Apartment Blockers: Parking Rules Raise Your Rent

http://daily.sightline.org/2013/08/22/apartment-blockers/

by jseliger • 13 years ago

63 76 13 years ago

daily.sightline.org

Fargren• 13 years ago

I feel like I missed something. Why is it that off-street parking must be subterranean? Is it more expensive to make the building a floor of two taller and use the first floors for parking? Is this illegal somehow?

ams61102• 13 years ago

Might be illegal, if there are height restrictions in the zoning code. Also a lot of cities now add in requirements to have street-level retail so that buildings are not featureless walls or concrete parking ramps at street level.

spc4763• 13 years ago

A friend of mine used to be an architect, and I asked him once if it was possible to build a mile-high building. He said that it was technically possible but economically unfeasible because it would be hard to rent all the space. The base of the building (X number of floors) would have to be huge, and most people want to rent suites (office or living space) with windows, leaving the deep interior bare of renters.

Perhaps a ring of stores, with the interior of the first floor or two as a parking garage, which are less desirable anyway?

sjs1234• 13 years ago

"She builds it as tall as the legal height limit for that zone too."

spc4763• 13 years ago

I was wondering the same thing. The office building I work in has the first four floors devoted to a parking garage, with floors 5 to 10 as office space. Why couldn't the same be done for housing?

thrownaway24243• 13 years ago

Because it's hideous? People walking around don't want to walk past the blank walls or ventilation grates of parking garages. An attractive urban pedestrian environment needs to have something _different_ and _interesting_ every few dozen feet. That's why streets with many narrow storefronts are the most crowded with pedestrians.

drdaeman• 13 years ago

Not sure whenever it's true, but when I've asked similar question on why our city (a relatively small town in Russia) has problems with parking space but no building designs still include underground parking lots, I was told it's economically infeasible as office and living space costs much more than parking one.

icambron4• 13 years ago

This is basically what sjs said, but you're only allowed to build the building so tall (zoning rules often crazily restrictive about this). So if you put your parking above ground, you'd have to have fewer units.

bproctor• 13 years ago

Yeah, I don't understand this article. My building has a 1 story basement, street level is retail space, the next 6 floors are parking, and above that 24 floors of apartments. You can't easily tell from the outside what is apartments and what is parking without looking close. I also live in Seattle only blocks away from where this guy is talking about.

schoper• 13 years ago

Cars ruin everything about urban life. Look at what happened to SF when the automobile came on the scene in the 30's:

http://www.oldsf.org

dkersten2• 13 years ago

I would love a car-less city where the only vehicles are public transport or commercial delivery vehicles, with cycling being the only allowed personal transport.

BerislavLopac• 13 years ago

And Segway.

hollerith• 13 years ago

I hear that some city cores in Europe are car-less in this sense.

jared3142• 13 years ago

I think the issue is the people, not the cars. The people of Peachtree City, GA have a large golf cart culture. And, they still have golf cart traffic jams[1], golf cart drunk drivers[2], and severe golf cart accidents [3].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RlXz_DQYRI

[2] http://now.msn.com/peachtree-city-georgia-has-golf-cart-dui-...

[3] http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/story/22293708/peachtree-city-te...

Edit: Removed 'primarily' assertion because of information from vinceguidry

Jacqued• 13 years ago

I think this vision is shared by some of the town councils in big european towns.

For example in Paris, the current mayor (who has been in office since 2001) has made it his mission to make the city as unfriendly as possible for cars to discourage people to come to Paris in their cars.

This includes massively removing parking spots, making parking expensive all over the city, removing lanes wherever there are roadworks (to add sidewalks, bike or bus lanes, trees...) and banning cars from some of the most important streets in the city (most notably the embankments).

So far it has stopped the growth in car usage in Paris. I don't think people are ready for an outright ban on cars yet, but this surely seems like an effective strategy to prepare them for it. Maybe when the Supermetro is done and suburbans can more effectively use public transportation the city will move in this direction.

However : do you consider taxis as public transport ? What about Autolibs (shared electric cars you can pick up all around the city) ?

Edit with some stats : Parisians overwhelmingly use public transport (63%) and not their cars (13%) to go to work. More people walk than take their cars (14%). So that would be an indication of success, however a brief walk outside at 6PM will help you see that suburbans still massively come to Paris in their cars :)

jared3142• 13 years ago

I think history has romanticized car-less cities. Horses spook easily, and kill people in the process. Massive quantities of animal feces and dead animal remains would overwhelm the minimal city waste-cleanup services. The constant sound of horseshoes on non-dirt roads is worse than normal car noise. Cars solved real problems of city life.

vacri• 13 years ago

I think a better argument is that 'everyone' has a car, but in old cities, far from 'everyone' had a horse - they were for businesses or the wealthy only.

revelation2• 13 years ago

Nobody wants to go back to horses.

dbg31415• 13 years ago

Articles like this annoy because the underlying tone is, "Well, you shouldn't have a car." But I don't know anyone over 30 who doesn't have one. The bus system doesn't go everywhere. How would I get to Mt. Rainier, or get around Bainbridge, or for that matter over to work? I've taken the bus and I've driven from Seattle to Redmond; the bus takes twice as long for me to get from home to where I'm going.

Rent goes up. If you don't like paying high rent, move to Texas.

ericabiz• 13 years ago

Sounds like you live in Seattle. When I visited there recently, I used car2go instead of renting a car. It's a car sharing service like Zipcar, but unlike Zipcar, you can drop a car off anywhere in their network instead of having to return the car to where you picked it up. Very cool. I use them here in Austin, too, where I live (and they started.)

If you don't like paying high rent, move to Texas.

Sadly, not so much true these days, although here in Austin you can make 100% of your mortgage back via Airbnb or having roommates.

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

It sounds like they live 30 minutes away from Seattle by ferry (Bainbridge Island). Car2go doesn't 'work' there. The answer, of course, is move to the Seattle urban core.

(And car2go actually launched in Germany about 2 years before Austin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go)

thrownaway24243• 13 years ago

The point is to not force people to build the parking by having minimum parking laws. If some building wants to have lots of underground parking, fine, and if another building wants to have units that are $20k cheaper because they lack parking, that's also fine.

dredmorbius5• 13 years ago

I don't know anyone over 30 who doesn't have one

For people under 30, not owning a car is becoming increasingly the rule. And I know several above-30 types without cars. They may rely on transit-only (a city designed to be unfriendly to cars is much friendlier to transit and walking), hire cars as needed, or use a car-share service (which still greatly reduces car dependence and parking requirements). Self-driving vehicles which can park themselves elsewhere are another obvious solution.

In crowded cities, cars aren't faster than buses (though they're typically more flexible for multi-stop trips), and parking requirements at your destination greatly increase costs ($20 - $50+/day isn't unusual).

kalleboo3• 13 years ago

In crowded cities, cars aren't faster than buses

And especially not faster than a well-designed subway system

dman• 13 years ago

I saw quite a few people revisit their decision about not owning a car post hurricane sandy. Zipcar etc are well and good for everyday use but good luck for peak usage scenarios during natural disasters.

kalleboo3• 13 years ago

But I don't know anyone over 30 who doesn't have one.

That just completely depends on where you live.

mathgladiator• 13 years ago

I think it requires strategy going forward, and it's going to require a mixture of things.

I highly recommend bicycle; I commute daily from bainbridge island to downtown Seattle. It's a little under 12 miles a day.

Having lived downtown, I can say that a car isn't needed as you can walk to 99.9% of where you need to be. That being said, living downtown is often times very limiting if you have aspirations of living freely. (Personally, I hate having neighbors that I can't control since I prefer quiet.)

njs12345• 13 years ago

As is touched on in the article, one of the problems with parking quotas is that they shift a major cost of owning a car in a city (parking) on to everyone, rather than just car owners. If all the external costs of driving were priced in correctly then driving would become far less attractive, increasing demand for public transit and hopefully improving service to the point where it is a realistic option for more people.

FWIW, I've lived in Seattle and can understand your frustration --- the system there isn't great. When you live in a city with a good transit system you use it for your commute to work and day-to-day things and rent a car (services like Zipcar have made this easier than ever before) every once in a while when you really need it.

icambron4• 13 years ago

Parking minimums are subsidy towards car owners from non-car owners. Why do you believe you should receive that subsidy, instead of the developers being able to choose what to build based on demand? If you want a parking spot, you should pay market price for it and developers will happily sell it to you. In other words, no one is telling you not to have a car; they're telling you that you need to pay for the space it takes up.

If you want lots of cheap parking, you move to Texas.

As for rent going up as a fact of life, that's silly. Rent goes up because demand increases faster than supply. That's something you can fix by increasingly supply. And since high rent just reduces your income, it doesn't make sense not to.

selfexperiments• 13 years ago

I'm over 30 and don't have a car. Sure, you don't know me personally, but there's a growing number of environmentally aware people who aren't buying into the car culture.

Hopefully you (and your friends) will be in the minority soon.

jseliger• 13 years ago

Articles like this annoy because the underlying tone is, "Well, you shouldn't have a car."

I don't think that's true: the underlying point is that car owners should pay something closer to the total cost of ownership, rather than baking large parts of the cost of ownership into the larger society.

nmcfarl• 13 years ago

I also live in Seattle, and I also don't know anyone over 30 without a car per coupleº. But, like me and my wife, the vast majority of my friends own one car and that car is, indeed, largely used to get to Bainbridge, Rainier or Redmond. IE they are weekend cars - used to get out of the city and run some errands. A nice luxury for folk rich enough to pay many many 1000s of dollars for a toy they use on the weekend.

I love it - it wouldn't be Seattle to me if I couldn't get out on the weekends, but I don't think other folk of any sort - but particularly the large number of people living in Seattle on less than I am - should be subsidizing my toys. And, as such, I don't think we should be requiring parking for new construction.

º I do know one solo 50-something who manages to go carless and, like our 20 something friends, I don't think she's missing much. She's got a great network of folk with cars to ferry her to the mountains and she (and they) are out there nearly every weekend in the summer.

I also do know of a lot of people outside of my social circle who have 2 cars per couple and live in places like Puyallup and commute an hour plus each way into downtown Seattle everyday. Seattle is not immune to car culture, but those choices are either economic, or based on a culture I'm not part of. I'm fairly certain the suburbs, and exurbs, shouldn't be driving Seattle's city planning.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

No, the underlying tone is, "If you have a car, you should pay all of the expenses associated with having one, rather than expecting your car ownership to be subsidized by people who don't own one."

Any time a city mandates that developers install parking, that's exactly what happens: car owners are being subsidized. Car owners have come to expect free or cheap parking.

Cities don't actually need to mandate parking. If they just left developers to decide, then they'd only build parking if it was profitable. That means that the market price for parking would rise until it made economic sense to construct parking.

This is a (I would say, the only) sensible way to do things, but car owners would revolt, because they apparently hate the idea of paying for what they use.

And just for the record, I do own a car, and live in a city.

icambron4• 13 years ago

This is a way better counter than my comment.

kalleboo3• 13 years ago

In my city, the daily commute traffic breaks down like this:

* Car 40%

* Bicycle 36%

* Bus 16%

* Walking 8%

I'm nearing 30 and none of my friends who live in the city own a car. Many subscribe to zipcar-type services for when they need to make trips. They're also all childless - all my friends with kids moved out of the city.

IMO, cars and cities are a bad mix. They make cities far more unfriendly, they increase sprawl, and cause a spiral of adding more cars, increasing sprawl further, etc.

chiph• 13 years ago

Not sure why they don't investigate automated parking systems. Their parking density is much higher than lots or decks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOR25PjV0wI

dredmorbius5• 13 years ago

Cost and retrofit requirements, mostly.

abirkill• 13 years ago

There is at least one residential building in Vancouver, BC that has implemented an automated system, but according to this article, the cost per space is almost double that of a conventional space:

http://www.vancourier.com/news/vancouver-robo-garage-lowers-...

Also, having spoken to someone who lives in that building, it seems to be disliked by a lot of residents, due to the long waiting times at peak periods. That's not particularly surprising given there are only two transfer stations.

I guess these systems may work better in retail locations where there is a steady flow of traffic coming and going through the day, rather than at residential or office locations where there are very high peaks in demand. To build enough transfer stations to satisfy the peaks would presumably both be very expensive, and reduce the space savings that were made.

IvyMike• 13 years ago

I don't mind most driving, so self-driving cars are kinda "meh" to me.

But then I think about the ability to pull up to a building and tell my car "go park yourself" and it becomes awesome.

All sorts of great efficiencies pop out, too: a lot filled with self-driving cars could pack them tightly, and when a car needs to be removed, all the other cars move out of the way. Offices, closed businesses, schools, etc, with parking spaces could all become ad-hoc lots at night. (I'd make city ordinances requiring this for building approval). Your car can park in a remote area somewhere, and when you want to leave, your car comes and finds you. Imagine taking a post-dinner stroll towards my car, and at some point you meet up.

lifeformed2• 13 years ago

I wonder what society will be like once self-drivings cars are ubiquitous. There'd be so much reclaimed real-estate from giant parking lots.

ams61102• 13 years ago

Why, will they not need to be parked anywhere?

trafficlight• 13 years ago

I think the concept owning your car will become mostly a thing of the past. Most of the time, I just need a car to get me from point A to point B. When the car is not performing that function, it's just sitting, taking up space.

Rather than making a car payment, I'd rather pay for a car-on-demand service. Whenever I need a ride, I make a request and a car appears.

Coupling with an electric car makes sense, too. The car will always be charged, or alternatively, only a charged car will pick me up.

icambron4• 13 years ago

Also you can tell it whether you need it for a long drive or a short one, so it can know when to send you an electric car or an internal combustion car. Or whether you need a big car or a small one.

saidajigumi• 13 years ago

Relevant to your point and this article's Northwest angle, I note that the Car2Go[1] service has become fairly prominent in the Seattle area. It's quite different to services like ZipCar, in that Car2Go has worked out a few key details:

1. Smartphone apps that show you the location of the nearest cars and allow various interaction.

2. The ability to walk up to any car not reserved/in use and take it.

3. Parking deals with the city -- just park in any public parking spot, no worries about metering.

These attributes raise convenience considerably vs. some competing carshare services and remove ceilings on how many vehicles can be injected into the local system.

For anyone following Horace Dediu's Asymcar[2] podcast, Car2Go fits right into their theme of exploring what will really disrupt personal transportation as we know it today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go [2] http://www.asymcar.com/

ballard• 13 years ago

When public transport is decent, vehicles become a luxury. So really, this sounds like the continuation of Los Angeles-style mandated luxury to justify the expense of a white elephant property. Instead, finding someplace less committed to a lower threshold for net lifetime greenhouse emissions, expense and digging in mud on union hours appears preferable.

awda3• 13 years ago

Maybe First Hill is special, but parking in Seattle proper and Capitol Hill (both near First Hill) is extremely crowded and finding a spot can be hard. The mythical building plot described in the article sounds wonderful relative to my experience:

"Overnight, when your tenants’ cars will most likely be at home, the office buildings’ garages are usually empty. And, of course, there are hundreds of curb spaces within six blocks of your building, though neighbors’ vehement territoriality about “their” spaces would make it impolitic to mention those in an appeal to the city for a parking waiver. Odds are that your tenants could secure whatever parking they wanted for much less than $250 a month per spot."

The cheapest parking I could get on Cap Hill was $150/mo, and it was in one of these subterranean garages.

Speaking of garages, any reason you can't build the garage on levels 1-2 and put apartments on 3-5?

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

The cheapest parking I could get on Cap Hill was $150/mo, and it was in one of these subterranean garages.

I always guffaw when I see American prices, which are so much lower than the rest of the world. The cheapest spot I could get near my apartment in Beijing is around $400/month, and its not available. Switzerland was even worse. But when I was at UW, it was only $50/month (back in the late 90s). Why is the USA so cheap?

awda3• 13 years ago

Easy answer? Low population density, lots of space, relative to Europe (totally unfamiliar with Beijing). UW (U district) is a bit cheaper than capital hill (when I lived in U district, 1 parking spot came w/ rent, an additional spot was $50/mo).

natrius• 13 years ago

"Speaking of garages, any reason you can't build the garage on levels 1-2 and put apartments on 3-5?"

Most cities regulate building heights, so then you're choosing between parking space and living space. Here in Austin, some downtown land is zoned for more height than the market demands at this point, so you do see parking podiums with residences or offices on top. It's the cheaper option when it's allowed, but it usually isn't.

lancewiggs• 13 years ago

I would think that contractors need to dig a deep hole to ensure the foundations of the building are secure - get into the bedrock, especially in earthquake zones. Whether the car parks are below or above ground is moot.

That said - The High Cost of Free Parking (1) and The Walkable City (2) are both excellent reads on the matter of parking and car parks. The second is the more readable.

(1) http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1... (2) http://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp...

Anechoic• 13 years ago

I would think that contractors need to dig a deep hole to ensure the foundations of the building are secure - get into the bedrock, especially in earthquake zones

Not necessarily, spread footings or piles can work if designed properly and the soil can support it.

Eliezer• 13 years ago

Why is it so hugely expensive to dig holes? You would think this'd be the kind of work that would be easy to automate.

joseph_cooney• 13 years ago

I'm guessing there is an element of 'you don't know what you're going to find until you start digging' aspect to it.

revelation2• 13 years ago

In Germany and other WW2 theatres, you will commonly find unexploded ordnance. All work will come to a halt as it has to be removed by experts.

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

Depends where you are digging them. If you are removing a lot of material in a built-up area it costs a lot to get it off-site.

tghw2• 13 years ago

The primary reason they dig those holes is because tall buildings need solid foundations. It's not as if they can just build the building at ground level if only it weren't for those darn cars.

Foundation depths vary based on too many factors, but a ballpark number for a midsize apartment building is probably in the 15-30% range. So if you have 16 floors, you could reasonably expect to have 2-4 stories below grade. What else would you put there?

Even if you only needed 2 stories of foundation depth, digging an additional 2 for parking is relatively cheap compared to the first two, since the equipment is already out there.

Retric• 13 years ago

You don't need a full basement for foundations, large pilings are far cheaper. They can easily support 30 story buildings without a basement in an earthquake just fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_foundation

tghw2• 13 years ago

True, but most apartment buildings will want at least one basement layer for mechanical and storage.

rdl• 13 years ago

I live in a condo building with maybe 35-40 1br and 2br units on 3 floors, plus first floor 35 or so units of parking. It doesn't seem unworkable, and a parking spot in the building is worth at least 100-200/mo to me. I am not sure how the economics work here but not in the example.

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

Install a couple of lifts on the side of the building and put all the parking on the roof.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

That certainly sounds cheap!

corresation• 13 years ago

This is an awful lot of conjecture, yet remarkably little substance. The core claim of this purported injustice is that "Digging these holes is astronomically expensive", with absolutely nothing to qualify it (beyond a link to an Onion article). The single proof was that LA allowed builders to re-purpose existing buildings (e.g. turning that old sugar factory into condos) without satisfying current parking requirements, which has absolutely nothing to do with the cost on a new build.

Large buildings need a substructure proportional with their height, especially in an earthquake zone like SF area. Even where non-parking substructure is built, it usually still requires a complete excavation to ensure that the materials are appropriate for keeping a skyscraper from falling over. However more expensive parking is than without, unless an accounting construction expert wanders in, I draw very little value from someone looking out of their window and drawing perhaps unsupported conclusions.

And then even if you assume that parking is more expensive, most buildings charge for parking. Does this cover the extra costs, if any? I don't know, and neither does the author. Just a perceived injustice and yet another claim of subsidizing car drivers.

Apartment Blockers: Parking Rules Raise Your Rent

Related Stories