> anything that you leave to optionality in code enforcement ends up being a thing that never happens ever

No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.

Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.

Marble countertops aren't competing for space that you could otherwise use to build more apartments to sell/rent.

Parking is.

Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.

Isn't this (part of) the point?

We have an abundance of parking required by law and not enough housing units - removing the requirement should encourage more money to be invested into anything but parking no?

Seems like letting businesses decide whether or not it's worth opening a business with the available parking would cause one of two things to happen:

1. We wind up with the actual correct amount of parking required for a given set of businesses - instead of some arbitrary amount dictated by legislatures decades ago. 2. Everyone is tired of the lack of parking and votes to increase public transit funding.

Multiple means of egress from bedrooms, fire-rated walls between units, accessibility requirements, auto-closing doors, fire suppression systems, CO and smoke detectors, are all things that we could remove the requirements for and also leave to the businesses and builders to decide whether or not the market demands those things.

3. Businesses open up shop 5 miles away from downtown where they don’t have to deal with any of this.

> developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred

Once we have apartments with and without parking on the market, we'll see how much more people are willing to pay to get parking, and future developers can build accordingly.

What part of "one hundred times out of a hundred" did you miss? You don't end up with the choice because nobody builds parking.

Queens NY has this problem pretty severely. Zoning requires parking past 7 stories in building height, so every building is 7 floors at maximum density with no parking. Residents often find themselves circling their neighborhoods for hours looking for parking. Living without a car and being fully-dependent on public transit absolutely sucks in most of the borough.

A better example would be where a "development" community's rain water goes. The areas booming right now in the south east usa will build the next development up 4 feet above the previous community and get approved through the county council permit process. Then the first big rain storm or hurricane comes by and the formerly dry community is now flooded out for the new community that got built, which also floods because drainage wasn't factored in.

Then parking spaces will be priced according to what the market wants to pay.

Eh, Milwaukee has fairly lax parking requirements (including no minimums for most downtown developments) but most developments have more than legal required. Developers are pretty open about the reason (it's not uncommon for neighbors to push back on parking due to traffic concerns): they lost money on the parking, but without the spots they can't rent the apartments at all. Walmart doesn't build parking because the city makes them, they do it because their target market has cars and won't visit without a parking lot.

And even if this does drive up parking costs to match rents, is that such a bad thing? Why should we legally mandate that developers subsidize parking?

I understand both sides of the issue. My problem is the lack of context given to this solution for housing.

I live in small (2,000ish households) New England town with some streets that predate automobiles. Nobody is really space constrained. The housing 3 miles a way is at least half the cost of my town.

The public transportation is poor and it took about 25 years to build less than 3 miles of bike path.

Should my town ditch off-street parking minimums in an attempt to increase housing supplies?

> Nobody is really space constrained.

Clearly the answer is no then.

That doesn't make space-constrained Austin's answer an automatic yes either though. The city is very car-dependent. The starting point isn't "take away peoples' ability to have a car". It should be "make it more attractive not to have a car".

Changing parking minimums comes far down that road.

It's not clear to me. I really wish you could take the effort to explain your thinking. If there is no place to park but your neighbor's yard how it would work in a civilized society and help housing costs.

Then you’ll end up with the building equivalent of the titanic which had a lot of luxurious amenities and decor, but skimped on the more boring stuff like structural integrity. You can see this in effect in parts of Asia. The closest example we have in the US is the Millennium Tower. There were regulations, (someone could correct me) but they decided to “bribe” their way out of it.

Ironically, I still share your opinion about over regulation, but we can’t ignore the other argument.

> No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.

"Follow the money" always works.

Builders want (reasonably enough) to increase profit. Marble countertops add a few thousand in cost but now you can sell these as luxury units for tens of thousands more! So it's profitable, so it happens.

Building parking space instead of additional units is not profitable, so it won't happen unless required.

Its expensive to build parking. Loads of shopping centers end up having to build seas of parking spaces due to these parking minimums given their square footage even though the actual car traffic wouldn't come close. I imagine a lot of those stores would have preferred paying for far less real estate and paving.

Perhaps the problem isn't the fact that parking requirements exist but rather that they require way too many parking spots. Most shopping center lots in my area are never close to full, even on the busiest Christmas shopping days.

I here this a lot but in the North East at least those extra spots can be used during the winter for snow management.

Snow management can be done in other ways but that is a cost analysis exercise.

Can you elaborate on the snow management aspects?

Parking lots are a common place to store excess snow when it is plowed. Obviously from the parking lot itself, but also sometimes snow is hauled in dump trucks from other areas where there is no space to store the snow.

In snowy areas the piles can grow quite large and take up a sizable amount of parking lot space. These large piles then take considerably longer to melt away than snow in surrounding areas, sometimes lasting well into Spring.

Shopping Centers are an entire different zone than housing. You typically do not build them in the same places. They're built in less desirable places than housing which makes the parking spaces cheaper and an efficient use of the space.

Not all square footage is created equal!

My apartment charges me to maintain a parking spot in the garage, giving them more money for minimal extra maintenance. This way people that don't have cars don't have to subsidize my parking spot, but it's still super worth it for the landlord.

If the cost to provide (guaranteed, protected) parking spots ends up being higher than people are willing to pay for them, maybe they're not actually worth what we're currently paying for them.

That's great. Should increase demand for transit.

Effective public transit isn't something you can bolt onto a city after the roads are all built. Cities like Austin that were designed for cars from the outset are hopeless lost causes.

Old world cities can have great public transit because they were dense long before cars existed and have hundreds of years worth of civil projects designed to get people from A to B.

> ... have hundreds of years worth of civil projects designed to get people from A to B.

We better get started right away then, huh.

You don't start by building public transit. You start by bulldozing roads and housing and moving/rebuilding communities.

Do you have a citation for that? Large portions of Paris for instance aren't exactly old-world high density development. Luckily they're putting in the GPE, which is 120 miles of metro service. [1] Once you have the metro, you can put in higher-density development around the stations, and over time, the neighborhood changes. That's just fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express

Most of Paris as we know it was built in the 1950s and 1960s. Especially in the 1970s French politicians took on ambitious public works projects in Paris.

Most of the housing and most of the population was obliterated in the late-1930s through the mid-1940s, as you might recall. Two-thirds of the city's population had fled before the German invasion started even.

Except this sort of code has a very real impact on volume of business, in the case of retail outlets, restaurants, venues or anything that's open to the public.

Can you see the design conversations going, "let's provide for practically no parking spots, so we can get less foot traffic and nobody will want to come shop here!"

In areas that support public transit and promote multi-modal, the businesses which thrive there are ones which cater to folks who eschew private vehicles. And that's a distinctly different crowd! So I think it'll work out great.