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U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

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Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#161

Post by autoexec »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #156
autoexec wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, at least not for most people anyway. People need cars to get to where they need to go. When the developer of an apartment complex has to provide parking for its residents everyone has a place to put the cars they need. When those developers don't have to provide parking space anymore, people will still need cars, but will now have no place to put them at night. This will drive up the price of apartment comp…

> This will drive up the price of apartment complexes that provide parking, pricing many people out, while doing nothing to eliminate the need for their cars There is zero evidence for this. There is evidence for parking minimums raising housing prices. I’m curious about the overlap between off-street parking minimum requirement advocates and anti-development NIMBYs who don’t believe in supply and demand.

> There is zero evidence for this.

When most people need something, and there is suddenly a much smaller supply of that thing, prices for the now scarce but still needed thing tend to increase. That's basically self-evident.

If you have evidence that shows otherwise please feel free to provide it. I suspect that if examples showing otherwise exist at all they won't be remotely representative of the situation these cities will face.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#162

Post by briffle »

TexanFeller wrote: post #12

A big problem with this is the incredibly long payoff time. You make parking go from miserable to insufferable, but it will take a decade minimum for good public transit and making popular areas bikeable/walkable. Sad experience with government projects tells I’m being generous on the timescale. If you make the infrastructure problems in Austin more painful for a decade there will be a migration away and we might hav…

Nothing about this makes it a 'car free area'. They are saying no more arbitrary minimums. Nobody is saying parking is not allowed. You better believe businesses will still want parking for their customers. And a new apartment complex/condo is still going to have them to attract tennants.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#163

Post by tuna74 »

autoexec wrote: post #89
pc86 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. Yes. If you own a limited resource it's your right to make money from that. I know we like to pretend people making money from things they own is somehow evil but it's how all of civilization has been built and is an objectively good thing. > If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200…

> No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability. That sucks for the people who are denied the ability to park there because they can't afford it though. Telling people that they need to walk miles to get to a doctor or a grocery store and that only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city doesn't seem like a good idea to me…

Yeah it sucks that you might have to pay for parking to do free activities like shopping or visiting medical services.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#164

Post by huntertwo »

oh_sigh wrote: post #149
chimeracoder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) mea…

Why is 3 parking spaces per car inherently unsustainable?

If you think about it, three parking spaces take up way less space than 1 housing unit in LA.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#165

Post by megaman821 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #35

> "Austin has developed as a low density city without adequate mass transportation system," said resident Malcolm Yeatts. "Austin citizens cannot give up their cars. Eliminating adequate parking for residents will only increase the flight of the middle class and businesses to the suburbs." I think this is likely to happen. Also, as a potential customer, when I look at a business, if I see that the parking is going to…

They could make things better rapidly by have a downtown bus loop with dedicated lanes and a park-and-ride to the north and south of downtown. They don't have to solve the whole city at once just incremental improvements every year.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#166

Post by hughesjj »

kilotaras wrote: post #86
autoexec wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because before developers were required to ensure that when they built something adding parking spaces to handle the demand they were introducing to an area was their responsibility. Now developers can (and will) push that externality onto the public at zero cost to them. The city has a very limited amount of parking spaces it can provide at any cost which means that removing that requirement will suddenly make parki…

But that's not what artificially inducing means. London for example have buildings which are prohibited of having parking (or getting street permit). Providing an option not pay for parking space when buying an apartment is not that.

IDK, pure speculation, but maybe 'autoexec' isn't arguing in good faith here and may have a conflict of interest

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#167

Post by empyrrhicist »

oh_sigh wrote: post #149
chimeracoder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) mea…

Why is 3 parking spaces per car inherently unsustainable?

https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/outdoor-living/pave-a-parki...

And that doesn't cover opportunity cost or the knock-on effects of market distortion, or the exponentially higher costs of e.g. parking garages.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#168

Post by dragonwriter »

autoexec wrote: post #134
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city There parking minimums drive up housing costs. They’re why that person has to drive longer to get to that place. Perhaps why they need to make a car payment at all.

Not true, at least not for most people anyway. People need cars to get to where they need to go. When the developer of an apartment complex has to provide parking for its residents everyone has a place to put the cars they need. When those developers don't have to provide parking space anymore, people will still need cars, but will now have no place to put them at night. This will drive up the price of apartment comp…

> When those developers don't have to providing parking space anymore, people will still need cars but now have no place to put them at night.

If they have no place to put them, they won't have them, and if they don't have them, then either (1) they won't live there at all, or (2) they don't actually need them.

> This is the kind of move that should be done selectively

No, having parking requirements should be done selectively, if at all. If there is sufficient market demand, the requirements will be unnecessary to get developers to include them, if not, then the requirements are most often a harmful constraint that limits housing supply.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#169

Post by ponector »

adventured wrote: post #147
pramsey wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, good read and wonderful on the vicious cycle that led to the downtowns of most US cities looking like WWII bombed out zones by 1975.

That's not the cause at all. Extreme minority poverty and the potent bifurcation of incomes, education and wealth in the US is the cause. Parking won't fix any of that realistically. You can push minority poverty to the suburbs, which for example is what France does, however it doesn't solve anything about the bombed out look, it merely redistributes the problem to somewhere else. You can gentrify the cities and push…

Root cause it's poverty, it is zoning laws and taxes for real estate.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#170

Post by tstrimple »

tellsomething wrote: post #96
ta_1138 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course infrastructure is subsidizing those who use it. Even more so when it comes to infrastructure that takes a lot of space, as every square foot of surface dedicated to one thing cannot be dedicated to another. And infrastructure induces demand by lowering some prices relative to others. In an extreme case, imagine that your typical, currently congested highway gained another 6 lanes in each direction, and we r…

> One can like one tradeoff more than the other, but the fact that infrastructure means subsidy, and that urbanism choices are picking some people's interests over others is just factual. You do have a point. But, do you think cities prosper in spite of this subsidy? It seems like an investment that pays off in second error effects. I mean, why aren't cities without infrastructure growing like mad? Because it's not p…

The investment only pays off in areas with the tax base to recoup the upfront cost. Largely this isn't the suburbs or rural areas and only some parts of urban environments. Massive suburbs are built without the ability to maintain their infrastructure in the future based off of the taxes of its residents. There is an interesting image in this article (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...) which shows the areas of a city which earn a ROI and those which are just expenses. The poorer and denser parts of the cities are the only ones which pay for themselves (and thus everyone else).

> There are some remarkable things to note right off the top. When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city's infrastructure—an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation—it came to $32 billion. When we added up the entire tax base of the city, all of the private wealth sustained by that infrastructure, it came to just $16 billion. This is fatal.

> It's obvious to me why this is fatal, but for those of you for whom it is less clear, let me elaborate.

> The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure (more is paid to the schools and regional government). A fraction of that $150—it varies by year—is spent on actual pavement.

> To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year. That assumes no new roads are built and existing roadways are not widened or substantively improved. That is $3,300 in additional local taxes just to tread water.

> That does not include underground utilities (sewer and water) or major facilities such as treatment plants, water towers and public buildings. Using ratios we’ve experienced from other communities, it is likely that the total infrastructure revenue gap for that median home is closer to $8,000 per year.

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