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Tag parking

Links: Transit worker wages, farmers markets, parking, and beyond!

1. Austin Contrarian comes out in favor of a Republican proposal to lower bus drivers’ wages. I wish more liberal urbanists (i.e., urbanists) would comment on issues like these. I don’t see (m)any of them vociferously defending transit labor unions, but I also don’t see them criticizing them for making transit more costly and inefficient. 2. While NYC has a program that opens farmers markets in rich neighborhoods, regulations make it too difficult for private citizens to start their own markets, without government assistance, in parks and other open spaces in neighborhoods that could actually use them. 3. LA considers devolving some control over parking policy to neighborhood groups. Most of the powers that they’d give them appear to be liberalizing (reduce minimums, allow off-site parking to count), but it’d also give them the power to raise parking minimums. Can anyone who knows a bit more about LA tell me if this is, on net, a good idea? My gut says no – at least in my experience, the more local the power, the more likely people are to use it to stop dense development. 4. Apparently New York City maintains a dog run in Tribeca. Should the city really be subsidizing the laziness of incredibly wealthy dog owners in lower Manhattan? Regular parks at least increase land values nearby (well, at least in theory), but given that this one appears to be made of concrete and is covered in dog poop, I have a feeling that most of the neighbors wouldn’t miss it. 5. Lydia DePillis has a profile of DC-area real estate consultant/VIP Stephen Fuller. 6. Cap’n Transit on how regulation aimed at making buses safer could end up making us less safe.

Links

1. Maps of sprawl and gentrification in Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston. At first the picture looks bleak for cities, but Jesus – even downtown Detroit is growing! (More here.) 2. A real, live Texan (just kidding – he lives in Austin) replies to O’Toole on parking. 3. Why aren’t (more) urbanists cheering on Jerry Brown’s attempt to kill sprawl-inducing California redevelopment agencies? (Streetsblog SF/LA, I’m looking at you!) 4. NY lawsuit alleges that LEED standards are meaningless, and Charlie at Old Urbanist takes the opportunity to review the case against America’s most popular “greenness” metric. 5. This is awesome: The DC Office of Zoning makes the code and all the overlays accessible on Google Maps. Is there any other city with anything like it?

From the comments: Parking minimums in Houston

In a comment to yesterday’s post on land use in Texas, baklazkhan notes that in spite of the libertarian myth of Houston as a completely (or even relatively) laissez-faire city with regards to land use, it actually has pretty strict parking minimums: Additionally, it’s interesting to compare the actual ordinances. Here, for instance, are Houston’s and San Francisco’s (+more). What’s noteworthy is that SF’s minimums are way lower. SF requires 1 space per residential unit of any size, while Houston requires 1.25-2/unit. A 6-classroom elementary school in Houston requires 9 spaces – SF requires one. An 18-classroom high school – Houston 171, SF 9 (!). The other notable thing about SF’s requirements for commercial spaces is that, in almost every case, they don’t apply to small businesses. For instance, for restaurants, Houston requires 8 spaces/1000 square feet. SF requires 5. But in SF if your restaurant is under 5000 square feet, which all but the largest are, you’re excused from any parking requirements at all.

A far-too-long rebuttal of Randal O’Toole on parking

Donald Shoup and Randal O’Toole – they just can’t get enough of each other! Donald Shoup, you may recall, is the granddaddy of free market parking policy, and Randal O’Toole is the self-styled Antiplanner. Though they both claim to be libertarians, they seem to have some pretty fundamental disagreements, which we heterodox libertarians at Market Urbanism can relate to. Shoup has made a career out of pointing out the sprawl-enhancing effects of minimum parking regulations and under-priced on-street parking, whereas O’Toole’s made his on the idea that sprawl is the free market equilibrium and that smart growth, not anti-density NIMBYism, isthe greatest threat to free markets in land. They’ve sparred before in a roundabout way, with Randal O’Toole replying to Tyler Cowen’s very Shoupian NYT column and then Shoup posting a three–part rebuttal to that (which I wasn’t totally onboard with, surprisingly), but I think this Cato Unbound issue is the first time they’re being published head-on. It’ll also also include friend and former Market Urbanism contributer Sandy Ikeda, whose opinion I’m excited to read, along with Clifford Winston of Brookings. Shoup’s contribution was good, though probably familiar to Market Urbanism readers. But it’s O’Toole’s that I want to talk about. There’s a lot about what he wrote that I take issue with, but to keep this post to a manageable length (I could easily make my reply to O’Toole a three-part series), I’ll stick to this paragraph. O’Toole is arguing that in most of America, parking minimums don’t contribute to sprawl since developers would build that much parking anyway: To find out what cities would be like without minimum-parking requirements, we must turn to Texas, where counties aren’t even allowed to zone, much less impose minimum-parking requirements. This means developers are free to build for the market, not for urban planners. […]

NYC’s horrible parking privatization plan

In the past, Market Urbanism has not been very pleased with municipal parking privatization schemes. While we are pro-privatization in theory, in practice, many of the schemes turn out to be seriously deficient in market credentials. For one, true privatization would mean giving the “owners” full rights to the land, including some sort of development rights. In addition to the option of leaving the land as parking, the “owners” should be allowed to use the space for other uses, like a parklet or maybe even opening it up to food trucks and small farmers’ markets. Or perhaps when they redevelop the property, they could extend the building a few more feet onto the sidewalk and make up the lost sidewalk space in what is now the parking space. Parking privatization schemes, however, allow for none of that. So the only redeeming quality is that they are politically palatable ways of raising woefully underpriced on-street parking prices. But as the Queens Gazette reports, New York won’t even get this benefit if Bloomberg’s plan is successful: The plan is similar to one established in Chicago in 2008 with one exception. Unlike the Chicago system, parking fees in New York City would remain in strict control of city officials. “In no way would officials give up the right to establish parking rates in New York City,” officials said. So if the owners aren’t allowed to do anything but park cars in the spots, and they don’t even have the right to raise prices, then what exactly does the “privatization” do? Well, for one it gives the city an lump-sum check – essentially the net present value of the revenues of the space. This is really just a form of borrowing – while they’ll be getting more money now, they get less money later. But […]

Even a HUD project in a high-density Bronx neighborhood can’t escape the parking minimum

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s taken a look at America’s absurdly restrictive minimum parking requirements, but Streetsblog has come up with a really great example of really bad parking policy in action: The HUD-sponsored project, located on Bathgate Avenue between 183rd and 184th Streets, was originally slated to be an 18-unit building. Under the zoning that used to govern the site, the parking minimums were low enough that fewer than five spaces were required, said Ferrara. With such a small number of required spaces, the project was eligible for a waiver, meaning it didn’t need to build any parking at all. In October, however, the area was classified as a “neighborhood preservation area” by the Department of City Planning in its Third Avenue/Tremont Avenue rezoning. The new zoning, known as R6A, carries slightly higher parking requirements for affordable projects [PDF]. “When we went down to an R6A,” said Ferrara, “it put us in a position where we couldn’t get the parking waived.” In effect, the rezoning added parking requirements where there hadn’t been any before. I’ve praised Bloomberg’s rezoning in the past while also worrying that the lack of parking minimum reform would hold back growth. It looks like I was too generous—in some cases, the rezoning has actually made the parking minimum problem worse. And just for the record, I looked up the location on a map, and the specific location is about a 10 minute walk to the closest B/D local station on the Grand Concourse. Its zipcode is pretty poor – 10458’s average adjusted gross income has been in decline since 2000 when adjusted for inflation, and currently stands at only $23,781. And obviously it’s a HUD project. There’s also this interesting bit: Even though he reported that it’s “not uncommon” to subdivide a […]

Links

1. China’s high-speed rail scandal. So much for Obama’s State of the Union shout-out. 2. Boston, Philadelphia, and DC are all moving towards parking reform – both of minimum off-street requirements (unfortunately to be replaced with maximums in most cases) and of underpriced curb parking – but NYC’s the laggard. Like I noted a few weeks ago, this could be sabotaging its recent upzonings. 3. One Democratic Assemblyman wants to hamstring the NYC subway with yet another ridiculously overbearing safety rule – literally forcing trains to come to a complete halt right before entering a station – adding significant time to existing commutes. 4. NYC’s FRESH initiative gives money to a politically-connected supermarket for a parking lot. Wait, isn’t car-owning food desert victim an oxymoron? 5. Downtown San Jose’s Diridon station – the most transit-accessible place in San Jose – is getting $10 billion worth of new rail. Zoning consultants were paid for a year, and came up with the following recommendation: “no proposed changes to current code.” Got that? $10 billion in rail investment in one of the most progressive places in America and there will be no new TOD allowed.

Jamaica, Queens upzoning was great, but don’t forget the parking minimums

In Next American City, Aaron Barker discusses the failure of NYC’s massive rezoning in the highly transit-dependent black and immigrant neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens: One of the centerpieces of [NYC’s] initiative to house an expected 1 million new arrivals in the coming decades was the Jamaica Plan. Covering 365 square blocks surrounding a major rail hub in Queens, it was the largest rezone in the city’s history, projected to bring 9,600 jobs and 3 million square feet of new commercial space to the area. Even though it’s been over three years since the resolution passed, almost none of the expected 5,100 units of new residential construction have materialized. In fact, the only real activity has been at MODA, a 350 unit, mixed-income rental complex that opened this summer. He then poses the question: “Can redevelopment on a meaningful scale really only occur in already sought-after areas?” While it’s true that Jamaica did undergo a tremendous upzoning, there was one element missing: Minimum parking requirement reform. From what I can tell from NYC’s zoning maps and code (which are notoriously difficult to understand), there was barely any let-up at all in the Special Downtown Jamaica District (zoning district “DJ”), despite the NY Metro Chapter of the American Planning Association asking the city planners to eliminate the minimums (.pdf). Streetsblog actually wrote about this tendency to upzone without lifting parking minimums a year ago. Now, I don’t have any specific knowledge of Jamaica – I’ve only actually been to Queens once. But based on this study that we featured a few weeks ago, developers in NYC in general (and actually the study focuses on sites in Queens) only build as much parking as the zoning code mandates, implying that it is a binding constraint on development. So before we declare that zoning […]

More empirical evidence that parking minimums matter

The other day, I had a meeting with Sam Staley and we both lamented the paucity of good empirical evidence about how land use regulations actually affect the built environment. For the ubiquitous minimum parking requirements, the only thing I’ve seen up until now was this study about the effects for LA County’s population of 10 million. But searching on Google Scholar, I found a 2011 article called Minimum parking requirements and housing affordability in New York City in the journal Housing Policy Debate which also addresses the issue: […] In this article, we explore the theoretical objections to minimum parking requirements and the limited empirical literature. We then use lot-level data and GIS to analyze parking requirements in New York City to determine to what extent they are already effectively sensitive to transit proximity. Finally, we examine developer response to parking requirements by comparing the number of spaces that are actually built to the number required by applicable zoning law. Our results indicate that the per-unit parking requirement in New York is, on average, lower in areas near rail transit stations, but the required number of spaces per square foot of lot area is higher, on average, in transit accessible areas. We also find that by and large, developers tend to build only the bare minimum of parking required by zoning, suggesting that the minimum parking requirements are binding for developers, as argued by critics, and that developers do not simply build parking out of perceived marked [sic?] need. Our results raise the possibility that even in cities with complex and tailored parking requirements, there is room to tie the requirements more closely to contextual factors. Further, such changes are likely to result in fewer parking spaces from residential developers. Unfortunately I cannot find an ungated version of the full […]

Links

1. Systemic Failure praises Gov. (again) Jerry Brown’s efforts to do away with California’s redevelopment agencies and “enterprise zones” (there’s a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one), which the author claims promote autocentric development with public funds. He then cites a few examples of redevelopment agencies pushing such plans in San Jose. If he can come up with that many in one city, I can’t even imagine how much damage they’ve done throughout the whole state. So far I’m liking Jerry Brown’s second act. 2. A very interesting Wikipedia article about a controversial Brooklyn-based developer. 3. One Staten Island councilman wants to use the dreaded environmental review against bike lanes. 4. An article about the Toronto condo boom. I’d like to know more about this: But perhaps the biggest demographic that will continue to drive sales this year is the investor market, both local and international. Mr. Lamb says there are few developers building rental towers any longer, in part due to the city’s rent control laws, so investors hold the key to rental accommodation. He says it’s not uncommon for 40% of a building to be owned by investors, with most rentals situated below the fifteenth floor because they are less expensive than those with a brighter view. Mr. Myers estimates 50% to 60% of downtown condo units are owned by investors who rent them out.

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