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!
Any argument that depends on “hey, people are still building stuff in San Francisco” is not a very strong argument. Hopefully we can all agree that housing construction there is massively inadequate.
Fees and costs on new housing are a dimmer, not a switch. They don’t block all housing. They just reduce the number of viable projects, and every tenant and first-time homebuyer ends up paying for that shortage.
I’m not claiming that the low parking allowances in central SF are a primary obstacle to building more stuff there. But parking maximums would start to matter more in places that aren’t one of the most walkable, transit-rich areas in the country.
To your questions, impact fees do add to housing costs, both for the people in the associated units and for everyone else in the housing market. And, yes, we should care if high-end condos don’t get built and rich people end up either (a) buying their way into poorer people’s homes instead or (b) buying exurban mansions instead. The best place to put a rich household is in the sky. (Though ideally in a mixed-income building and/or block.)
That said, a per-parking-space impact fee is maybe the least bad impact fee. If cities with transportation impact fees were to shift from per-unit to per-parking-space, that might do a lot of good. If cities considering transportation impact fees were to create a new per-parking-space fee rather than a per-unit fee, that’d at least be better than the alternative.
All this stuff would be way way better if executed on a regional or statewide basis than a citywide basis, because of the risk of pushing growth away from the city cores where more people are needed needed, both for long-term energy savings and short-term political change.
Re: SF, that’s a fair point and I knew it was shaky when I wrote it, BUT there are a lot of other reasons SF doesn’t build housing from Prop 13 to NIMBY power. One would assume that all things being equal (property tax wise), they probably could have sold a Salesforce tower full of condos if the city would let them build it.