NB: What appears to be a great idea has many (perhaps, unintended)
consequences without other appropriate socio-economic changes. The USA
has a socio-economic system based upon both a massive trucking logistics
system and a private vehicular transportation system (as well as other
things, including racism, classism, etc.). Converting all of the USA
into the model of the older cities of the USA (such as the New York city
area) with a very high population per unit area density -- the
equivalent of industrial caged/restrained animal products (caged egg
laying chickens as one example) for humans -- may not be feasible,
particularly in earthquake prone regions. In the case of New York city
density, current technology mass transit is feasible. In low population
density areas, including areas such as the Inland Empire, adjustment of
the work day (with no decrease in total net worker compensation) to
perhaps two to four hours per day would allow for the three to four hour
(or more) round trip times required by current public transportation
service for essential goods and services (DoorDash et al. is NOT the
solution). As for anything outside a local area, such as the current
way legitimate theatre, symphony orchestra, grand opera, or for those
who want professional entertainment sports (USA baseball, USA football,
etc.), the present low population density of many megalopolan areas in
California make attendance at such events much more difficult.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopolis ) Are there solutions that
actually would work? The likely answer is yes, but not without
fundamental re-allocation of the total financial resources of the
population of California (eventually, the USA and beyond) within the
present monetized socio-economic systems.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-parking-space-law-aims-for-affordable-housing-and-climate-change-win-win-222640846.html
Yahoo News
California parking space law aims for affordable housing and climate
change ‘win-win’
Ben Adler
Senior Editor
Thu, October 6, 2022 at 3:26 PM
California is famous for its car culture, which the automotive website
Jalopnik has dubbed “second to none,” but it's also known for its
environmentalism and its sky-high housing prices. So, in an effort to
lower the cost of construction and cut down on car dependence, the state
has recently adopted a law that prohibits local governments from setting
minimum parking requirements for new buildings within half a mile of a
transit hub such as a rail station or the intersection of two bus lines.
“Housing solutions are also climate solutions,” said California Gov.
Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, after signing the law on Sept. 23. “Reducing
housing costs for everyday Californians and reducing emissions from
cars: That’s what we call a win-win.”
The California bill was written by Assembly Member Laura Friedman, a
Democrat from Glendale, a Los Angeles County suburb, who is concerned
about the cost of housing in her region. CNBC recently ranked L.A. as
the second-most expensive housing market in the U.S., just below Miami —
the California cities of Long Beach, San Francisco, San Diego, Anaheim
and Santa Ana also made the top 10 — and it rated California the third
most expensive state after Hawaii and New York. Rising housing costs in
California have contributed to an epidemic of homelessness. A recent
state count found 173,800 Californians lack stable housing, an increase
of 22,500 over the past three years.
Gov. Gavin Newsom at a podium marked More Housing, Faster, surrounded by
a group of men in hardhats holding signs saying: Build Homes Now! and
#skilledandtrained.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, center, at a press conference on Sept. 28
in San Francisco. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“We’re in the midst of a housing crisis, desperately looking for a
solution, and we need to consider all options to reduce the overall cost
of housing,” Friedman said when she introduced the proposal last year.
Her co-sponsors included other legislators, such as state Scott Weiner
of San Francisco, who have also been working for years to pass state
laws preempting local restrictions that limit new housing construction
or drive up its cost.
Before the new law went into effect, zoning in most California cities
required developers to build parking spaces for new units. Those costs,
in turn, were passed on to home buyers and renters. A 2017 study from
professors at Santa Clara University and UCLA found that when an
apartment came with a parking garage space, it added approximately
$1,700 to the annual rent. In 2018, after Minneapolis eliminated
mandatory parking minimums, the American Planning Association (APA), a
professional association of urban planners, reported that new studio
apartments in areas of Minneapolis, where they typically had gone for
$1,200 per month, dropped to less than $1,000 per month.
Building parking isn’t cheap. The Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a
Canadian think tank, calculated in 2014 that surface parking spaces in
California cost an average of $20,000 to build, with garages costing
several times as much, especially when built underground — and that’s
not including the cost of installing driveways. Nationally, the Parking
Reform Network estimates that surface parking spots typically cost at
least $20,000, with spots in underground garages as much as $60,000.
Rows of rebar sprout from the ground on a parking lot under construction.
Construction on a new parking structuring next to the Mickey & Friends
lot at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, Calif., in July 2018. (Jeff
Gritchen/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
While the connection between parking minimums — which are a staple of
zoning codes throughout the country — and the cost of construction is
straightforward, the relationship to pollution is more complicated.
Relying on nationwide formulas that set a certain number of parking
spaces for each bedroom or square foot of retail space, without
considering the possibility that some new residents or customers will
walk or take the bus, has led to large parking lots and multicar
garages, many of which are often mostly empty. The United States has 290
million cars and as many as 2 billion parking spaces, and the U.S.
Geological Survey estimates that parking covers roughly 5.5% of land in
the country.
Providing ample parking makes it easier to drive, contributing to auto
dependence, according to many urban planners and professors of urban
planning. The average American drives 16,000 miles every year, the most
of any major economy. Transportation is the largest source in the U.S.
of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change, and it
is one reason the United States has one of the highest per capita
emissions in the world.
“Particularly after World War II, California and the West really
sprawled out. And we’re kind of wrestling with a built environment that
doesn’t work in terms of efficiency and the cost, but also just the
quality of life and then trying to address climate change,” Michael
Lane, state policy director at the the San Francisco Bay Area Planning
and Urban Research Association, known as SPUR, told Yahoo News.
The abundance of parking, however, is not the same everywhere out West.
Empty lots in front of big-box stores might be commonplace in rural
areas, but that’s often not true in much in larger cities. Jackson,
Wyo., has 27.1 parking spaces per household, compared to 5 per household
in Seattle and 4.5 in San Francisco.
But more populated areas also suffer more concentrated air pollution
from cars. This year’s "State of the Air" study by the American Lung
Association ranked 11 California regions among the 25 most polluted in
the country, including all of the top 4 for ozone and the top 6 for
particle pollution. (Los Angeles claims the dubious distinction of being
the No. 1 in ozone, and Bakersfield is the worst for particulates.)
A packed freeway, with bumper-to-bumper traffic over five lanes on the
right, wends its way through Santa Ana.
The I-55 Freeway heads south from the I-5 Freeway in Santa Ana, Calif.,
on July 27. (Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via
Getty Images)
Merely eliminating parking requirements won’t be enough to make every
Californian go car-free, not by a long shot. Apart from a handful of
neighborhoods in a few of the state’s largest cities, the mass-transit
options aren’t necessarily available and convenient enough.
“Walking, biking, public transit — alternative modes of transportation,”
have to be enabled, Bill Magavern, policy director of the
California-focused Coalition for Clean Air, told Yahoo News.
An academic paper published last year by professors from UCLA and UC
Santa Cruz surveyed the rates of car ownership and driving habits of
residents of 2,654 homes in 197 affordable housing projects built in San
Francisco since 2002. They found that residents of developments with
more parking have higher rates of automobile ownership and driving. The
authors argue that it is causal: They found no evidence that applicants
for low-income housing developments — which, in the high-earning San
Francisco area, can include two-person households making up to $118,200
— were more likely to apply to the housing lottery for units with
parking, but were more likely to have a car once they secured housing
that came with a parking space.
“In California, about 80% of our air pollution and 50% of our greenhouse
gas emissions comes from transportation, so most of our work is to clean
up transportation,” Magavern said. “We work on both air pollution and
climate change, and this will help with both.”
Although California is the first state to take action, some cities
already have. Noting “traditional parking ratios are outdated,” the APA
reported in 2018 that “there's a burgeoning movement of municipalities
across the U.S. reducing or eliminating parking requirements for certain
locales or certain types of development, or even citywide.”
Vehicles arrayed in a parking lot, with regular empty spaces.
Aerial view of vehicles at a parking lot on Aug. 26 in Los Angeles.
(Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images)
In 2017, Buffalo, N.Y., removed parking requirements for developments of
less than 5,000 square feet, while Hartford, Conn., removed them
entirely. Cities such as New York City, Seattle and Portland, Ore., have
removed parking minimums for subsidized affordable housing developments
near transit.
Some of the largest cities in California, including San Francisco and
San Diego, had in recent years reduced or eliminated parking minimums.
But many Californians fear having to fight for on-street parking with
their new neighbors. Worried about the loss of their power to set
parking requirements and a potential future parking shortage, some
cities, especially smaller, more suburban jurisdictions, opposed the
newly passed law.
“Restricting parking requirements does not guarantee that individuals
living, working, or shopping on those parcels will actually use
transit,” said the League of California Cities, a nonprofit that
advocates for local control of policy. “Many residents will continue to
own automobiles and require nearby parking, which will only increase
parking demand and congestion. [Friedman’s bill] also would give
developers and transit agencies — who are unaccountable to local voters
— the power to determine parking requirements.”
Some more progressive California cities, including Los Angeles, dangle
exemption from parking requirements as an inducement to developers in
exchange for building affordable housing or public amenities such as
daycare centers, causing quiet reluctance to back the bill from some
local officials. Even some progressive activists and professional
planners opposed the bill unless their demand for amendments that would
allow local governments to let developers build taller buildings with
less parking in exchange for including affordable housing was met. (It
wasn’t.)
A Metro bus in Los Angeles with one passenger standing in the aisle and
a generous number of free seats.
People commuting on a Metro bus in Los Angeles on July 14. The Bay Area
was once a public transit model. Now California's "car capital" leads
the state in riders. (Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles
Daily News via Getty Images)
On the other side, the deregulatory nature of the bill brought out
backers from the business community, including real estate developers
and retailers, who supported the bill as a means of lowering costs.
(Developers are still free to build as much parking as they want.)
“One of the interesting things about this bill and campaign is that the
California Restaurant Association came on to support it, because
entrepreneurs trying to open a storefront in a downtown are often hit
with the need to find off-street parking,” Lane said.
Although the bill was sponsored by Democrats, it passed with the support
of a number of Republicans and conservative policy intellectuals, who
spoke up on its behalf.
California policy experts say that the state’s struggle with climate
change, which has recently caused extreme heat waves, droughts and
wildfires, among other disasters, has helped galvanize public support
for efforts to cut back on driving.
“The crisis had become so great — both in terms of just built
environment, vehicle miles traveled and the interest in addressing
climate change — that we’ve gotten some movement,” Lane said.
Experts caution that California has yet to put many other policies in
place if it is to reduce the amount its residents drive significantly.
“It’s just one of the many steps we need to take,” Magavern said. “But
this at least takes down one barrier, and it removes a disincentive to
transit-oriented development. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get
transit-oriented development, but combined with other policies, can move
us in that direction.”