Ideally these apartments could be rented to the many many many people that prefer to not have a car of their own. Especially in SF, there's a need for more apartments like that.

To solve the parking problem, SF should require a dedicated parking spot be obtained before allowing a person to register a car with a San Francisco address. Alternatively, start charging reasonable rates for street parking, and have hugely increased rates for permits beyond a person's first.

"Free" parking has an extremely high cost on every aspect of city life.

> Ideally these apartments could be rented to the many many many people that prefer to not have a car of their own. Especially in SF, there's a need for more apartments like that.

The significant price differential for SF real estate without parking suggests this is about 3 "many" too manys.

The price differential reflects the high cost of devoting space to parking, not of the demand for it.

A parking space require not only the square footage for the car, but also the lane to get to the parking space. A constructed parking space is equivalent to 1-2 bedrooms worth of living space, which is a huge difference in real estate prices.

It sounds like you haven't ever actually been in a garage. The lane to the spaces is shared by all the spaces, and the garage also houses electrical distribution, water supply, heating and cooling which couldn't be co-located with a unit anyway. It would be at best storage space, and at worst it would just go to waste.

The amount of lane space scales linearly with the number of parking spaces. You can't add more parking spaces without adding additional lane length to reach those parking spaces.

Take a look at any aerial view of a parking lot and you'll see that only roughly half of the are is dedicated to parking spaces.

Parking annoyance versus saving lives….I’d know what I’d pick…

There's a lot of people who think that parking should be annoying, because driving is evil and you need to be punished for wanting to do it.

Owning a car (in order to drive it) is probably a bigger risk than ditching the second staircase.

Yeah, but you have to weigh that against the annoyance of slowly choking on black smoke, while the temperature rises and cooks you alive.

I don't think anyone's weighing the two options against each other? The space used by a first-floor garage can't be used by stairs instead, unless it was like one really big set of stairs just to the second floor.

Because EVs that charge from solar energy can park in hammerspace instead of needing to use real-world parking spaces like ICE cars do.

Maybe fewer people should have cars? Especially people in major urban areas like SF.

The massive parking requirements for inner cities for businesses and residential areas effectively turn city centres into suburbs of concrete.

The increased density that comes from getting rid of parking means that driving is no longer essential.

If you want a deep deep dive into how parking has shaped our cities - I would recommend reading about the “high cost of free parking” and “parking minimums”.

https://blog.getmyparking.com/2019/07/01/why-parking-minimum...

Right but the cities are already there. We don't have the luxury of redefining the American lifestyle and dependence on cars with a single unit of new housing. There's no benefit for the developer - leaving out parking (aside from the mandate to include it) makes the property less desirable.

The fact that mandates and minimums exist suggests that this is not the case; if parking paid for itself, no mandates would be necessary and developers would already be incentivized to build it by the market. In jurisdictions that have relaxed parking requirements, however, developers generally build less parking after the rules change (and sometimes as little as none). This shouldn't be too surprising: in cities with decent transit, at least some residents don't drive and so don't need the parking, so a market exists for housing without it, and parking is expensive to build, especially if it's underground, which is typical for multifamily residential construction in dense urban areas. Underground parking in the US typically costs ~$50k per space to build.