Agenda - Planning Commission - 07/06/2017

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Eliminating Parking Minimums By Ben LeRoy For decades, many American planners unquestioningly applied minimum off-street parking requirements to projects of every conceivable size, type, and context. Whether drawn from the quasi -scientific findings of the Institute of Transportation En- gineers' Parking Generation report or simply borrowed whole cloth from other cities' zon- ing codes, minimum parking requirements continued to grow more onerous and complex. Communities across the nation watched as formerly walkable neighborhoods were hol- lowed out by parking. Even as planners crafted complete streets policies and rejiggered tax incentives for infill redevelopment, minimum parking requirements were largely ignored, taken on faith as a necessity for any well - planned city. But many planners have woken up. A wealth of data -oriented research —from Park- ing Reform Made Easy by Richard Willson, FAICP, to the work of Chuck Marohn, AICP's Strong Towns organization, to the seminal The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup, FAICP—has produced a growing consensus within the planning profession that the tra- ditional approach to requiring automobile parking produces more harm than good. In response, cities and counties have begun chipping away at their parking requirements with a variety of techniques, offering urban - minded developers the opportunity to reduce their parking burden through shared parking, payments in lieu of parking, and smarter man- agement of the public parking supply. While these incremental steps have gen- erally proven popular with developers, rela- tively few communities have taken the bolder step of eliminating parking requirements in part or in full. The following sections lay out the case for parking reform, profile recent reform efforts in three cities, and present a series of strategies to help planners make the case for eliminating off-street parking require- ments to residents and elected officials. - THE CASE FOR PARKING REFORM The case for parking reform is not self-evident in our auto -dominated society, especially to those not trained as urban planners. Resi- dents and business owners alike have legiti- mate concerns about ever-increasing conges- tion levels. Accordingly, a discussion of how to achieve parking reform would be lacking if it did not include a summary of the top reasons why parking reform is a worthwhile goal. Although parking requirements are well-intentioned, they raise housing prices, induce automobile traffic, and degrade the built environment. Increased Housing Prices Because Americans often park for'free, they could be forgiven for thinking that parking is free to build and maintain. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. It turns out that parking —and more specifically, parking produced as a result of minimum parking requirements —is a significant con- tributor to unaffordable housing. The construction of parking carries sub- stantial costs. Surface parking consumes valuable land that could otherwise be used for productive buildings, while structured parking costs average nearly $1.9,000 per space (Cudney 2016). With parking require- ments elevating parking supplies beyond what the market would normally produce, parkers often do not directly cover the cost of their own parking. Instead, the cost of parking is tucked into rent, hiding the true allocation of the burden. Non-parkers often end up sub- sidizing parkers, producing a more expensive and less fair result than allowing developers to build only as much parking as parkers are willing to pay for. Induced Automobile Traffic Intended to mitigate congestion, minimum parking requirements have unfortunately pro- duced the opposite effect. By hiding the true cost of automobile ownership and spreading out destinations, minimum parking require- ments create the very traffic burden they were created to contain. A recent analysis by the In dense urban areas with high land values, many developers choose to build parking at surface level and elevate the building on ";stilts. The effect at street level is unpleasant, especially for pedestrians ZONINGPRACTICE 647 . AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION 1 page 2