a new housing developer does not provide sufficient on-site parking for its residents, it is imposing a cost on the existing residents — that cost being the cars of the new residents taking up more and more of the existing “commons” of on-street parking.
Why should existing residents be required to pay that cost? Or be insulted as NIMBY-ites for simply asking for new housing developers to pay their own costs rather than imposing them on existing residents?
What is “car-centric” about a local government requiring a new housing developer to supply enough on-site parking to satisfy the known demand of its future residents? I am only assuming that new development should pay its own costs, whether it be parking, parks, sewers or libraries. Why do others assume new development should not have to reduce burdens it places on the system?
NIMBY is classically about existing residents objecting to other uses, not about objections to lowered development standards. Existing residents don’t object to new housing per se — they will support quality new housing if for no other reason than that raises their own property values (by raising neighborhood comps).
September 20th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Dr. Urban, you are talking about new development. I am talking about a solution for a neighborhood that was built entirely at the end of the 19th century. There is no space to build in parking: the housing is extant and the city is more than walkable with pretty darn good public transit infrastructure.
And the city already limits the parking to RPP zoned parking with only a limited number of ‘guest’ parking placards available per household. This limit is monitored by computer (you have to go to the nearby, within walking distance, police station to get the placard where it is recorded by the cop who issues it and charged against your address). The parking police already regulate this and regularly ticket violators.
It is really quite easy to allow registration of only one car per housing unit: obv. you have never registered a car before. While you are right that there will be liars who cheat the system, this has always struck me as a silly arguement against anything. Most people play by the rules.
And I wasn’t talking about any other type of neighborhood: I was only talking about a particular type of extant urban high density area with on-street parking only. It is certainly not NIMBYism; no one in my neighborhood (Capitol Hill) is going to park their car at night in some other neighborhood and vice versa. And there is no land available in my ‘hood for development other than the occasional row house squeezed into an empty lot.
This is just a random idea that has been tossed around by neighbors for years and we would love to get some serious input on what the problems with this might be as a solution to inner city congested parking.
September 20th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Wow, it takes a special kind of psychotic to equate “number of cars per household” to “number of children a family has.”
September 20th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Dr. Urban,
There is not a fixed number of cars, or fixed amount of car use, per future resident.
So now consider an incumbent resident in one neighborhood in a growing city. Suppose in the other neighborhoods of the city there weren’t new parking units added as new residential units were added. The result would be that the incumbent resident would get the benefit of growth in the city with proportionally fewer new cars being added to congest the city streets, less pollution, less emergency services being used, and on and on.
OK, now suppose the incumbent resident is called upon to allow their own neighborhood to add residential units without new parking units. No way! It was fine for other neighborhoods to do that, but now this particular incumbent resident will have a harder time parking their own car.
That is why it is really a NIMBY problem. Non-car-centric development in the rest of the city would be good for our hypothetical incumbent resident, but they just don’t want it happening in their own neighborhood.