1. No universal parking minimums. Developers choose how much parking the market requires.
2. Parking Maximums in Transit Oriented Communities.
3. All new parking garages must be built with a flat floor and a high enough ceiling to allow future conversion into office, studio, or living space.
4. 20% of parking spaces must include EV charging, with the rest install ready.
5. Garages must include an equivalent number of bicycle/micro-mobility parking spaces.
I would say suggestions 2-5 get progressively worse, but suggestion 1 is really good and backed up by the data presented.
It is much more cost effective and environmentally friendly to tear down parking garages and replace them with new construction.
For 1 - sure yea, I sorta doubt developers are going to voluntarily go below 1 space/unit in any sort of world because the value of the property takes a steep dive - but removing any commercial unit parking requirements or higher requirements for larger residential units makes sense. I think 2 is great - assuming exceptions are made to support park & ride demand. 4... Eh, EV is going to need to solve this through market forces so I think we can entirely ignore this (though I would love to see a lot more EVs I think this is point is entirely tangential to the main discussion) Lastly for 5 - nope. Every building ever has managed to sort this out naturally without regulation... leave this up to the market.
LA desperately needs for transit extensions.
The first application to build this building (replacing a small family home on a relatively large plot) was rejected for having too few parking spaces. Policy at the time assumed housing needs space for cars, if you don't build space for cars they litter the streets so each home must have 1 space or more for larger homes.
But the last application (ie the one they actually built) was only accepted after reducing the number of spaces, because by then policy had changed to dissuade people from owning more cars. They'll park them on the street anyway (and they do) so giving them more spaces just encourages owning even more cars in a congested city.
Here in DC, we have "bike lockers" at the Metro transit stations so you can park your bike there and take the train into the city. However, these lockers aren't cheap, and there aren't many of them, and they're completely enclosed so they take up a fair amount of space. By contrast, in Germany you'll find many hundreds of bikes just lined up and parked outside the S-bahn station, without people having to pay a hefty rental fee.
That´s everywhere. I was told that in Austria the only major petty theft is bike theft (in one of the most secure countries in the world).
I don´t even need to mention how prevalent it is in my country Uruguay (which tries to encourage bike use).
In this case, if the government authorises the construction of more than 300 parking spaces, unacceptable congestion will result.
I do think that 1 would need to be tempered with some handicap minimum though.
Where I currently live developers are required by law to build. Certain percentage of square meters of social housing for every square meter of higher class housing they build. When my house got build they had to build social housing right next to it.
If I understood it correctly, the city ties this to the building permits. So if you wanna build new stuff you need to show that your plans include these social and affordable flats as well.
A city should in my opinion regulate to maximize the happieness of it’s inhabitants and not it’s developers (to some degree these two overlap anyways).
Certainly you could also try to change things via the market, but unless your city has a lack of developers why should you?
What ends up happening is that developers need to raise the rents on the non-subsidized units, because they're the ones that subsidize the subsidized ones. Which creates a constant upward pressure on housing prices that ends up squeezing everybody.
I'm not sure what the solution is, and I'm no economist, but it seems plausible. Looking at it from a 3,000 meter perspective, I would assume that, however well-intentioned San Francisco's housing policies were, we should probably expect that emulating them will yield the same outcomes that San Francisco is currently experiencing.
That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either. I would also suspect that emulating Detroit would also tend to lead to the sorts of outcomes that Detroit is currently experiencing.
This isn't something we do, it's something that falls out of a free real estate market. Money either finds itself and accumulates, making prices soar, or it flees the whole area throwing prices through the floor.
There is no magical world where the forces of supply and demand just happen to create income-diverse neighborhoods. We have to force that to happen if we want it.
Ultimately this, like every other problem resulting from income inequality, must be resolved by fixing the inequality, not by forcing people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.
The current separation of rich white and poor black/brown absolutely did not and does not fall out of a free market without consistent, long term, and deliberate racial action. Frankly, this is completely ignored by most neoliberal treatments of the housing issue.
Sustainable affordability is achieved at the balance of supply and demand.
Supply can only be increased by building upward and outward: increase density near jobs, and invest in effective regional public transportation to mitigate "Manhattanization" (extreme density) or "Los Angeleization" (car commuting hell).
Demand grows from increased economic prospects, so can be managed with progressive taxes (ideally reinvested in transit/education/job training that equalize economic opportunities).
Subsidized housing makes sense as an interim solution, a buffer as the market adapts, but those subsidies are ultimately unsustainable (requiring prescient central planning).
Was a few years a go since I head to deal with this. However I want to emphasize the positive effects this kind of mixed living has on the social climate. The most mixed up city I ever lived in was Vienna (also due to their munipicial flats called “Gemeindebauwohnung”) and it really creates a better climate. People seem to be less afraid of each other and more in contact across culture and class barriers, it is harder to be in a bubble.
A negative example in Europe would be Paris — there you have strong segregation between different parts of the society. I have met Parisienne art students who never have been out of the city center and have no idea how it is there (except for what they heard about it).
Ironically, this is the one outcome that is bad for both the city and the developer. The developer goes bankrupt, so obviously they and the bank don't like it. The city usually has a problem collecting tax revenue from bankrupt developers, and during the transition period between when the developer goes bankrupt and when another landlord buys the property, they face problems with crime and blight. It's good for enterprising bottom-feeders and for the city's poor, but neither one of them get a seat at the table. So here's a case where the incentives are directly aligned to let the people who make the decisions profit at the expense of the people who don't make the decisions.
Putting rich and poor people together maximize happiness?
[1]: https://www.sightline.org/2016/11/29/inclusionary-zoning-the...
In my book these requirements work quite well, the developer I talked to also didn’t complain because there are some tax benefits so he has no incentive to make the flats more expensive.
If California got rid of prop 13 and allowed by-right zoning, market forces absolutely would build what we want.
https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...
> Here’s the doozy: Houston mandates off-street parking for just about every form of development. This is probably the number one regulation holding back the city’s rapid densification and a major reason that car-dependence remains the norm. By requiring developers to build either parking deserts and garages, this policy encourages developers to bypass exciting infill and downtown opportunities in favor of developing in the suburbs where land is cheap.
I mean...there already are private shuttles and buses throughout LA. Tour buses are a tourist staple and I can't imagine there's much regulation there. I can only assume the particular bus you're talking about broke some law that I most likely don't mind is in place.
They can do transfers to other shuttles or other public transit on fixed routes to optimize the routes.
The govt would never come up with rideshare type algorithms.
Maybe just an exception to the rule, but still worth pointing out.
You go the far distance to a hub which has lots of parking space and switch to subway, tram, bus or foot traffic, or bikes, or the hip electric scooter. And disadvantaged or disabled people get better accessibility. Pity it is hard to retrofit into misdesigned cities.
See EU and how Uber is not making millions here. And taxis are relatively expensive.
Also check South Korea and how relatively cheap normal unsubsidized taxis essentially prevented Uber from getting a foothold...
It does not compete with owned cars at all.
Zoning isn't a cure-all. Housing is getting pretty expensive in Houston, one of the only large US cities with lax-to-non-existent zoning laws (and also high property taxes). Also, I think most people want some restrictions on what can be built where. I don't think many parents want strip clubs built next to preschools, and I don't think many people want a cement factory to be built across the street from a public park.
I also don't think many people want the zoning laws we have either. They just want to see their land value increase as fast as possible, but that's not really sustainable either.
I thought we might reach a tipping point as we reach a majority renter population. But Europe has been a majority renter society for a long time, and I would argue Europe's housing (to buy) is more unaffordable than US housing. Strangely, the price to earning on real estate makes 0 sense in Europe (even with respect to interest rates), and renting is somehow much more affordable in Europe (even though buying isn't).
There is always an X to be fixed first, and housing is never built.
> From 2010 to 2015, San Mateo County added 72,800 jobs but only 3,844 homes: that's 19 jobs for every home
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-pe...
That's low enough that, as far as the market is concerned, it's effectively stopped.
BTW I am a non car driver here
When these suggestions are made HN seems to forget people still need to live the time between when this pain is enforced and if/when a solution arises.
Are you 100% sure that street parking is the only difference between these two situations?
And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world"
Yes, you are. You said:
> "Third world" traffic jams are what you get when you have enough population density.
then proceeded to throw out NYC as a non-"third world" example.
> He/She could as well make points about better infrastructure instead of disparaging places as "third world" countries. The notion of bucketing countries is derogatory, and does not add to the argument.
> And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world"
Yes, it could have, and the use of "third world" as shorthand for "lacking proper transportation infrastructure" was unnecessary and somewhat derogatory. However, your initial response doesn't address that. It just puts the cause of traffic jams as population density, then compares NYC's density (and, implicitly, traffic), to the places being referenced.
That's not an actionable proposal, the closest that gets to an actionable proposal is to demolish existing parking structures and either put public housing projects on top of them or incentivize real estate developers to build actual low-income housing.
Telling real estate developers to build low-income housing in areas where they could easily build high-income housing is, well, let's just say cities promise this all the time and developers never do it.
"Build more housing" is probably the answer to the homeless problem, but the ownership issue needs to be fixed first. The author made all these cute graphics of studio apartments superimposed on parking spaces. Cool, I like density, my condo is 650 sqft, like 3 or 4 spaces without egress.
Are we talking about literally taking parking from existing owners and building housing on the bare pads? Are we talking about building vertically on top of them and leaving the space underneath for cars? I'm not saying these are bad ideas. But can we fully bake them first? So a politician can actually hand it to a bunch of legislators and come up with something he can actually put on his platform?
Sure let's abolish the minimum. But that won't do a darned thing to help congestion and the housing shortage other than make LA more like Atlanta where there's an island of density around a bunch of ugly sprawl with more dense pockets springing up in the periphery. We're still waiting for market conditions to fix the city. And market forces don't care about what we want. Promising low-income housing in desirable real estate markets doesn't work but is the only thing politicians can put on their platforms that people will vote for.