The California APA @APACalifornia is once again opposing parking reform. They done this before, and it's shortsighted and disappointing. A thread.
By this point there’s basically a consensus that offstreet minimum parking requirements encourage driving, depress transit use, and obstruct infill housing. Their presence is antithetical to California’s climate, equity and affordability goals.
(For anyone curious about the evidence to this effect, I’ll put links at the end of the thread). The parking requirements are also total pseudoscience. They are an embarrassment for planning, and needlessly discredit smart hardworking planners who are forced to use them.
See here for instance:
shoupdogg.com/wp-content/upl…
shoupdogg.com/wp-content/upl…
Laura Friedman @laurafriedman43 has proposed a bill, AB 1401, that bans the use of parking requirements near transit stations. It’s a sensible bill. (Note: it doesn’t ban *parking*. It bans *parking requirements*. That’s a big difference).
@APAcalifornia won't endorse this bill. Why? Not because it likes parking requirements. It doesn’t bother to defend them. It’s because developers *also* don’t like parking requirements.
So the APA and cities believe—wrongly (see below)—that they can use parking requirements as bargaining chips to get developers to build affordable housing in their projects.
So @APACalifornia doesn’t dispute that parking requirements are harmful. It just says we should keep them bc sometimes they get us some affordable housing. This is a bad argument for a bunch of reasons.
Note that the parking requirements here just mask a different goal. They aren't there because cities need more parking, but because cities need some things they think some developers will give them in exchange for escaping the parking requirement. That’s pretextual zoning.
Pretextual zoning, like all pretextual rulemaking, is bad. Pretextual zoning makes zoning less transparent, and erodes people’s confidence in it. @APACalifornia should be working against, not for, pretextual zoning.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.111…
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.111…
The pretext *might* be worth it if we could traded parking reqs for LOTS of affordable housing. But we can’t. Most of our affordable housing is built by mission-driven nonprofits building in 100 percent affordable bldgs. Parking reqs unambiguously impede these projects.
Even when market rate developers build affordable units, they do it in exchange for more density, not less parking. Why that’s so is a little weedsy. Additional units can mean more revenues—a real incentive. Less parking can mean lower costs, but it also means lower prices.
(also our incentive programs sometimes make parking reductions less useful, for instance by giving big reductions in residential but not commercial).
Developers do ask for lower parking reqs, but often for the same reason they ask for additional height—so the additional density bonus units make them money rather than losing it.
Also, what we miss is that parking requirements make some projects just impossible to even propose. Small garden apartments, adaptive reuses of old buildings, and (importantly) private SRO hotels, which can play a huge role combatting homelessness.
San Diego had some success with SROs in the 1980s, until the city council killed them off by attaching parking reqs to them: latimes.com/archives/la-xp…
So: sometimes developer respond to these programs, and we get less parking along with some affordable housing. But lots of developers won’t take the proffer, for different reasons, so mostly we get a lot more parking and no affordable housing.
The big issue here is that there are *much better ways* to get affordable housing. We don’t need to pit multifamily infill housing against affordable housing. We have a shortage of both, and both shortages are harmful.
Those shortages, moreover, are CAUSED, in part, by parking requirements. So it’s really weird to say that we won’t get rid of the requirements unless the developer “does something in return.”
Parking requirements *hurt California.* They are a self-inflicted wound. We happen to use developers as the vehicle for inflicting the harm, but WE are the ones who benefit if they stop.
Suppose last April we passed a law saying that everyone had to gather once a week, without masks, in restaurants. The restaurants protest; COVID surges. But experts oppose repealing the law, unless the restaurants first contribute to a fund to buy ventilators.
That would've been dumb. Ventilators are important, but so is not spreading COVID.
But that’s the mess we're in with parking and housing. We have huge broadly-applied bad rules that create bad outcomes, that we want to protect bc they also get occasional and small amounts of good outcomes.
If @APAcalifornia really thinks California has a parking shortage, then it should stand up and oppose AB 1401. But if it’s actually worried about affordable housing (and it should be!) then it should transparently back new funding for affordable housing.
Trying to get affordable housing by making housing harder to build via parking policy doesn’t work, and suggests they don’t actually care much about affordability.
Okay that long, sorry. But here's some of the promised evidence. people.ucsc.edu/~jwest1/articl…
And then of course this, by @DonaldShoup amazon.com/High-Cost-Free…
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