Want More Housing - Let’s Talk About Parking
One way cities in California have been facilitating housing development, is through the elimination of expensive parking mandates. Cities across the country are repealing their parking minimums. Locally, these cities include Berkley, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose. A recent report by the City of Palo Alto finds that state laws that eliminate parking mandates could help housing, especially near University Avenue and California Avenue.
This isn’t to say parking isn’t provided with projects, it simply allows developers to provide the parking needed for their project type and location. Project developers know exactly how many spaces are needed to get a project financed and ultimately sold/rented. Cities shouldn’t require more than that.
Over-Parking Raises Housing Costs
A huge driver of construction costs (and ultimately higher housing prices and rents) is parking. Due to high land and construction costs on the peninsula, building parking spaces can cost from $35,000 to $100,000 spaces per parking stall. And many of these required spaces go unused thanks to “one size fits all” parking mandates. A luxury condo has a very different parking need than a one bedroom affordable unit near transit, which is part of the reason why AB 2097 was passed to prohibit cities from requiring any parking near high-quality transit.
Developers pass on these costs to residents. For example, rents increase by $1,700 per year when homes and parking are bundled together. According to the LA Times, a single parking space can add (a minimum) $35,000 of cost to a building and increase rent by 12.5% with two parking spots can increasing rent by 25%. A developer could make the same investment and build 20% to 33% more units with lower rents if parking mandates were not so high.
Let’s Hear it for Car-Free Living
It is also unfair to impose the cost of off-street parking on the many millions of U.S. households that have no car. This is about 8% of all households (10 million out of 124 million), according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Many zero-car households cannot afford one. Low-income households comprise 60% of zero-car households. Likewise, home renters are five times more likely than homeowners (17% versus 3%) to have no car. People in many other zero-car households cannot drive a car. Older adults are also less likely to drive.
Still other households choose not to drive. Many people avoid the need to drive by working from home, or by getting around with ride-hailing apps, mass transit, bicycle, or walking. It is getting easier to go car-free - so it is no surprise that the share of teens with a driver’s license fell from 64% in 1995 to 40% in 2021. Finally, another third of U.S. households (40 million out of 124 million) have only one car.
Still Plenty of Parking - We Promise
If we end costly parking mandates, there will still be plenty of parking for people who choose to drive.
The nine-county Bay Area already has 15 million parking spaces – enough to circle the globe twice – according to the Mineta Institute. Oversupply like this means that parking spots are often empty. For example, a study of parking at ten developments in southern California found peak-period utilization rates of just 56% and 72%.
Also, developers will continue to build new off-street parking, even when not required by zoning laws to do so. For example, when London repealed its parking minimums, developers continued to build more than half of the parking they had previously been building.
Environmental Benefits
The repeal of parking minimums isn’t just good for the production of abundant and equitably-priced housing. It is also good for the environment. Some people respond to an increase in parking cost with a decrease in driving, which means fewer pollutant emissions. Moreover, parking lots can amplify heat and flooding, so we should end mandates to over-produce them.
In his article, America is Addicted to Parking Lots, our friend Jeral Poskey contends that:
Creating prosperous, sustainable cities starts with realizing that accommodating and encouraging car dependency affects not only residents' pocketbooks but their environment and their quality of life. Turning that realization into action — developing better walkable, bikeable neighborhoods and increasing access to convenient transit options — could help end Americans' overreliance on cars and make life better for everyone.
The Growing Movement
A growing number of people are concerned about the ways that parking minimums can harm housing production and the environment. Thanks to Donald Shoup’s influential work, The High Cost of Free Parking, and Henry Grabbar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, we are all rethinking the usefulness of expensive parking mandates.
Moving FORWARD Together
We will keep an eye on proposed changes to the city’s residential parking mandates. While proposed zoning changes have reduced requirements slightly, more changes or even a full elimination of parking minimums would increase home production, ensure that people only have to pay for the parking they actually use, and contribute to environmental sustainability.
We are all for that!