Why Does America Provide More Space for Storing Cars Than Housing People?

https://commonedge.org/why-does-america-provide-more-space-for-storing-cars-than-housing-people/

by jseliger • 3 years ago

54 96 3 years ago

They didn't make space for cars, they made space for people who own cars.

supertrope• 3 years ago

Because the majority of the electorate is dependent on their cars for access to employment, school, stores, recreation, and their friends and family. The lower friction path is to buy a car and demand free parking, toll free roads, cheap fuel, higher speed limits, etc.

They don’t make the connection between half of urban land (!) being allocated toward driving infrastructure and high housing costs. Landlords take the blame. Other problems caused by spatial displacement and only building infrastructure for cars include traffic congestion, oil dependency, climate change, and rising traffic deaths. Driving doesn’t scale well in cities. Besides insatiable demand for parking and congestion, people buy bigger cars to keep up with the crash safety arms race.

kaffeeringe• 3 years ago

How did they become dependent on an object that cost them a fortune and ruins cities and enviroment?

rurounijones• 3 years ago

The power of large corporations and their marketing departments.

Terr_• 3 years ago

If we consider restrictions and costs of housing as the cause of needing a car, it seems hard to conclusively assign blame to just the chicken or just the egg.

vkou• 3 years ago

Because the benefit is immediate, and personal, but the cost is deferred and distributed.

JoshTriplett• 3 years ago

Because all of the proposed replacements entail substantial compromises, such as "not actually going directly from point A to point B", and because we no longer seem to have the ability to build infrastructure like transit for reasonable costs.

midoridensha• 3 years ago

It's a long story, but it involves the post-WWII economic boom, White Flight from the inner cities to the suburbs and away from the Black people in the cities (along with Redlining to keep the Black people from following them), the construction of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system in the 50s, and many other factors I'm sure I'm missing.

wink• 3 years ago

Because the cost/benefit analysis makes it perfectly viable or even cheap.

Even as someone living in a non-US city with supposedly good public transport, the cost of a cheap car + gas is ridiculous compared to the benefits.

goodpoint• 3 years ago

Because corporations brainwashed people very successfully.

arroz3• 3 years ago

Lobby

candiodari• 3 years ago

Because of the constant growth any real reduction in housing costs would have be temporary. Or it would have been in the 1945-2020 period.

Also, it would have created an environment that would have been totally unaffordable for families. Families don't work well in cities, because you need space. So that means a family of 4, with each kid a room, needs to pay 3-4 times the price a single person needs to pay, just for housing, while only making, at best, twice as much.

So families moved away. Families are also the ones that have the numbers, for voting, and the money ...

That, and stress in cities is 10x what it is in suburbs.

trimethylpurine22• 3 years ago

This is trying to sound dystopian, but it fails because car storage is not suitable for housing. We also have more square footage of sidewalks than dwellings. So?

_dain_• 3 years ago

The land on which car storage is built is suitable for housing to be built on it instead.

trimethylpurine22• 3 years ago

There is no shortage of land in the US. Have you ever been here?

throwaway29010• 3 years ago

I don't get your argument. On an area that barely fits 5 cars and is not large enough for ramps and multi story parking you can build a skyscraper housing a hundred of people in comfort. So?

Why is it surprising that there’s more cheap to build car parking

By that logic it would be cheaper not to build anything, so why is something built in the first place?

A hundred people in the space of 5 cars is unmeasurably better for the economy. Workforce, consumers, etc. If 2 of them open craft coffeeshops next door 98 of them won't need to go somewhere to get a nice drink, and so on. Once you don't need to cross 6 lanes on foot all sorts of possibilities open. Proximity is benefit multiplier at the same time reducing ecofootprint

catiopatio• 3 years ago

You could, but that would cost several orders of magnitude more than a patch of asphalt for parking.

Why is it surprising that there’s more cheap-to-build car parking than there is expensive-to-build housing?

trimethylpurine22• 3 years ago

I don't understand your argument. Are you saying we don't have land? Or that we don't need money? Fitting 100 people in the space of 5 cars sounds a lot worse, not better. Everything you've listed sounds horrible to me. Tight shoulder to shoulder walks smelling each other's farts and bad cooking is a step backwards. If you want that, that's fine, there's plenty of land available to do that with. Go do that. It's obviously not popular or we would be doing that.

WeylandYutani• 3 years ago

I was in Amsterdam a few days back and decided to take a look at the new automatic underground parking.

When land is expensive enough efficiency finds a way.

CalRobert8• 3 years ago

Well when you give people a vote on "do you want more homes for new neighbours or unlimited free parking everywhere always?" people vote for the parking. Which is why US cities are mostly asphalt.

Animats• 3 years ago

More land is used for growing food than for housing people, too. So?

mouzogu• 3 years ago

the land is probably used in the most profitable way. whether that's parking, housing, farming, or leaving it empty. it's not used for some hypothetical greater good.

lazyasciiart• 3 years ago

Car parking space being provided by commercial and residential properties is mandated by government regulation in cities, so it actually is closer to “the greater good” than “the greatest profit”.

throwaway29010• 3 years ago

Has someone coined "the greater bad" yet? If not I'm calling dibs.

BoorishBears• 3 years ago

That logic only works if you have some notion that any action that causes economic harm also causes harm to the party who takes it: like the economy is a magical game of tit-for-tat...

If I fund a REIT and buy up half the housing in some bumbling town to extract rent, and let those who can't afford it go pound sand: it can be profitable for me, yet be a net cost to the wider economy.

In fact, it can cost significantly more than the profit I gain: A couple of cases homelessness can end up costing the state millions over the next few decades in knock on effects, the extra rent my REIT extracts in rent ends up in less economically stimulating places than the local economy, etc etc.

In the end I can end up contracting the economy by 100s of millions and still profit, as long as that contraction doesn't overlap with my personal interests too much. Increased homelessness might lower the value of my properties, but the majority of the economic loss doesn't fall on me so I might even expand on that loss in value.

CalRobert8• 3 years ago

Normally, yes it is, but in this case, we force people to build parking even when that is not the most profitable use.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... shows the impact of parking minimums on housing costs.

countWSS• 3 years ago

US is extremely car-dependent due commuting and infrastructure spread out in the suburbs, which in turn are caused by abandonment of cities for suburbs: i.e. the conditions of life in suburbs outcompeted cities. Fixing the root cause is fixing the cities Quality of Life to compete with suburbs - going after symptoms(car-centric culture) won't work.

cpursley3• 3 years ago

Suburbs didn’t just outcompete cities, the federal government virtually subsidized them with cheap land (via federal interstate system) and mortgages.

mrpopo• 3 years ago

Subsidies for suburbs go deeper. Spread out houses means longer water pipes, electric lines, transformers, etc., paid and maintained by local governments. You might pay more taxes for owning more land, but nowhere near as much as what you owe your community.

More details here :

Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

xorfish• 3 years ago

Suburbs are highly subsidized. The quality of life only seems to outcompete cities because the quality of life in cities is lowered by the car centric culture.

If you want to know how good the QoL in a city can be, you need to visit a European city that is not car centric.

slifin• 3 years ago

Parking minimums cause cities to turn over a large percentage of their productive land to parking

You can't effectively build human centric attractive spaces without being hampered by the fact we've given the majority of public space to cars

bagels4• 3 years ago

It's 50x cheaper per square foot of parking than for housing.

I think we should bring back housing projects though. I'd rather increase state budgets by the 2% it would take rather than deal with homeless all the time.

rahimnathwani4• 3 years ago

Example from San Francisco:

  In a shocking and possibly illegal act of public absurdity, eight members of the Board of Supervisors voted to stall the construction of 495 new housing units on the site of a parking lot in the South of Market neighborhood.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/absurdity-san-francisco-...

bagels4• 3 years ago

Why do we need to house the homeless in the most expensive part of the state?

It's a genuine question. Would love reasons instead of just downvotes.

sgt• 3 years ago

I didn't see anything about this being to house the homeless. It just said affordable housing, which I assume is for normal working folks even tech people?

rahimnathwani4• 3 years ago

Your question has nothing to do with the proposed development in SOMA.

The government forces developers to reserve some % of units for 'affordable housing' but this development wasn't being built to house people who are currently homeless.

numpad0• 3 years ago

Would you want a slum - solely, solely for the sake of the argument - at the center integrated into the city and its culture, or far from the city where they'd start a new culture and own justice, distinct from that of the city...

mock-possum• 3 years ago

They bemoaned the dreaded specter of gentrification, as if the site’s current use as a 176-space valet parking lot for Nordstrom’s shoppers provides any benefit for communities struggling with scarce housing options.

This got me

Reason0773• 3 years ago

The block didn’t last too long. The project was approved in April 2023 after an 18-month environmental review:

https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2023/06/07/build-buys-c...

rahimnathwani4• 3 years ago

Whether 18 months is 'too long' is a matter of opinion. To me, it seems like 17 months too long.

est• 3 years ago

Car is an asset and people is sometimes a liability. (just describing a fact, not that I fully agree with this.)

gl-prod• 3 years ago

Climate town did a fantastic piece on this

Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8

WirelessGigabit4• 3 years ago

If I think about a walkable city, I keep on getting stuck.

Regardless of whether I get around during the week to a doctors appointment, my work, friends, etc I still will need a car.

Not being able to buy things in larger amounts means that you get taken advantage of, looking at price per X at your local grocer vs Costco.

Then during the weekend I want to go into nature. You cannot economically have public transportation to all those hiking trails.

Some of you might say: what about a rental for when I need a car? Lots of rental places just flat-out don't allow you to take the vehicle off of paved roads.

arroz3• 3 years ago

One reason costco is cheaper is because they charge for a membership. It’s not that cheaper. Honestly it’s not even cheaper if you compare against a regular supermarket and you are willing to buy a different brand then the one offered at Costco

I have never seen a rental saying where you can or can’t go with a vehicle

WirelessGigabit4• 3 years ago

A basic Costco membership is $60. Their chicken is $5 + tax. Same chicken at Safeway is $8.99 + tax.

So if you eat >15 chickens per year Costco is cheaper.

And even that is incorrect. Costco's chicken is 32oz, the Safeway one 28. Forgetting about taxes, Costco's is $0.15625 / oz, Safeway is $0.3210714285714286 / oz.

So now we have 2 equations, and we need to find the intersection:

* y = 60 + x * 0.15625

* y = 0.3210714285714286 * x

They cross at 11.37594799566631 chickens.

But larger chickens have larger bones, so let's keep it at 15. I definitely eat more than 15 chickens per year.

Then there's the issue of cost in general, while the house-brands of Safeway / Frys / Kroger / ... are cheaper, they are much more likely to have stuff added to it to make it 'bulkier'. A good example is Cottage Cheese from Walmart. They add a thickener to the liquid which allows them to sell you the same amount for less, but you actually get less cheese and more filler.

WirelessGigabit4• 3 years ago

And with the rental:

https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/gold/displayTerm...

5. PROHIBITED USE OF THE CAR NEITHER YOU NOR ANY AUTHORIZED OPERATOR MAY:

...

d. ENGAGE IN ANY WILLFUL OR WANTON MISCONDUCT, WHICH, AMONG OTHER THINGS, MAY INCLUDE RECKLESS CONDUCT SUCH AS: ..., USE OFF PAVED ROADS OR ON ROADS WHICH ARE NOT REGULARLY MAINTAINED, ...

National:

https://www.nationalcar.com/content/dam/National/functional/...