.
The Hidden Reason Behind Seattle’s Skyrocketing Housing Costs
.
The lack of affordable housing in Seattle has been blamed on factors such as the absence of rent control and the fact that about 65 percent of the city is zoned for single-family housing. But there’s an often-overlooked reason that’s also exacerbating the affordability problem: cars—or, specifically, the cost associated with parking them.
The cost of building one parking stall in residential garages is estimated to be between $20,000 and $50,000. This can add several hundred thousand to millions of dollars to a project, depending on the size of the building and other factors. …
But all evidence points to the fact that we build too much parking. Even in areas of the city where buildings aren’t required to have off-street parking spaces, developers still construct them. And many of these parking spaces go unused—more than 30 percent in apartment buildings constructed after 2008 are empty at night, according to a 2013 report by the Sightline Institute.
Who’s paying for these parking spots? We all are. Even people who don’t have cars. …
“All the negative effects of parking quotas are hidden,” Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, told me in an interview. “The benefits are clear in the form of free parking to the person parking the car, and the costs are distributed among everyone else and are hidden in other people’s bills.”
“The reason the parking requirements exist is the neighbors demand it,” said Alan Durning. “It’s entirely political. There’s no economic justification or urban planning justification of parking.” …
Durning acknowledges that getting neighbors on board to remove parking quotas is a huge challenge. In fact, he says, it’s useless to try to convince them. Instead, he thinks we should pay them.
“It’s not effective to talk neighbors into accepting more competition for street parking,” said Durning. “It’s better to bribe them.”
Durning is advocating for creating parking benefit districts (one of the possible “innovative” solutions mentioned in HALA’s report). The concept is similar to community benefit districts, in which property owners decide to tax themselves to pay for various services such as street cleaning and security. In parking benefit districts, the city charges for curb parking in neighborhoods, via either meters or parking badges, then gives that money (or some of it) back to the neighborhood.
“The magic of that is it breaks apart the local political coalition,” Durning explained. “In some California cities, they have parking improvement districts in urban areas, revenue comes back to the community council, and they can use it for whatever they want. Those people then stop arguing, they stop pushing for off-street parking. It’s in their interest to have scarce off-street parking because then they make more money. Then we can cut the Gordian knot of parking politics.”
.
