My Case Against Parking Minimums
Identifying one of the Root Causes of our City's Unaffordability
Yesterday, I had an opportunity to publish my case against parking minimums in an online publication, CounterPunch. You can read it in full (and please do, to create some web traffic!)
To those unfamiliar, parking minimums is a tool of urban planning, wherein a new business or housing developers must include a certain amount of parking spaces (not on the public street, but in a garage or lot) for their customers. Parking is a sensitive subject in LA, and there is no wrath like an Angelino who has a parking space taken away from them. But much of that is because of our cognitive bias: we have been conditioned to think of parking as free to the end consumer, but just because parking is unpaid does not mean you are not paying for it! As a result, parking minimums are incredibly expensive to residents and our cities. As I write in the article:
Parking requirements are similarly wasteful, but at a much greater scale: every parking space in a new building costs $55,000 to build, and including parking increases monthly rents between $100-300 a month.
That figure probably understates the cost of parking requirements in a city like LA, where new housing often digs underground to build parking garages. Digging underground adds cost on top of the land needed to create a parking lot. When you are talking about a housing crisis, a couple of hundred dollars can make a huge difference in someone’s budget. But on top of that, it is unclear that urban planners can centrally plan for demand for parking rigorously. As UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup has long argued, parking minimums are a pseudo-scientific enterprise that generates a lot of waste. As I wrote:
Here in LA County, we have approximately 19 Million parking spaces, almost double our 10 Million residents and over five times our total housing units. We can assume that the vast majority of these are vacant at any given time. A study in King County, Washington, found that almost one-third of parking spaces in apartment complexes sit empty overnight, to say nothing of the overnight vacant parking in commercial zones.
No economist would be surprised to find out that centralized planning that doesn’t respond to market signals leads to shortages and surpluses. You had long lines at gas pumps in the 1970s, as price controls made it impossible for companies to get gas to the places it was needed. Parking is no different. Because parking is valuable, most developments in a world without parking requirements would still include parking spaces, but not requiring parking makes a considerable difference in cost in the minority of projects where parking is burdensome. So as I argue in the article:
If Angelinos love their cars as much as purported, there’s no reason for the government to mandate that businesses include parking, rather than letting people and businesses make their own choices.
Imagine that governments forced fast food establishments to make the sandwiches on their menu to include a refillable drink. We can all recognize that this policy would be incredibly wasteful: yes, people need to drink, but that does not mean all restaurant consumers will want or need a drink when they order a burger. Mandating beverages would harm consumers who don’t drink soda, and it would also harm those who simply have a tight budget. Furthermore, revoking the option to buy just the sandwich means all prices will increase to cover the cost of the drink. The only people this would seem to help is those who drink excessive amounts of soda, and similarly, the only folks who benefit from parking minimums are those who drive an unhealthy amount.
Parking minimums also have a substantial negative impact on small businesses. For example, Azel Sepulveda, a mechanic in Pasadena, Texas, recently won a lawsuit overriding a local parking ordinance that was so burdensome it would have prevented him from opening a business:
Last year, with his first child on the way, Azael took a leap and purchased a new location on Shaver Street. The property had five existing parking spots, which Azael knew was more than enough for his business. He spent all of his savings, took out a loan and put his house up as collateral, all so he could provide for his growing family.
After he bought the property, Azael was informed by city officials that he would need to add an additional 23 parking spaces before he could open. But Azael runs a one-man shop and takes cars by appointment only. He simply does not need that many parking spaces—not to mention that they wouldn’t fit and he couldn’t afford to build them.
But what is ultimately most salient to me (and hopefully to Counter Punch’s left-of-center audience) is that “free parking” is essentially a tax on the poor and the environmentally conscious:
By not charging a fair price for storing a car at the end of a journey, mandating parking serves as a hidden subsidy for solo car trips. Not only does this incentivize congestion and air pollution, but it also serves as a tax on the poorest Angelinos who drive less. Cars often cost tens of thousands in upfront costs to buy, and with insurance, gas, repairs, and interest on loans, they can cost several thousand dollars more every year to maintain. Thus it’s no surprise that a 2017 survey found that 84% of bus riders in LA did not own a car, and their median household income was $15,620. Other data shows that residents of South and East LA drive far less than suburban residents of the San Fernando Valley.
Now that said, any of my fellow faith-based nonprofit workers have more of a natural distrust of markets than I do, and may object that the parking market will not work for our city's lowest-income residents. The problem with that objection is that the data is clear that the lowest-income Angelinos are the least likely to drive a car. After all, cars are expensive: they often cost tens of thousands of upfront costs to buy, but between insurance, gas, repairs, and very high interest on car loans, they often cost owners several thousand dollars every year to maintain. Mandating parking thus hurts the poorest people in our city, as their rent bill includes the cost of the space for a car they do not own.
Likewise, when cities lift parking minimums, the type of housing that is built the most is disproportionately affordable housing because those are the developers who benefit the most:
San Diego ended its parking requirements near transit stops in 2019; it saw a five-fold increase in the housing built around its transit stops. This included 1564 subsidized affordable units created around transit, 1292 more than were created the year before. Many of those units were part of 100% affordable projects that were presumably made feasible because the developers could reduce the cost of providing parking.
This success is not unique to San Diego: after I published the article, Reason Magazine ran a piece analyzing the success of Minneapolis’ 2040 housing reforms:
Minneapolis is in fact seeing an increase in new housing development. According to CPED's numbers, the city issued close to 4,000 building permits annually for new housing units from 2018 through 2021. That's an increase from the 2,600 units the city was permitted on average each year from 2013 through 2017.
This new building appears to have led rents to stabilize and even drop for some segments of the population:
Janne Flisrand, writing at local urbanist blog Streets MN, has parsed rental price data to find that median, nominal rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments are renting for less today than they did in 2018. Median prices for three-bedroom units have ticked up by 2 percent. This is in spite of record inflation and a nationwide trend of rising rents.
Parking Reform was a significant part of that success story:
What's responsible for the increased housing production then? Wittenberg credits the city's elimination of parking minimums—which had typically required one parking spot per housing unit—with facilitating increased construction of smaller apartment buildings.
The city has been chipping away at residential parking minimums since 2009. The Minneapolis 2040 plan eliminated them entirely. (The city has also adopted some rather un-free market parking policies, including parking maximums in some areas and bike parking minimums.)
Data culled by Wittenberg, and shared with Reason, shows that 19 major projects have been approved by Minneapolis' Planning Commission since parking minimums were eliminated. The median project provided .42 residential parking spaces per unit, with smaller apartment buildings typically including even less parking.
Brittney and I have personally seen how parking is a practical incremental way to save on housing costs: when we were first married, we lived in a small, 12-unit apartment complex with two parking spaces but only one car. We were not allowed to rent out the unused space to a neighbor or friend, and our landlord was not inclined to reduce our rent simply because we didn’t make use of the parking space. So instead, valuable land in a dense LA neighborhood sat vacantly. Finally, after a year and a half, we moved into a cheaper apartment with no off-street parking spots provided. Of course, not having dedicated parking is occasionally an inconvenience. Still, we are better off in the long run because the market gave us an option to prioritize cheaper rent over parking spaces. Unfortunately, many Angelinos never get to make that choice and are forced into more expensive units instead.
If you want to learn more about parking reform, I will recommend checking out the work of Donald Shoup, a professor at UCLA. Vox did a nice short explainer of his work; you can watch:
The high cost of free parking
Or you can read a nicely summarized version of his book. Another great resource is Chuck Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, a civil engineer who decided his civil engineering work was doing more harm than good.
Thankfully, California has the opportunity to end most parking requirements in major cities through AB 2907. This bill would be one of the most significant incremental steps California has taken yet to reverse the housing crisis. If you live in LA, and if you are interested in learning more and advocating for it, join me in those efforts!