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MickeyFinn posted:As long as there is no alternative to driving, people will own cars and find a place to put them. Your point here is a kind of accelerationism where if we just start making car driving miserable, then public transport will all of a sudden get funded. But driving is already miserable if you can't afford to live close to work. 1) The actual developments that go up with minimal or zero parking are often those that are already transit adjacent 2) Broadening the constituency for public transport, bike lanes, and straight up walkability is worth it, especially if proponents can also push policies that ensure broader affordability near areas of opportunity. Yeah, this is because many policymakers are unfortunately more likely to listen to the well-off who choose transit than the disadvantaged who need it, but the change still benefits all. I had a similar reaction as you to congestion pricing when I first heard about it, because you're right that it incurs a disproportionately high cost on the poor who've been forced into car-dependence by prohibitive housing costs in the denser areas. What matters is both what policies you institute alongside that address affordability and what you do with the money from the congestion pricing: do you just finance further highway construction and continue the never-ending sprawl or do you invest in alternative modes of transportation? Eliminating parking minimums should be (and often are) a single facet of a broader policy shift.
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Feb 1, 2020 22:20
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Cugel the Clever posted:Eh, it's worth recognizing two things: This is a lot of words to say, “I agree.” Unless I’m missing something, you are agreeing that developers only really get rid of parking when there are alternatives to driving for the residents and you are also agreeing that we should build more public transit and make it more universally tolerable, if not useful.
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Feb 1, 2020 22:29
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MickeyFinn posted:On parking minimums: bad, abolish them immediately. quote:Yes, it costs less to build such a building, but it is also worth less to the people looking for housing and will attract only those people who are so cost constrained that the premium for parking is impossible to pay for. quote:In places where parking is jam packed, it is because there aren't any sufficiently good alternatives to driving and dealing with the car. Maybe its different in the suburbs, I don't know, I haven't lived in one for nearly 20 years. Do you think Tokyo has parking that's not jam packed? Do you think Tokyo doesn't have good alternatives to driving? quote:So, when I see people discussing parking minimums without also discussing how much they are going to spend on public transport to make it useful to the residents I see "poor(er) people should have to deal with that poo poo, I don't care." As an example of this, I literally said failure to provide public transport to poorer residents is punishing them by making them look for parking and luxury handset responded with a paper that advocated charging people for street parking. I guess that is a more obvious kind of punishment. quote:I don't think this is true at all. As long as there is no alternative to driving, people will own cars and find a place to put them. Your point here is a kind of accelerationism where if we just start making car driving miserable, then public transport will all of a sudden get funded. Yes, obviously you need to do things in concert. I don't think you'll find anyone here disagreeing with that. Just like how the people who want to abolish private health insurance aren't suggesting that this be done in isolation; "replace it with universal public healthcare in some form" is kind of a given.
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Feb 1, 2020 22:30
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MickeyFinn posted:I don't think this is true at all. As long as there is no alternative to driving, people will own cars and find a place to put them. Your point here is a kind of accelerationism where if we just start making car driving miserable, then public transport will all of a sudden get funded. It's not like getting rid of parking minimums gets rid of the parking attached to existing buildings overnight. That kind of transformation would take decades. Plenty of time to improve other modes in parallel. MickeyFinn posted:That gives me a different way of thinking about my point. The changes we have to make are so drastic, both in terms of changing people’s habits and reducing the cost of housing, that when people bring up parking minimums I respond with OK, but who cares? Cicero fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Feb 1, 2020 |
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Feb 1, 2020 22:36
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Boot and Rally posted:Have you got a source for this? It might be true that the majority of poor people in NYC don't have cars. I don't believe that for a second about anywhere in California. If poor people have cars then abolishing parking requirements might make housing cheaper but housing + parking costs would be unchanged. https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf quote:A key difference between low-income and higher-income households also i don't have data for this on hand but i'm willing to bet lower income households have fewer cars per person, and therefore require less parking over all even when they do use cars to commute. MickeyFinn posted:The changes we have to make are so drastic, both in terms of changing people’s habits and reducing the cost of housing, that when people bring up parking minimums I respond with OK, but who cares? uh. . . professional urban planners? The guys whose job it is to effectively engineer cities? Idk what kind of answer you were looking for. Places like LA are suffering under the accumulated burden of many decades of bad policies. If you think you're going to find a silver bullet that will magically fix all the problems you should just give up already, it's not going to happen. It doesn't exist. If you're someone in LA with a low income who does not currently own a car, a 12.5% decrease in rent is huge. For a lot of people, that might be the difference between a stable housing situation and homelessness. I really don't understand why you are trying to downplay it. This line of argument from you is kind of weird anyway, since i don't recall anyone talking about banning parking. If it turns out people aren't willing to live in housing without parking, then developers aren't going to build it, and people who require parking will find places that are willing to provide it. You have yourself already described how the market can handle this issue.
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Feb 1, 2020 22:37
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Cicero posted:
In particular, what I usually see especially in small towns and cities, is proposals to remove parking minimums on main streets and downtown. Often these areas already have significant parking availability within a few blocks of these areas, so it doesn't create a huge burden for drivers. At the same time it makes these areas much more transit friendly by creating corridors of density. Eliminating parking minimums and encouraging alternative transit go hand in hand.
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Feb 1, 2020 22:47
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I don't dispute that steadily losing parking will hurt some poor people in the short to medium term. But it will help more poor people than it hurts. This isn't the kind of situation where there's a perfect solution that's great for everyone. What we know is that the current standard for US cities in land use + transit is really loving bad for the poor -- well, it's bad for almost everyone, but particularly bad for the poor -- and we need to move away from it. Parking minimums are one part of that, but yes you absolutely have to invest into alternatives at the same time. I've never met anyone who thought otherwise, so I'm not sure why Mickey is acting like this is a thing some people believe in. It's not, any more than there are people who want to get rid of private health insurance and just throw everyone to the wolves rather than replace it with Medicare for all or some equivalent.
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Feb 1, 2020 22:47
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Cicero posted:I don't dispute that steadily losing parking will hurt some poor people in the short to medium term. But it will help more poor people than it hurts. This isn't the kind of situation where there's a perfect solution that's great for everyone. What we know is that the current standard for US cities in land use + transit is really loving bad for the poor -- well, it's bad for almost everyone, but particularly bad for the poor -- and we need to move away from it. Parking minimums are one part of that, but yes you absolutely have to invest into alternatives at the same time. I've never met anyone who thought otherwise, so I'm not sure Mickey is acting like this is a thing some people believe in. It's not, any more than there are people who want to get rid of private health insurance and just throw everyone to the wolves rather than replace it with Medicare for all or some equivalent. I really like the analogy to healthcare since I can see a lot of parallels in the conversation. People tend to be more anxious about potential disruptions to their lives than benefits. So when Obama promised healthcare reform he had to promise "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan," even though objectively most people's insurance plans are terrible. The fear of losing what little healthcare people had overshadowed the potential for improvement. Similarly even though car oriented urban landscapes are obviously terrible for the poor and everyone else, people who are currently dependent on cars are so afraid of how any changes to their city will disrupt their lives, that they are blinded to all the upsides. It's just an unfortunate quirk of political psychology.
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Feb 1, 2020 22:52
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This is very strange. I’m getting multi-paragraph responses with people rather violently agreeing with me. Let’s change the conversation. Does anyone have any sources examining instances of when parking minimums were eliminated and what the outcome was in actual development of housing? Again, read this: I think parking minimums should be eliminated immediately and funding for alternatives to driving should be dramatically increased immediately, as well.
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Feb 1, 2020 23:04
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MickeyFinn posted:This is very strange. I’m getting multi-paragraph responses with people rather violently agreeing with me. quote:Let’s change the conversation. Does anyone have any sources examining instances of when parking minimums were eliminated and what the outcome was in actual development of housing? quote:Abstract: Using a partial deregulation of residential parking in downtown Los Angeles, I examine the impact of minimum parking requirements on housing development. I find that when parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also that developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces. The research also highlights the importance of removing not just quantity mandates but locational mandates as well. Developers in dense inner cities are often willing to provide parking, but ordinances that require parking to be on the same site as housing can be prohibitively expensive.
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Feb 1, 2020 23:21
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sorry if you feel overly attacked. For me at least though there's an element of addressing the crowd. While you have agreed to the basic premise that we should reduce parking minimums, you've also posed the question "why does it matter?" "Who cares?" I at least i have tried to answer these questions if not for you, who have already agreed that parking minimums are unnecessary or even harmful and should be rolled back, then for anyone else reading. The people who benefit are the many working people who already don't have cars and are forced to subsidize other people's parking. It is the children who will benefit from the denser, more sensibly designed neighborhoods that might develop in the absence of onerous parking burdens. It is the pro-transit activist who needs a constituency of voters that are dependent on public transit to support their initiatives. edit: what a surprise, shrinking the area of cities that is required to be devoted to parking increases the area used for other stuff like housing. Squalid fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Feb 1, 2020 |
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Feb 1, 2020 23:22
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Another little interesting-about-Germany thing that's relevant here: it's common in Germany to have underground parking levels even for very small apartment complexes. For example, I live in a backyard duplex, and out front is a small apartment building with 6 units. So, this development has only eight units in total, but it still has an underground parking level that provides one space for each unit (we use ours for bike stuff and tools). I've lived in a handful of regions in the US, and I don't think I've ever seen underground parking for such a small complex there, but here it seems extremely standard. I have to say, it's way better for urbanism than having those eight spots at ground level surrounding the buildings, the way it usually seems to work for apartments in the states. It looks better, feels better, works better.
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Feb 1, 2020 23:31
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Cicero posted:You disagreed with me, then strawmanned my position for some reason. I'm still not sure why. I’m confused by the first part of your post as I haven’t disagreed with much of anything you’ve written. I’m not trying to disagree with you. Thanks for the link, Matt Yglesias is like patient zero for never shutting up about parking minimums, but he hasn’t been able to convince me that it actually matters in practice, even though the theoretical argument is compelling. The link to the article is dead, but I have a title to search for now. Thanks again.
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Feb 2, 2020 00:12
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it's not as if there isn't an extensive literature on the subject anyone can easily find themselves on google scholar. . .
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Feb 2, 2020 00:26
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Squalid posted:it's not as if there isn't an extensive literature on the subject anyone can easily find themselves on google scholar. . . My attempts at googling this have resulted in innumerable opinion pieces and theoretical works and no data. The authors of the paper linked to in Cicero’s post literally give an explanation for this problem: parking regulations are are ubiquitous so comparing parking minimums to no parking minimums is very hard. If you’ve got a list of search terms you’ve used to get results, I’d love to see where I’m going wrong. Again, I want to see actual evidence, not models or theoretical exercises. The Manville paper is unconvincing. They point out that the developers in question actually supplied more spaces than legally required even when not required to do so, merely that the spaces were simply not on site and they further point out that Los Angeles in 1999, when the ARO started, had way too much parking because 50 years of reinvigoration plans resulted in lots of parking lots replacing leveled buildings. Finally, they point out that downtown LA is uniquely situated with good access to public transport and a large number of already car-less inhabitants. All of this supports my thesis that reducing parking requirements in car-heavy locations with little space for more cars and poor public transport isn’t likely to do much.
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Feb 2, 2020 01:05
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It feels like the solution is to remove parking minimums from all new construction, then over some N-year period remove them from existing lots.
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Feb 2, 2020 01:35
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MickeyFinn posted:My attempts at googling this have resulted in innumerable opinion pieces and theoretical works and no data. The authors of the paper linked to in Cicero’s post literally give an explanation for this problem: parking regulations are are ubiquitous so comparing parking minimums to no parking minimums is very hard. If you’ve got a list of search terms you’ve used to get results, I’d love to see where I’m going wrong. Again, I want to see actual evidence, not models or theoretical exercises. i feel like you are defining the scope of the question too narrowly. Could you rephrase the question for me? I just want to be clear what specifically you are asking for evidence of, and what you mean by reductions in parking requirements "isn't likely to do much." Do you just mean reduce the cost of housing, or increase the number of units available? What kind of time scales are we talking about here. If you are looking for experimental evidence to solve questions about macroeconomics and urban design, you may have to downgrade your expectations. Researchers don't have the luxury of being able to play sim city in real world metros. Natural experiments are obviously useful, but you seem to be defining the scope of your thesis extremely narrowly, and the more narrow you make the question the less likely there will be observational data that exactly matches what you want, and the more you will have to lean on models to make predictions about your system. edit: I have been trying to make the general argument that in MOST American cities, GENERALLY speaking, relaxing or reducing parking minimums will BROADLY lead to better outcomes in many contexts, as measured by variables like walkability, bike friendliness, density, and housing affordability, over MEDIUM to LONG time frames. You seem to be asking for evidence that in your SPECIFIC city, or even in your SPECIFIC, individual neighborhood, will reduced parking minimum have these same effects? I think it should be obvious why the second question is much harder to answer than the first. edit2: something tells me its going to be hard to disentangle the influence of changes in transit on our response, since it's not like anyone is doing controlled experiments with JUST changing parking minimums without doing anything else. . . also here is one non-academic article about the impact of removing minimums from one small downtown area, and why it was a good thing there: One Line of Your Zoning Code Can Make a World of Difference Squalid fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 02:03
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Also, like zoning, parking minimum arguments assume that developers only build what that are mandated to rather than the reality, which is that they start with what they want to build and then do what they have to do after. Like, if I were trying to build a grocery store I would aggressively design in a parking lot whether the city made me or not. Whether or not a business will attract clients or an apartment complex will be able to attract residents matters. If there is no transit and the fucker is in the middle of nowhere, the developer will build parking. Parking minimums only kinda make sense in dense urban environments where public transit and lots of street parking is available and the developer can free ride off of a public good. I could see a developer trying to offload their impact to the city in that case and the city responding by implementing a parking minimum in response. In my opinion impact fees and taxes on developers or landowners that generate revenue for public transit in proportion to the units or traffic are be a better solution.
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Feb 2, 2020 03:09
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Squalid posted:https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf This is about what I expected. I got the impression from your post that you meant zero or something. In the end, this is just a numbers thing. I'm not convinced that simply because car ownership rates are less for poor people (but still relatively high) that it is good for poor people to remove parking restrictions. I don't think it is generally fair to say that because high income people have a higher rate of car ownership than poor people that reduced parking requirements will benefit the poor (at the cost of the rich). A decrease in housing prices could include increased parking/transit costs. The discussion here is centered around nuance. The result is not in question, how to get there is. The right way is to build mass transit and then up the density around transit. This is what I think is happening in LA, but it is painfully slow. There is obviously (also) a lot of nuance in how to up the density as evidenced by the many discussion about displacing poor people.
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Feb 2, 2020 03:32
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El Mero Mero posted:Parking minimums only kinda make sense in dense urban environments where public transit and lots of street parking is available and the developer can free ride off of a public good. Street parking, much less so, but parking minimums are even worse.
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Feb 2, 2020 03:38
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Cugel the Clever posted:Not sure I understand this sentiment. By eliminating the parking, you make alternate modes of transportation both more necessary and more viable. All the parking minimum does is remove space that might have held more people and businesses. Free-riding off the public good of public transit is exactly what we want to encourage. Yeah I didn't mean that to come off as a defense of parking minimums. I just meant that the arguments around the topic makes 0 sense whatsoever in non-urban areas because whether minimums exist or not developers will still build parking if that's the only way to access a building. A grocery store with 0 parking in the middle of nowhere is pretty useless. In a city, that's the only place where a developer might try to NOT build parking, because they can get away with it functionally speaking. The minimums come from the city's side, but it's a bad policy because EVERYONE would be better off if the money that would have gone towards a parking lot went towards the transit system instead.
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Feb 2, 2020 03:54
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Boot and Rally posted:This is about what I expected. I got the impression from your post that you meant zero or something. In the end, this is just a numbers thing. I'm not convinced that simply because car ownership rates are less for poor people (but still relatively high) that it is good for poor people to remove parking restrictions. I don't think it is generally fair to say that because high income people have a higher rate of car ownership than poor people that reduced parking requirements will benefit the poor (at the cost of the rich). A decrease in housing prices could include increased parking/transit costs. maybe you'd rather see some of the economic research into the effect of parking minimums on housing affordability then? https://escholarship.org/content/qt0fm8k169/qt0fm8k169.pdf Parking Requirements and Housing Affordability: A Case Study of San Francisco posted:Residential parking requirements specify the number of parking spaces that must be provided when new residential units are built. This paper examines the way such parking requirements influence housing affordability. The provision of parking spaces requires land, building materials and equipment which increase the price of housing. On the other hand, offstreet parking requirements are said to be needed to prevent streets overcrowded with parked cars. In a case study of six neighborhoods in the City of San Francisco, this study investigated the influence on housing affordability of code-required parking. A hedonic model was fit to data describing housing and neighborhood characteristics in order to statistically explain the sales price of housing units that changed hands in those neighborhoods in 1996. The analysis revealed that single family houses and condominiums were more than ten percent more costly if they included off-street parking than if they did not. Based on the selling prices and the distribution of incomes of San Francisco residents, it was estimated that tens of thousands of additional households could qualify for home mortgages for units without off-street parking if those units could legally be provided under zoning and subdivision ordinances. The policy implications of this finding include the possible consideration of alternative forms of regulation regarding the provision of off-street parking in residential projects. A number of people have made the relevant point that even without minimums, if buyers and renters demand parking, developers are going to try and supply it anyway. However that 1/3 of working class people who don't need parking right now are effectively being forced to pay for it anyway, without getting any value. There's no reason to make them. Unrelated, but I really hate the kind of liberal paternalism common especially among New Englanders who believe that they need to tell the poor what kind of housing they need. Because obviously they aren't capable of making decisions about whether cohousing arrangements are right for them or how much square footage they need. It's gross, and most of the its advocates who pretend to be leftists are simply useful idiots for the racist defenders of neighborhood "character". edit: also one more thing, I found a chart breaking down different income groups by how many cars they have.  Unsurprisingly, wealthier households will tend to have more cars. This means that policies which effectively subsidize parking will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, as they will tend to use it more. Thus policies like parking minimums are a regressive wealth redistribution system that take from the poor and give to the rich. Squalid fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 04:37
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MickeyFinn posted:I’m confused by the first part of your post as I haven’t disagreed with much of anything you’ve written. I’m not trying to disagree with you. MickeyFinn posted:The Manville paper is unconvincing. They point out that the developers in question actually supplied more spaces than legally required even when not required to do so You've had a habit in this thread of deliberately misconstruing others' arguments, then after people call you on it, going "ugh why are people acting like they disagree with me? don't we all think the same??" Cut that poo poo out. quote:merely that the spaces were simply not on site and they further point out that Los Angeles in 1999, when the ARO started, had way too much parking because 50 years of reinvigoration plans resulted in lots of parking lots replacing leveled buildings. Finally, they point out that downtown LA is uniquely situated with good access to public transport and a large number of already car-less inhabitants. All of this supports my thesis that reducing parking requirements in car-heavy locations with little space for more cars and poor public transport isn’t likely to do much.  Are you serious?"This data appears to be a scenario with a different context than what I was talking about. Therefore it supports my thesis." Can't believe I have to point this out, but orthogonal data is not support. Not to mention, when you specifically asked this question, you didn't say anything about public transport: quote:Does anyone have any sources examining instances of when parking minimums were eliminated and what the outcome was in actual development of housing? Cicero fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 11:01
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Cicero posted:You responded at one point with "I don't think that's true at all", then accused me of accelerationism for apparently saying that getting rid of parking would automatically lead to transit getting more funding, something I never actually said or implied. It was a clear strawman. In my original post on this subject I claimed that the discussion on parking minimums was overdone because, in places that already have jammed up parking developers aren't going to change much as developers will still want to offer parking unless there are alternatives to driving. Your response starts with this: Cicero posted:You're describing a chicken-and-egg situation. Parking minimums are part of why alternative modes of transport are terrible. They're one of the major headwinds that make workable walking/biking/transit difficult. And it's common for parking minimums to be hilariously high, too, like literally "more space required for parking than the actual inhabited structure" kind of high. In the context of my post (paraphrased again for you here: "eliminating parking minimums without adding alternatives won't change development behavior very much in places where there is no parking"), I don't know how to read your first paragraph other than to say "just get rid of parking minimums." Notice, as well, that no where in your post do you include any comment on alternatives to driving. In fact, you express a preference for underground parking. You later claim that no one would say that parking minimum elimination can be effective absent other changes, like transport alternatives. But, your first response to me quite literally says to eliminate parking minimums and does not suggest any other changes as well. So, I argue that you have made the argument for parking elimination sans other changes, whether you wanted to or not. Cicero posted:Stop right there. Why bring this up? Literally zero people have suggested that developers will always provide the bare minimum. I think I've made my point on how I read your original response to me in the above text. None of my interpretations of your posts are in bad faith or "deliberately misconstruing others' arguments". Cicero posted:
You are partially correct about this but I don't want to argue this third-order point, I should have said "it does not refute my thesis" rather than that "it supports my thesis." Mia culpa. You should read the underlying paper (not the Yglesias blurb), it is very good. For instance, I did not know that banks won't give you loan in the Los Angeles area unless you have parking secured for the lifetime of the loan. That suggests that eliminating parking minimums in Los Angeles is going to be less effective than one might hope in increasing the number of units that can be built in a given area unless there is ample parking near by the developers can use somehow. And, in fact, that is exactly what the developers did in the ARO. Cicero posted:Not to mention, when you specifically asked this question, you didn't say anything about public transport: The post of mine that you link quite literally contains this sentence: MickeyFinn posted:Again, read this: I think parking minimums should be eliminated immediately and funding for alternatives to driving should be dramatically increased immediately, as well. I don't know how to respond to this. The thing you claim is not there (a demand for transport alternatives) is right there, now in bold, in the quote you provided. Maybe you linked the wrong thing?
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Feb 2, 2020 16:58
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Cugel the Clever posted:Not sure I understand this sentiment. By eliminating the parking, you make alternate modes of transportation both more necessary and more viable. All the parking minimum does is remove space that might have held more people and businesses. Free-riding off the public good of public transit is exactly what we want to encourage. I don't think the last two words in the bolded sentence are true, but that might be because we are using different definitions of "more viable." Elimination of parking minimums without funding more public transport will not make the buses run more frequently. When I think of making alternate modes of transportation "more viable" I think of allowing more people to use buses and bike lanes and trains and sidewalks instead of cars. But to make the buses and trains more viable, they have to run more often and go more places (I read somewhere that the two most important factors in public transport usage are frequency and coverage). To make the bike lanes more useful you have to make them more protected or at least more official. To make the sidewalks more useful there has to be places in the area people want to walk to (work, restaurants, the grocery store, whatever). It is not even clear that eliminating parking minimums reduces the amount of local traffic or road use. The Manville study found that developers offered 20% more parking spots (than required by the parking minimums) after elimination of parking minimums. They were able to do this because they could use all the overbuilt parking in downtown Los Angeles. If you had hoped that eliminating parking minimums would have discouraged car use based on the difficulty of paying for and finding parking, there is at least one piece of evidence that the opposite is true. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 17:20
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Squalid posted:maybe you'd rather see some of the economic research into the effect of parking minimums on housing affordability then? I appreciate that your opinion comes with research. That paper establishes that housing with parking costs more on the market. It does not establish why. It could be due to the necessity of driving making places with parking more desirable. It is a classic correlation is not causation problem. I'm not convinced at all by "demands for parking will result in supply". There is demand for housing (especially below market rate) in SF, but it isn't being built. I'm not sure I've stated a position here, so I'll do it now: build a flawless public transportation system then density will follow. Public transit is harder to build than an individual building. We should induce demand for parking-free residences through robust public transit. We should not induce demand for public transit through parking-free residences. I'm aware that this position also has many problems. Squalid posted:Unrelated, but I really hate the kind of liberal paternalism common especially among New Englanders who believe that they need to tell the poor what kind of housing they need. Because obviously they aren't capable of making decisions about whether cohousing arrangements are right for them or how much square footage they need. It's gross, and most of the its advocates who pretend to be leftists are simply useful idiots for the racist defenders of neighborhood "character". The previous paper you posted doesn't show that off-street parking is subsidized. I'm not sure how parking requirements are "subsidizing" parking. Are you trying to establish that because wealthy people have more cars that policy around parking isn't generally bad for non-wealthy people?
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Feb 2, 2020 17:21
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MickeyFinn posted:I don't think the last two words in the bolded sentence are true, but that might be because we are using different definitions of "more viable." Elimination of parking minimums without funding more public transport will not make the buses run more frequently. With the right policy and non-brain-dead developers, the space that might have been reserved for parking can instead be filled with space that is full of people. To take an extreme example, think about plopping down a cafe in downtown Seattle. My friend from the burbs might recommended it be a single-story building with a sizeable parking lot and drive-thru so that folks like him can stop in when they're traveling through downtown without risking exposure to "the city". After all, how are they going to make any money without drivers‽ He didn't quite grasp the idea that said cafe being just one portion of a larger building full of potential customers who could walk in might easily supplant the audience willing only to drive in. Great guy, but firmly blinkered by the car-dependent environment in which he'd been raised in. Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 18:25
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El Mero Mero posted:I'm curious if anyone knows about the relationship between upzoning and development. Like, just because a city changes the map to permit a dense building to be built doesn't actually mean anyone's going to come along and do it. Then, if they do, they still have to go through a review process even then, which always includes public feedback. There's a variety of areas where I live in Vancouver BC that have been up zoned already for substantially higher densities, often years and years ago, which haven't been touched. From a layperson's point of view it's sort of baffling since I hear in the news that we're in a "housing crisis" and there's opportunities to build that aren't being taken up. Meanwhile the developers that aren't building on these lands are agitating at council for more liberalized zoning in general. At the end of the day there's probably a complex basket of reasons. The up zoned areas aren't in hot areas, or the city has some strings attached. This is the problem with relying on for profit housing development to create housing supply. A developer is not going to build unless it's profitable so any reason that makes a project unprofitable could result in some up zoned land sitting idle for years. Cicero posted:Though I'm surprised how much leftists ignore the equity side of zoning, it's really just as important as price relief imo. For example, the reason the US can so often have such extreme inequalities in schools, especially within the same metro, is because schools get their pupils based on attendance boundaries, so if an area attached to a particular affluent school is nothing but single family homes on big lots, that makes it impossible for poor/working class families to attend. Whereas if townhomes/duplexes/fourplexes/etc are allowed, or especially the dreaded apartments, the rich can't really keep poorer people from attending anymore; some will definitely choose to move to a better school area even if it means living in a smaller home. "Neighbourhood equity" of up zoning is something that should probably be discussed more. It's much more common that all the areas selected for increased densities are not wealthy neighbourhoods, but relatively poorer ones. This is an area where Left YIMBYs occasionally run into trouble with their fellow progressives if they're so in favour of higher densities that they don't care who is affected. I've noticed that in Vancouver there's a new facet pushing back to the local YIMBY movement that are young, local, racialized people that are concerned about new development in traditionally ethnic minority neighbourhoods undermining local businesses that serve ethnic minorities. Not the usual white haired NIMBYs. Vancouver’s Little Saigon Facing Gentrification? Developers get density, city gets rentals. What could go wrong? ‘Upzoning’ Might Mean More Apartments — But It’ll Wreck Neighbourhoods Working-class, racialized people will be driven out by city-promoted gentrification. The local YIMBY movement sees all Single Family Homes as reprehensible things that must be up zoned and done away with, but there is increasing push back from ethnic minorities that are questioning why it is seemingly always their SFH 'hoods that are targeted for redevelopment and not others. It's a reasonable question. IMO we need to be pushing quite a bit harder to ensure that redevelopment is equitably occurring across the city and if anything weighted heavier to occurring in wealthy areas.
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Feb 2, 2020 19:50
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Cugel the Clever posted:With the right policy and non-brain-dead developers, the space that might have been reserved for parking can instead be filled with space that is full of people. I agree with this, but I also think that "right policy" and "non-brain-dead developers" is doing way too much heavy lifting. What are the right policies? How do we get developers to think about foot traffic as a replacement for cars? The developers in the Manville article were very clear that they wanted to build buildings with much less parking, but the banks where they get their loans literally would not give them money unless they had parking for the lifetime of the loan. That suggests that the problem (in this instance) isn't just the brain-dead developers, it is also the brain dead bankers. What is the policy that we implement to force banks to give loans to projects with (by their judgement) insufficient parking? My response to the questions of what the right policy is and what the right incentives are to get spaces full of people instead of cars is to build public transport and other alternative transport modes. A banker who accomplishes every single task during his entire life in a car is going to think it is obvious that parking needs to be everywhere and he is going to demand it from developers. Same of developers, same for city council people, same for your friend. Once you have lots people moving around in ways other than using a car, it becomes obvious to me that developers should want to build ground floor retail and cities will want big sidewalks and local parks and all those other nice things you want. At that point, the constituency for parking minimums will be basically irrelevant. None of this should be read to mean I think this will be easy. Femtosecond posted:The local YIMBY movement sees all Single Family Homes as reprehensible things that must be up zoned and done away with, but there is increasing push back from ethnic minorities that are questioning why it is seemingly always their SFH 'hoods that are targeted for redevelopment and not others. It's a reasonable question. IMO we need to be pushing quite a bit harder to ensure that redevelopment is equitably occurring across the city and if anything weighted heavier to occurring in wealthy areas. This is why my favorite slogan for fixing housing in California is "bulldoze Atherton first." MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 20:09
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Femtosecond posted:There's a variety of areas where I live in Vancouver BC that have been up zoned already for substantially higher densities, often years and years ago, which haven't been touched. From a layperson's point of view it's sort of baffling since I hear in the news that we're in a "housing crisis" and there's opportunities to build that aren't being taken up. Didn’t the housing bubble there pop? Femtosecond posted:The local YIMBY movement sees all Single Family Homes as reprehensible things that must be up zoned and done away with, but there is increasing push back from ethnic minorities that are questioning why it is seemingly always their SFH 'hoods that are targeted for redevelopment and not others. It's a reasonable question. The reason why this happens probably has little to do with racial animus and more to do with the fact that poor people are worse at NIMBY-ing up than rich people. Also poorer areas have cheaper land values.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:23
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MickeyFinn posted:I don't think the last two words in the bolded sentence are true, but that might be because we are using different definitions of "more viable." Elimination of parking minimums without funding more public transport will not make the buses run more frequently. When I think of making alternate modes of transportation "more viable" I think of allowing more people to use buses and bike lanes and trains and sidewalks instead of cars. In some sense, denser development actually does make the buses run more frequently: all else being equal, in a denser area the same bus line will cover more useful places to be. As such you can cover the same number of people with a shorter, more frequent bus line. Public transit is fundamentally limited by the actual development that exists; if people are closer together, it becomes more economical to offer the same coverage and frequency; in contrast, if development is sparse, high-frequency buses and subway lines can become too expensive to be feasible. Transit services like "park & ride" commuter rail are still useful, but not nearly as much as a good inner-city bus line or subway route. I highly recommend Jarrett Walker's Human Transit if you're interested in transit planning.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:25
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nrook posted:In some sense, denser development actually does make the buses run more frequently: all else being equal, in a denser area the same bus line will cover more useful places to be. As such you can cover the same number of people with a shorter, more frequent bus line. Public transit is fundamentally limited by the actual development that exists; if people are closer together, it becomes more economical to offer the same coverage and frequency; in contrast, if development is sparse, high-frequency buses and subway lines can become too expensive to be feasible. Transit services like "park & ride" commuter rail are still useful, but not nearly as much as a good inner-city bus line or subway route. Yes, if there is more density then buses are more efficient. This assumes that good transit follows density. Incidentally, I'm not sure reality bears that out. The other argument is that good transit allows for density. For example, convincing banks you don't need parking to build or convincing people they don't need cars. The question at hand is how do we get from where we are to higher density and good transit? Most people in this thread seem to agree they go hand-in-hand and on the eventual goal. Generally, and perhaps uncharitably, one group supports any step towards that goal. The other justifiably points out that poor people do the lions share of the sacrificing and that care is required.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:44
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Let's get rid of parking minimums, add a flat per unit fee to new builds, then the local council can build as much parking for it's residents as it likes.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:49
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That was meant to be a joke post trying to show how silly supporting parking minimums to protect the less well of is and the policy still manages to be better than parking minimums.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:51
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silence_kit posted:Didn’t the housing bubble there pop? More of a "soft landing." Prices have come down 10-15% for typical homes, higher for the sort of extreme luxury products that were more influenced by foreign buyers. There's still near 0% vacancy, though apparently rental prices are levelling off and declining after having spiked in the last few years. The trend I'm talking about of up zoned land lingering empty was present all through the most intense last few years of the housing crisis though. quote:The reason why this happens probably has little to do with racial animus and more to do with the fact that poor people are worse at NIMBY-ing up than rich people. Also poorer areas have cheaper land values. Yeah sure I agree, though the disagreeable end result is the same. The impacts on various racial minorities is severe when the development is over concentrated into their neighbourhood instead of more equitably being spread throughout the city. The city needs to understand this and take this into account when planning if they care at all about not displacing businesses and services that serve a specific community. Neighbourhood equity concerns is one reason I haven't much supported YIMBY policies to implement broad city wide upzones. In practice I think what one would see is that developers would be most keen on areas where the land is cheapest (read: low income, racialized communities) and redevelopment would appear in these areas instead of the wealthier areas, maximizing displacement of low income persons.
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Feb 2, 2020 21:03
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pointsofdata posted:That was meant to be a joke post trying to show how silly supporting parking minimums to protect the less well of is and the policy still manages to be better than parking minimums. There is not one single poster involved in this conversation who supports parking minimums.
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Feb 2, 2020 21:44
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nrook posted:In some sense, denser development actually does make the buses run more frequently: all else being equal, in a denser area the same bus line will cover more useful places to be. As such you can cover the same number of people with a shorter, more frequent bus line. Public transit is fundamentally limited by the actual development that exists; if people are closer together, it becomes more economical to offer the same coverage and frequency; in contrast, if development is sparse, high-frequency buses and subway lines can become too expensive to be feasible. Transit services like "park & ride" commuter rail are still useful, but not nearly as much as a good inner-city bus line or subway route. Thank you for the book recommendation. I agree with your point but I think it is a second-order effect. The bus lines (or any other non-car transit) has to be some kind of minimally useful in the first place, or maybe just not horrible, to get the benefits of density you describe, otherwise no one is going to use them anyway. Until alternative transport vectors allow lots of people to meet most (if not all) of their needs, i.e. as long as we have a car culture, buyers, renters, developers and bankers will still want parking everywhere and eliminating parking minimums will do very little to help with the housing crisis that, in particular, California is facing. When people are looking for places to live, they need to be able to get themselves to work, their kids to school, buy groceries, and find fun things to do on the weekend. To-date during my lifetime in the US the answer to those questions is to have a car because all of that stuff is scattered around a city with public transit that is far too slow to be useful.
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Feb 2, 2020 22:07
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I just want to say the discussion the last few pages has been mostly polite, engaging, and I’m learning a lot. Thanks thread! Meanwhile, this is the type of dumb poo poo we have to put up with in my area Potomac residents divided over proposed independent living facility https://www.wusa9.com/mobile/article/news/local/proposed-development-frustrates-residents/65-52bc21b3-363c-48a9-a7bd-579c7f8c3c81 quote:The proposed Heritage Gardens development is an independent living facility for people 62 and older, and would include 51 units and 113 parking spaces. quote:But Lemus said he worries about the traffic the proposed 113 parking spaces for the facility would bring. TLDR: NIMBYS in rich, exclusive, white neighborhood full of mcmanshions near DC are freaking the gently caress out over a small number of townhouses for seniors Also the developer was going to build 500 units but backed down to 51 due to opposition but even that wasn’t enough. Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 23:12
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I imagine the elderly have less effect on traffic than other people, too. Given that most are going to not be commuting to a job during the rush hour.
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Feb 3, 2020 00:21
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Boot and Rally posted:I appreciate that your opinion comes with research. That paper establishes that housing with parking costs more on the market. It does not establish why. It could be due to the necessity of driving making places with parking more desirable. It is a classic correlation is not causation problem. I'm saying that policies which promote abundant parking are more valuable to people who use cars more. As the rich have cars more and use them more, policies which encourage parking will disproportionately benefit them, at the expensive of no car or single car working class households. When we talk about residential parking, I'm not sure i would characterize mandated off street parking as a subsidy, since the cost is ultimately paid for by the resident. In this case they are simply an unnecessary financial burden imposed on those households which don't use cars, but not a subsidy. Where car is the dominant transit mode I think most housing developers would try to provide extra parking anyway. Where parking minimums are more obviously a subsidy is in downtown and urban areas. Providing parking is very expensive for businesses in these areas. It consumes a lot of land and space and capital. When that new cafe downtown has to pay twice as much in rent as it would otherwise, because its footprint needs to be twice as large as necessary, it's the consumers that ultimately pay the cost in increased prices. This is the "subsidy" I was referring to. Effectively the cost of the parking is redistributed from the drivers to everyone when parking must be provided for free, regardless of how they got to the businesses. As a result, even if you take a bus to downtown, you still in effect end up paying the cost of parking for those who drove. This is not a good policy outcome, as it unfairly privileges drivers. It is regressive because the benefit is disproportionately to the advantage of people with money, rather than without. Of course in many circumstances, people end up paying the subsidy in the form of just having fewer jobs, and services in their area as businesses relocate to the suburban fringe. Pedestrians and bus riders (disproportionately working class) also pay in the sense of having longer travel times, as devoting land to parking forces the urban area to become less dense and thus worse for non-car transit. Now as MickeyFinn has said (perhaps unnecessarily), there might be some specific circumstances where reducing minimums won't necessarily lead to increased density. Nobody thinks this one piece of policy is a magic bullet. But generally speaking, there are many places that would benefit. There are also less dramatic changes that could also be beneficial, like allowing more parking to be offsite, or just reducing how much has to be provided. So mainstreet can just be a nice, friendly, dense row of businesses without any open lots, but parking can still be available on the backstreets.
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Feb 3, 2020 02:57
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