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Search Results for parking

Parking lots as tax arbitrage during the Great Depression

I’ve learned a lot from Fogelson’s Downtown, but one thing that I had absolutely no idea about before I read this book was how Depression-era tax policies encouraged downtown landlords to tear down their buildings and replace them with parking lots (emphasis mine): By the mid 1930s the owners of Detroit’s Temple Theater, a nine-story office building that had once been the home of the city’s most successful vaudeville house, had had enough. In a city reeling from the Great Depression, the vacancy rate for office buildigns was running between 35 and 40 percent. With tenants hard to find – and rents, which had been falling steadily, hard to collect – the Temple Theater no long paid. In an attempt to lower property taxes and operating expenses, its owners did what other downtown property owners in Detroit and other cities had done. They demolished the building and turned the site into a parking lot. [These] were commonly referred to as “taxpayers.” The “taxpayers” were as much a legacy of the depression as the “Hoovervilles,” bread lines, soup kitches, and dance marathons. They symbolized downtown in the 1930s as much as skyscrapers, department stores, and high-rise hotels had in the 1920s. […] Things were much the same in downtown Los Angeles, where so many buildings were torn down and replaced by parking lots or “taxpayers” in the 1930s that by the early 1940s roughly 25 percent of the buildable land was used to store autos. In a business district of less than one square mile there were no more than nine hundred parking lots and garages, with space for more than sixty-five thousand cars. […] By tearing down the buildings, the owners could lower their tax bills and reduce their operating expenses. By replacing them with parking lots or one- and […]

Private parking contracting giving ‘privatization’ a bad name

In the past Market Urbanism has been lukewarm on parking “privatization” (Adam on Chicago and me on LA), but I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s a bad idea. To start off with, these “privatizations” are actually private contracting schemes – the “owners” are barely even allowed to set their own prices, nevermind decide to use their land for, *gasp* something other than parking. The possible benefit from the market urbanism perspective is that they seem to be accompanied by the raising of parking prices, but the potential pitfalls are actually quite large. Yonah Freemark explains, in a commentary on NJ Transit’s plan to “privatize” its parking lots: Moreover, the privatization of parking management prevents the agency from engaging in what is perhaps the most promising use of that resource: Redeveloping it into transit-oriented developments. In places like the San Francisco Bay Area, former transit parking lots have been successfully morphed into neighborhoods where people live in close proximity to public transportation and therefore use it frequently. Will the privatization deal make such projects impossible? My only quibble with Yonah (and just about everybody) is that the market’s contribution to urbanism is maligned and neglected enough as it is – do we really have to associate yet another sprawl-inducing policy intervention with “privatization”? But beyond that, he’s got a point – rather than taking on entrenched suburban interests, we’re just adding another layer of government dependents, this time of the monied corporate variety (bidders include KKR, Morgan Stanley, Carlyle, and JP Morgan). The land on which transit parking lots sit is uniquely positioned to be converted into dense development, and the only thing worse than sitting on the land would be for the agencies to sign away their rights to change that within the foreseeable future. The good news, […]

Free parking outside the $1,000/mo garage

This $1,000+/mo. parking space (without the 18+% parking tax! but one Curbed commenters calls bullshit) on the Upper East Side has been bouncing around the NYC blogosphere, and Curbed commenter low baller just about sums up my thoughts on the matter: And people howl because street parking is going up to $1 / hour (but of course free after 7pm and mostly free all the time off the avenues)? So let me get this straight – Upper East Side apartment: $4,000 a month, parking $1,000 a month, parking spot outside said apartment free, or at most $1 an hour. And oh, how they howl!

Parking politics in the 1920s and a bleg

While doing research for something totally unrelated, I came across this paper by Asha Weinstein (.pdf) on parking policy in Boston in the 1920s. One of the things she (?) discusses is the political feasibility of charging for the right to park downtown: Despite this general consensus, however, there was no shared view on what might constitute effective downtown parking policies. On the one hand, most people supported modest policy changes such as modifying existing regulations, improving motorist compliance with those regulations, or building more off-street parking, but even the strongest advocates of such policies never claimed they would significantly impact congestion. At the other end of the spectrum, a few people called for the drastic options of banning all street parking during business hours, or charging a fee to park on the streets. These proposals were touted as highly effective congestion relief, but they garnered little serious support and generated storms of opposition, and were never treated as serious proposals by the larger community. […] So you might think to yourself, “Banning parking entirely seems kind of draconian, but pricing parking at least sounds rational.” But you’re not a Bostonian living in 1926: Even less popular than a parking ban was the idea of a parking fee. In January 1926, this new approach to parking was proposed by a sub-committee of Boston’s Ways and Means Committee and Mayor Nichols. The proposal called for keeping the existing parking regulations, but charging drivers an annual fee of $5 to $10 for the right to park on city streets. The opposition from business and automobile advocacy groups was decisive and adversarial. All the city’s newspapers ran scathing articles. For example, the high-society Transcript immediately published an editorial warning that the proposed fee would be counterproductive as a revenue-generator because it would likely […]

NYC to raise on-street parking rates, local news freaks out

New York City has some of the most underpriced parking in the nation, and while there have been a few pilot programs (in the UES, the West Village, and Park Slope) to raise rates during peak hours, it looks like Bloomberg is finally pushing to implement Park Smart citywide.  Residential metered hourly rates throughout the city will be bumped up to $1 (they were 50¢ just six months ago) and commercial rates will rise to $3 (they were $2 six months ago). Beyond this, peak on-street parking in the busiest commercial zones will cost even more. The Post loads its article with driver outrage (headline: “Feed it and weep!  Meter$ jacked up”; opening line: “Park your wallet right here, drivers.”), but at least towards the end they suggest a benefit of the program: “More than half of the business owners and drivers in the area said parking became easier once the more expensive pilot program went into effect.” The CBS affiliate starts off interviewing a guy who lives on the Upper West Side who thinks that Bloomberg “should pay for [parking] himself.  Dip into his pocket […] and put it to the city.”  The interviewer then asks, “And pay for your parking?” and he answers, completely unashamed, “Right!”  The next guy complains about how tough it is to survive in the city, while he commuters by car from Rockville Centre in Nassau County (median household income: $99,299). He’s joined in this opinion by a fellow Long Island resident from Melville (median household income: $92,527). After a city representative notes that it’s a steal compared to off-street garages and an UES physician agrees, the presenter finishes by announcing plans to charge “sky high rates” on busy commercial streets during peak hours – so they’ll be higher than the $3.75/hour that they are now. […]

Ann Arbor’s biggest problem with medical marijuana? Parking

Of course it would be the only thing standing in the way of Ann Arbor, the famously liberal college town that almost legalized weed in the ’60s and ’70s, and medical marijuana: Even for some Ann Arbor residents, the city’s tacit acceptance started to give way to unease. As more and more dispensaries opened up, some residents started calling council members to complain about congested parking and busy traffic near pot shops. So there you have it. I guess the only issue more controversial than pot is parking.

DC parking minimums to “disappear in most cases”

Last month, Eric Fidler of Greater Greater Washington left a tantalizing comment suggesting that DC was going to do away with its minimum parking requirements soon. Obviously this would be very big news and a welcome change for market urbanists, and it looks like it might indeed pan out. On Monday the Zoning Commission is taking comments, but the DC Office of Planning’s draft is apparently very promising. The documents themselves are, like all planning documents, quite long and bury all the dirt within a morass of bullet-points. While I read over the first dozen or so pages, my eyes soon glazed over and so I’ll be relying on GGW’s summary. So, to start out with, here’s the good news: Parking minimums would disappear in most cases. In neighborhood commercial corridors or low-density residential areas without good transit, commercial, institutional, or multi-family residential buildings would still need to provide some parking. But any area with good transit service, or high-density areas, would have no requirements. Beyond that, however, the plan falls short of the market urbanist ideal. To misquote the internet meme, “planners gonna plan” – not content to simply dismantle the previous density-forbidden regimes, the planners are trying to stay relevant by instituting a few density-forcing rules. Parking maximums would come into effect (total lot size, for example, would be capped at 500 or 1000 spaces), and new parking lots wouldn’t be allowed adjacent to sidewalks, a reversal of the traditional setback requirements which encourage the parking-in-front designs so common in America. And while I’m sure in many of these cases the maximums will be set higher than people want to build anyway, GGW points out at least a few proposed projects that would have too much parking under the guidelines. One thing the plan doesn’t seem to mention […]

Matt Yglesias attacks parking maximums, outs himself as a market urbanist

Matt Yglesias has been on a roll lately with the urbanism posts, all of which have a heavy “market urbanist” slant, but it’s this post about parking reform in/around Boston (riffing off of this Boston Globe article) that seals the deal for me: Regulators pushing developers to build less parking than they want is much, much, much better than the near-universal practice of regulators mandating minimum levels of parking. But I do think the message is clearer and the potential political coalition bigger if parking reformers just stick to the idea that this should be left up to the market. Cars are useful, and people who have cars need to park them. So there’s nothing wrong with building parking. But urban space is expensive, and parking spaces take up space, so people should weigh the costs and benefits of building/buying more parking against other possibilities. Getting to market-determined levels of parking construction and parking space pricing would be a huge victory, and it’s not particularly necessary to go beyond that. I guess the only thing I’d have to add is that while I think these sort of parking maximums and general density-forcing rules are of minor import compared to the massively anti-density status quo, they do give rhetorical ammo to people like Randal O’Toole and other self-proclaimed libertarian types who like to claim that what planners really want is to banish cars entirely from cities. The sad truth is that they’re right – New Urbanism/Smart Growth might have some libertarian issues at heart, but at the end of the day, they’re out to put us all on trains/buses/bikes/our own two feet, not to set the market right. Now again, I think that O’Toole & Co. vastly overestimate the influence of density-forcing regulations, but they do have somewhat of a point. […]

Midnight parking round-up

1. Donald Shoup makes up for last week with an interesting piece on how America’s tax structure biases employers towards providing parking for their employees, similar to how untaxed employer-provided healthcare shapes that industry. 2. Back in August Randal O’Toole asked for proof that minimum parking requirements force Walmart to build more parking than they otherwise would. I think this is a bit of a red herring, since obviously parking reform would have more of an impact in areas that are more urban than where Walmart typically locates, but lo and behold, here’s the proof, at least in the case of one store in Northeastern Connecticut. In this case it looks like the parking minimums are going to be reduced, but I question whether smaller companies without Wal-Mart’s clout and money could have demanded such changes. 3. A survey of urban planners, supposedly biased towards big cities, found that 60% feel that the free market would not provide an adequate amount of parking if developers were not given parking minimums, with only 1 in 10 believing that the market would provide too much parking. The author of the paper, called “Are suburban TODs over-parked?” (.pdf), and published in the Journal of Public Transportation, found that suburban TOD projects in the East Bay and Portland supplied too much parking for the amount of cars that were actually parked. The authors unfortunately don’t do a great job of linking the parking surplus directly to parking minimums, but they do provide some interesting empirical evidence for what Matt Yglesias called “parking feedback loops” and what the study’s authors term a “virtuous cycle” – the idea that parking itself is a barrier to walkability, and thus removing spaces will lessen the demand for parking, even if nobody was using the spots that were removed.

Enforced price ceilings on private parking lots

by Stephen Smith I wrote last week about a tendency in developing Asian countries to emulate the most anti-market Western planning policies, but I didn’t realize it was this bad. Paul Barter writes: Would it surprise you to know that some cities control the price of parking even for private-sector off-street parking operations? Beijing, Guangzhou, Hanoi and Jakarta do control parking prices, so I assume the practice is common throughout China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Obviously, the “controlling” is a price cap, not a price minimum, and Barter makes a convincing case that the rates are indeed below the market price. I don’t recall ever hearing about price controls on private parking in the West, but it looks like the urge to come up with new ways to cater to car owners is universal. I should add that Paul Barter’s new blog Reinventing Parking is a must-read for anyone interested in parking policy. He’s based in Singapore and writes a lot about Southeast Asia and China, and has another more general blog called Reinventing Urban Transport.

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