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Brent Gaisford

Brent Gaisford

  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 4

Parking Requirements Increase Traffic And Rents. Let’s Abolish Them.

Everybody in LA can agree on one thing – traffic blows hard. Harder, even, than these guys:               Hate traffic? Blame parking. But here’s a secret: people don’t cause traffic. Cars do. And you know what makes people use cars? Parking. If you’ve got nowhere to put your car when you arrive, you aren’t going to drive, and you aren’t going to contribute to traffic. Research has shown that for every 10% increase in parking, 7.7% more people commute with a car. Hate high rent? Blame parking. That’s a bad start. But it gets worse. Parking is also driving up your rent. Building parking spaces is incredibly expensive – each underground parking spot in LA costs about $35,000. Even if your unit includes “free” parking, you’re paying for the cost of that parking in your rent every month, whether you want to or not. Parking is cheaper to build above ground (if you can call $27,000 cheap), but then it takes up valuable space for apartments. All those dollar signs have an impact–UCLA professor Donald Shoup has calculated that requiring parking reduces the number of units in new apartment buildings by 13%. But parking is even more insidious than that. Often, when a new housing project is proposed, one of the first things that angry people (NIMBYs) yell about is traffic. Sometimes, those NIMBYs successfully stop housing from being built, and we desperately need all the housing we can get to contain our skyrocketing rents. Then why the hell do we require all new buildings to include so much parking? You’d think, then, that developers might stop providing parking. But they can’t, because we did something really, really dumb. We’ve created a system that requires parking to be provided with all new projects. For an apartment […]

Lack of New Housing On The Westside Is Causing Gentrification Of East And South LA

[Research help for this article was provided by UCLA student Mitchell Boswell] The past 15 years have seen a hell of a lot of gentrification in LA. 15% of our poor neighborhoods have undergone gentrification since the year 2000, and it feels like things have only accelerated since the end of the financial crisis. That’s putting a huge strain on communities across the city, from Boyle Heights to Leimert Park. But before we get into why, let’s get one thing out of the way… Academics love to debate about whether gentrification is good or bad for residents of poor neighborhoods. Maybe we should try listening to what people actually want. Some argue that when a neighborhood gentrifies, more of the existing residents stay in the neighborhood than they otherwise would (one of the many, many hard things about poverty is housing insecurity, so folks tend to move around a lot no matter what), and also tend to be more satisfied after the change. On the other side of the debate are people arguing that as gentrification occurs, the investment and new residents push up rent prices and drive out poor residents who made that community home. It’s not clear who’s right. That all seems pretty academic – it’s an argument between folks who are well-off about whether or not people in poor neighborhoods should be happy. Instead of telling people how they should feel, maybe we should stop and listen, just for a minute, to what they want. And a lot of those people sure as hell don’t seem to want gentrification. The lack of new housing on the Westside is driving gentrification There are a lot of reasons for gentrification, but the lack of new housing on the Westside deserves a lot of the blame in recent years. As […]

How Los Angeles’ Rent Got So Damn High

[Research help for this article was provided by UCLA student Hunter Iwig] The rent in LA has gone up 30% in the last three years. What the hell? Three big things happened, two of them awesome, and one dumb. We decided living in cities was cool again (awesome), city centers are creating tons of new jobs (awesome), and we didn’t build very many new places to live in our cities (not awesome). Living in cities is cool again (awesome) In the 1950s and 1960s our cities stopped growing and people started moving to the suburbs. We kept it up for a long, long time. But something has changed in the last 10-15 years. More and more people prefer to live in walkable, urban areas. Today, 52% of Americans say they would like to live in a place where they do not need to use a car very often. For millennials, it’s even higher – 63% say they want the walkable convenience of cities. City dwellers do less environmental damage and cause less traffic, so that sounds like pretty damn good news. Cities are creating tons of jobs (awesome) New jobs used to be created in suburbs. But since the Great Recession until 2011, that’s changed – cities are where the new jobs are. And, surprise surprise, people want to move to places where they can get jobs. We’ve made it incredibly hard to build more houses in LA and other cities (not awesome) First, a quick primer. You can’t build anything you want wherever you want. Zoning and planning rules dictate what can be built on any given plot of land. In 1960, L.A. had a population of 2.5 million, but its zoning rules allowed for housing for 10 million if every lot was built to it’s maximum density. Today our […]

High Rent Sucks. Let’s Build More Houses.

LA rent sucks. It’s way, way too damn high. Let’s fix it. If you rent, you’re probably already on board. You gotta pay the man on the 1st of the month, every month, and that sucks. But what if you are the man? You’ve got the sweet house, the trophy husband, the picket fence. Even then, you should still be upset. Here’s why this matters, to everybody: High housing costs are hamstringing the whole American economy. To the tune of a TRILLION dollars a year. $3,000 for every man, woman, and child. Short and sweet – the places where the rents are too damn high tend to be places where people are more productive and can make a lot of money (think entertainment in LA, tech in SF, or finance in NYC). But because the cost of living is so high in those places, lots of people choose to move to places where it is cheap instead. If we drove rents down, and people started moving to where the best jobs are, the US economy would grow by $1-2 trillion a year. That’s more money for you, more money for me, and more money for Uncle Sam. High rents are trapping us in our cars, breaking up families, and literally driving us into obesity and early death.  Remember those high-paying jobs in our most productive cities? Well some people want them even though they can’t afford to live near them. So they drive, and they drive far. And when more people drive, and the farther we drive, the more cars there are on the road (cars on road = # of people driving x distance they drive). Then we’re all stuck in traffic. Sitting in our damn cars for hours in traffic makes us fat, gives us less time at […]

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