It took a decade, but the California legislature has finally delivered to the governor one of the most critical climate and equity bills in the country. No, it’s not mandating carbon neutrality or increasing renewable energy. It’s finally ending local mandates that all new housing and infill projects must include car storage, even if they’re located within half-mile of transit.
AB 2097 (Friedman) builds on work dating back to 2011 (I blogged about then-Assm. Skinner’s failed attempt) to finally end parking requirements for projects near transit and with a percentage of affordable units. Otherwise, too many local governments have not gotten the memo that California’s climate and equity goals require more housing near transit and reduced need for residents to drive vehicles. Instead, many cities and counties still rely on outdated boilerplate planning requirements that require developers to build parking spots, even if residents don’t want or need them. The spots can run anywhere between $30,000 and $90,000 each to build, increasing the cost of housing and making it less affordable as a result.
So why would the state want to allow locals to mandate car storage? In the past, powerful anti-housing local governments resisted such a state override. But cities and counties have mostly lost that fight. Instead the entrenched interests are those that insist that eliminating these requirements will somehow harm the provision of affordable housing. And if it sounds counter-intuitive to you that making housing cheaper and not mandating car storage hurts affordability, it’s because it is.
Here’s the problem: in California, building new housing requires navigating an incredibly complex soup of state and local requirements. Some advocates for affordable housing use this byzantine system to extract concessions from developers. So if someone proposes relaxing one of these requirements, no matter how nonsensical or counter-productive to the environment and affordability it may be, these advocates will only support doing so if they can extract a concession for more affordable housing in the process.
An example is the state’s density bonus program, in which developers can add more density and reduce parking on a project beyond what the local governments allow, but only if they provide more subsidized affordable units. These advocates therefore worry that ending local parking requirements statewide will eliminate this incentive to build more affordable units.
While that might sound right in theory, in practice it’s not correct at all. Developers make money on increased density — more units on the same parcel. The parking reductions are only valuable in that they allow greater density to be built on the same limited parcel. Basically, developers only request the reduction in parking spaces if it means they can squeeze in extra units.
We’ve seen this in practice. As Mott Smith from USC and Michael Manville at UCLA have documented in multiple years and cities, including in the Los Angeles Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) program, the evidence conclusively shows that reduced parking requirements lead to more affordable housing and does not undermine density bonus programs. Most prominently, in 2019, San Diego abolished parking requirements near transit for all housing projects (which is precisely what AB 2097 would accomplish statewide), and the results were decisive: overall housing units increased 24%, density bonus units increased five-fold, and deed-restricted affordable units via density bonuses increased six-fold.
The evidence is clear. California is behind on meeting its 2030 climate goals, and much of the culprit is due to rising transportation emissions from more driving. We also face a brutal housing shortage, leading to a mass exodus of residents to high-polluting states, pervasive homelessness, and stark income inequalities. AB 2097 would knit a solution to both problems, by making housing more affordable and reducing the need to own a car right near existing transit hubs.
After a decade of waiting, the state’s residents need this crucial reform to abolish car storage mandates. Let’s hope Governor Newsom does the right thing and signs AB 2097.
Los Angeles just overwhelmingly passed a transportation sales tax with over 70% support, yet policies that encourage automobile usage may undermine the transit and congestion relief goals of the measure. Chief among these driving incentives is the over-supply of parking.
Juan Matute of UCLA and Andrew M. Fraser and Mikhail Chester of Arizona State University make the case in the Los Angeles Times that the region should stop providing plentiful, cheap parking:
Decades of car-centric development in Los Angeles have resulted in more than three and a half parking spaces for every car in the county — nearly 19 million in total. These spaces — in residential garages and driveways, commercial parking structures and surface lots, and along streets — account for 200 square miles of real estate, much of it concentrated in dense, transit-friendly areas.
It is not a coincidence that where there’s the greatest concentration of parking spaces —the downtown core, Hollywood and the Wilshire corridor — traffic can be particularly bad. The abundance of cheap or free parking spaces encourages Angelenos to choose cars over other transportation options and creates localized congestion, which makes driving more painful for everyone.
Only by making parking more scarce will we give drivers a reason to switch to buses or subways — and achieve Measure M’s promise of reducing traffic.
There’s no question that policies that require abundant parking are counter-productive when it comes to discouraging driving and reducing infill opportunities, and this op-ed sums up the situation nicely. My only quibble is that it frames parking reform in the negative. The average Angeleno reading this will probably think: they’re going to make it harder and more expensive for me to park my car in order to force me onto a slow-moving bus.
But there are many positive benefits for Angelenos from reforming parking policies. First, it will (as the authors argue) decrease congestion for those times you need to drive. Second, it will allow more walkable, thriving neighborhoods to develop in all the space that otherwise would go to house cars in a parking spot. Three, it will save residents money on their homes and rents from not having to subsidize excessive parking. Fourth, it will encourage the development of much better, faster, and more reliable transit service as an alternative to being stuck in traffic.
The authors hint at these benefits in the end:
Angelenos like to think they have a right to cheap and easy mobility in the form of car ownership. We suggest that cheap and easy accessibility — to work, stores and fun — is the right we should strive to promote.
They also counter the usual argument that reduced parking spots will lead to parking nightmares in surrounding neighborhoods (residential parking permits can handle that issue).
Given the intense opposition to parking reform, advocates should focus on the positives for residents, rather than making the policy sound punitive to those who have few viable options other than driving. Because ultimately, the weight of the evidence is on the side of parking reform. And as this piece makes clear, advocates need to make the case that it’s the right thing to do.
The generation that brought Miami its parking minimums
A long time ago, somebody in some room somewhere came up with minimum parking requirements. Those random formulas soon became boilerplate code for cities and counties across America, regardless of how much people actually needed the expensive-to-build parking spots. The problem is particularly acute near transit, where cars are by definition less necessary.
As I blogged back in 2012 about a profile on UCLA parking guru Don Shoup, the requirements are stunning in their mindlessness:
Funeral parlors? A basic formula is eight parking spaces plus one for each hearse. Convents? One-tenth of a space per nun is fine. Adult bookstores? One space for every prospective patron plus one for the cashier holding the longest shift (no mention of the flasher in the alley). Public swimming pools? One space for every 2,500 gallons of water on the premises, chlorine included.
But it looks like Miami, the U.S. city most likely to be the first to fall to climate change, is pioneering a more rational, albeit baby-step reform. A proposed zoning change would eliminate parking minimums for buildings under 10,000 square feet near public transit. To be clear, developers could build or contract for more parking if the market demanded it. The upshot of removing pointless parking is cheaper housing and rents for everyone.
The Miami Herald published an effective op-ed from young professionals couching the parking requirement as part of the overall mismatch between land use policy and emerging demand:
What baffles us most is why housing targeted to our generation should be required to have parking at all. Our grandparents’ love affair with the car is outdated. We don’t want to spend all our money buying and maintaining a car. We don’t want the guilt of contributing to air pollution and energy consumption. We don’t want to worry about having a designated driver. And we definitely don’t want to grow old waiting in traffic.
If Florida can pioneer this move from Golden Girls-era parking to a more contemporary policy approach, perhaps other cities and states around the country will follow suit.
