Parking Maximums

Developers should pay more to build parking

July 12, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Mexico City charges fees for excess parking supply and your city should too.

More car parking in our cities is an invitation for more cars and the congestion, pollution, and sprawl that those cars bring with them are a cost borne by everyone (whether they drive or not), particularly the poor and disenfranchised.

Each of these stalls is a threat to our environment.

Despite this reality, airport operators, development agencies, and many developers want to build large amounts of new structured parking, in the face of climate, housing, and traffic emergencies.

Reforms to parking requirements are becoming more common, but too often these reforms are structured as if building less parking is a bad thing for the neighborhood or city center. Developers who build little-to-no parking are required to provide bus passes, permanently affordable housing, additional street trees, or other supposed mitigations. Those are all critical things to provide, but not building parking, alone, makes housing cheaper and more abundant, fights climate change, and discourages driving to work.

When Mexico City eliminated minimum parking requirements citywide in 2017, they took things one step further and imposed a parking impact fee on developers who build lots of new parking. The city has relatively generous parking maximums (about 3 stalls per housing unit) but if a developer builds more than 1 stall per unit, they have to pay a fee:

For 50-75% of the maximum parking allowance, a developer pays approximately $4,000 per stall.
For 75-100% of the allowance, the fee is about $8,000 per stall.
Residential-only developments are allowed to build above the maximum, for an additional $12,000 per stall fee.

These fees are used to improve public transit in the city, but other good uses would be to fund public affordable housing or plant additional trees at developments where no parking is built.

Parking impact fees would be a smart way to discourage excess parking without restricting the freedom of developers, airports, and agencies that insist on building large amounts.

Restricting new parking wont ruin our cities

April 24, 2019 By Tony Jordan 2 Comments

Parking is bad for our communities and it’s time we stop building new parking structures. Cities (and preferably regions) can accomplish this by parking maximums, impact fees, or other mechanisms, but, given our precarious ecological crisis, it’s clear we need to dramatically curb car culture.

But would a city acting alone to restrict new parking supply simply push new development to the suburbs and make things even worse?

Would parking maximums push development out of cities?

Many argue that restrictive maximums would require less parking than the market demanded and push development to less regulated regions. But what is market demand? Banks and developers predict parking demand based on existing projects with cheap or free bundled on-site parking surrounded by cheap, or free, on-street parking. San Francisco has very, very low parking entitlements in the Transit Center District, developers and investors still want to build there.

One possibility overlooked by these critics is the development of secondary markets for parking. Most American cities have vast amounts of existing structured parking, but much of it is underutilized because it’s reserved for particular land uses or is restricted for private access. Parking maximums should be matched with rules allowing (or requiring) shared use of existing parking. I suspect there is ample existing supply in most cities to support new development for a long time.

Would impact fees increase the cost of housing?

Parking has a lot of external costs and those costs should be borne by the people who build and use parking. Impact fees for new parking could price those externalities into, already expensive, parking costs. Would those fees just discourage new housing development or make housing more expensive? Similar concerns underlie criticism of rent controls, mandatory inclusionary housing, and other well-meaning fees.

One big difference between these fees, however, is that the parking impact fees are easily avoidable by not building parking, which makes the actual development costs much cheaper! Remember, these are REAL COSTS borne by society for every parking space, not charging for them doesn’t mean the costs go away, it just makes everyone else pay for the convenience of a few.

In new developments in Portland, many apartments are built with little to no parking (unless the city requires it) but high-end condos and office space have lots of new parking. Would impact fees discourage this high-end development (and should we care)? If not , impact fees on these projects, could subsidize housing costs and improve transit.

Let’s keep the conversation going

This is a contentious topic and clearly there are a lot of concerns about restricting new parking, but it’s a conversation we need to have. Join me in the comments, on facebook, and on twitter and we’ll figure it out!

It’s time to stop building more parking

April 23, 2019 By Tony Jordan 5 Comments

There is a lot of development that happens in the USA, nearly a trillion dollars were spent in 2018 on new private construction and, unfortunately, we can assume most of that development adds more parking supply to our communities.

I was on a panel at the APA National Conference last week debating parking maximums with a few great folks who were representing the “developer perspective.” The argument against restricting new parking development is that if an area doesn’t have good transit or density, then disallowing new parking supply will kill the project.

Maybe that’s good.

Every new structured parking space is a 30 year commitment to undermine climate action goals.

We’ve got a dozen years to turn the tide on climate change. This isn’t a drill. Every new structured parking space is a 30 year commitment to undermine climate action goals. The cost of parking is much higher than the $30-50,000 a stall it might cost to construct and maintain.

The bank, or the NIMBYs, or the local transportation bureaucracy will say: “This part of town doesn’t have sufficient transit to support a building with no parking.” But if we build enough parking to support more people in a transit-desert, we are guaranteeing the transit will never be sufficient.

If the project is a new development in on a multi-acre suburban greenfield, it’s an even bigger problem. “This isn’t the city,” they will say, “this project won’t get built unless we build hundreds of parking spaces.” It’s probably better for everyone if it isn’t built, except for the investors who were hoping to squeeze a few more percentage points of return out of car culture.

I support market rate development and I think markets are a good way to gauge parking demand, but I don’t think the cost of climate change is priced into these decisions. If a site is too risky to develop because there’s no way to get there without driving, then don’t develop it. Most cities have plenty of (often wealthy) neighborhoods with good transit access to upzone, let’s do that instead.

I’m told that I’ll never win over enough people by being so radical and I’m not so sure, I think there’s not enough people telling the truth. In either event, I think I’d rather lose after trying to win than lose by default through bad compromise.

Upcoming: National Planning Conference 2019

April 10, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Photo of San Francisco Skyline — NPC 2019 is in San Francisco. Let’s meet up and talk about parking!

In a few days I’m heading to San Francisco for the National Planning Conference. I was on a panel a few years ago for the Oregon/Washington Joint Planning Conference, but this is my first time attending the American Planning Association’s annual event.

On Sunday I will on a panel for an interactive session titled Parking Maximums: Development Barriers and Opportunities. I’ll be joined by fellow parking reformers Lindsay Bayley and Jane Wilberding, who developed the great Better Parking 101 handout. We’ll have a friendly debate about parking maximums with Ranadip Bose and Malek Abdulsamad, who will bring a developer/finance perspective to the conversation.

Professor Donald Shoup is included on two sessions Saturday that I definitely plan to check out: Zoning Reforms to Boost ADU Development and a panel on Parking and the City.

There are several other parking sessions, including: From Parking Lots to Places, A Decade of Demand Responsive Parking, and Valuing and Managing the Public Right-of-Way.

I’ll be taking notes and dispatching a few Parking Minutes from the conference. If you’re attending and would like to meet up to talk about parking reform (or whatever), please get in touch!