This is an odd claim to make. Regulation has historically required that it be provided in most (American) markets, hence the ample supply. I'm not sure how we could possibly know what the market would do on its own over the long term.
Requiring excessive parking will artificially and needlessly raises prices, true. But I would also be at least somewhat concerned that without sufficient regulation short term thinking on the part of builders might result in less parking than would be generally desirable.
I'm not at all convinced that urban planning should be done by market forces alone.
There is no "minimum air conditioning" requirement where I live, but pretty much every building I walk into has it. My apartment, like most apartments I've seen, also has it.
Turns out that people don't need the government to tell them what they want. People like AC, so most buildings have AC. Not particularly remarkable, but most apartments in my area also come with refrigerators, stoves, ovens, sinks, showers, and dishwashers, all sans-minimum-appliance requirement.
To me, a minimum parking requirement seems as weirdly dystopian as requiring ACs or dishwashers. Most people like those things, so most buildings will have them, but it shouldn't be illegal to decide you don't need an AC or dishwasher.
For example, in the Northeast, heaters have been required for all residential construction for many decades. Residences without heaters are legally considered not habitable. In most of the Southwest like Arizona and Nevada, new residential construction must have ACs (in CA, it's not a universal requirement and window units meet the requirement).
Few residential apartments come with washers. Generally, those would be apartments classified as "luxury" or better (where luxury is a rental term of art referring to amenities, not the actual quality of the building...)
I of course have no objection that buildings must be habitable. A building with dirty water, structural issues, or lacking heat in a cold place is obviously not serving any market segment.
Parking seems to me be fundamentally different than those issues though. I know many people that happily live without a car in LA. Why should it be illegal for developers to cater to them?
Sure we can. Those regulations are not always binding. Buildings are built with parking capacity in excess of minimums all the time.
>Requiring excessive parking will artificially and needlessly raises prices, true. But I would also be at least somewhat concerned that without sufficient regulation short term thinking on the part of builders might result in less parking than would be generally desirable.
Why? What's the market failure? For that matter, why is there a "general desire" for the quantity of at-home parking I individually consume?
>I'm not at all convinced that urban planning should be done by market forces alone.
That's a strawman — removing parking requirements is a far cry from "market forces alone" doing urban planning. (It is, however, a great example of how non-market forces can create worse, environmentally inefficient, undesirable outcomes by submitting what should be private choices to mob rule.)
There is no evidence that this is the case though. The vast majority of new construction has always been targeted towards the top of the market, which in the case of Los Angeles means a need for parking spaces.
The only clear case where the market would act differently would be in the case of commercial parking requirements, where a one sized fits all approach as exists today doesn't work as each neighborhood in LA drives a different amount.
Changes will more likely happen at the margin. I have no doubt that an apartment building with 1 space per 1br apartment instead of 1.5 would still be marketable at the top end.
If I am a strawberry seller and my cost to buy strawberries goes down, I can pass those savings onto the consumer or not. But my competitors will all be making the same choice, so absent collusion, if I don't lower my prices, but my competitors do, then obviously they'll take my business.
In other words, profit margins are determined by how competitive a market is, not the cost of production.
If this change goes through, I imagine that profit margins for LA developers will remain similar to whatever they are now.
My old unit in the DC area had something like $80,000 in parking attached to it. That could have been ground floor units or retail instead. The units would have been cheaper had the parking minimums not been there. In bigger buildings that put parking underground, those units can be very expensive to build.
If you live in a new development you can't get a permit.
I have been in a queue at the local council offices behind a guy who had bought a 500K+ flat without knowing he could not park his car within 2+ miles of it.
Fun.
I don't live there any more.
No, because removing parking minimums is not the same as removing parking.
>parking podiums eat up the most pedestrian-friendly ground floor square footage, but i can sympathize with people wanting parking in their building.
In-building parking is a widely available amenity amply provided by the market. Regulatory parking requirements don't change that, they just make it illegal to not want parking.