From Wired:
…the biggest bugbear in neighborhood politics just got some serious side eye from the Obama administration: Parking.
… as cities impotently scrabble to keep housing affordable, requiring developers to provide off-street parking feels like dead weight. The cost—up to $60,000 per underground spot—can kill projects before they even start. And you could argue that it’s better to use that land for bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, not hunks of metal that spend most of the day sitting still. …
Indeed, says the White House. In a Housing Development Toolkit released Monday, the Obama administration calls off-street parking minimums an affordable housing no-no. “When transit-oriented developments are intended to help reduce automobile dependence,” it says, “parking requirements can undermine that goal by inducing new residents to drive, thereby counteracting city goals for increased use of public transit, walking and biking.”
Granted, the toolkit is merely a list of recommendations, with no teeth. And cities control zoning laws that dictate things like off-street parking. But the Obama administration is reiterating what urban planners have long said: Parking ain’t great for your city. And cities are finally listening. …
You can attribute the change in part to a growing shortage of affordable housing, says Stockton Williams, the executive director of the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing. And you can expect such policies to become more popular as the affordable housing crisis reaches ever further into the middle class. …
Of course, hitting parking where it hurts is no panacea. The White House toolkit points out other important policy adjustments—like taxing vacant land, zoning for density, and letting homeowners build additional dwellings in their backyards—that will promote affordable housing. All of them must be enacted together to keep everyone housed.
Nice. At worst, parking in US cities will be just a teeeeeeny little bit less convenient. But whether minimums are ever affected or not by this toolkit, it’s yet another thing white suburbanites in the US will blame Obama for.
The cretin that lived next to us when we bought into our quiet residential street ran an industrial corporation out of his house – a line-painting, power-washing, blue collar skank business that was all anout parking lots.
Our street was infested with his vehicles: trucks, trailers, cars. He’d occupy 6-10 parking spots, but god help you if you parked in front of his house. It was war – and devilishly difficult to shut him down – one of the toughest experiences of my life. Ugly. Sometimes scary.
He profited from all the free residential only parking on our street. It gave him a cost advantage in bidding for contracts.
It took over a year to force him to stop running the business out of his house. When that advantage ceased, he sold his house and moved his rat family to the Fraser Valley.
The dichotomy between life now and then is stark: no more moving of materials in the wee hours; no more noise of trucks; no more toxic odours of toluene from his trailers. There’s lots more parking.
There shouldn’t be. We have one car. It always goes in the garage, as does the neighbour adjacent. These spots inevitably get filled up with other neighbours’ cars and their tenants’ cars. Free parking is induced parking.
We live a four minute walk to Skytrain. No one here needs a car. Why is there all this free parking?
Down the block, and everywhere, people have parking wars (There’s a British series called Parking Mad). People put buckets and chairs in the street to stake claim to spots. It’s madness.
It’s so graphic – every street littered with parked cars.
Just watched a great new DVD: Bikes vs Cars. It should be required watching to get a driver’s license. It was filmed around the world – including the city we love to hate – Toronto. I’d always wondered why they elected Rob Ford – that roiling mass of humanity. He bought the votes of suburban commuters (Scummuters) by promising to abolish the $60.00 vehicle registration fee and to stop spending so much on transit.
He wanted to carry his pile of flesh in his Escalade unimpeded by cyclists that he called a pain in the ass – in council no less. On the plus side, he put Toronto on the global comedic map.
Indeed. Free parking is like squatting, and even in “green” Vancouver that is happening aplenty. https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/free-parking-is-like-squatting/
Just like lack of density, lack of affordability is home grown in most cities.
$50/monthly pass is a joke in the west end. This is “green” ? or is it merely another form of entitlement we expect when we vote certain politicians into office ?
Our neigbourhood is exactly the same, even though we are ~5 minute walk from Skytrain. If you can’t park it off street, then you should have to pay for the priviledge of parking in the street.
I’m fine with these initiatives – as long as permit parking is implemented in the affcted neighbourhoods and the residents of the new buildings are prohibited from obtaining permits. Otherwise its just developers milking the gullible greens for all they’re worth.