housing

PDC’s Parking Problem Restricts Ability To Deliver On Strategic Goals

February 18, 2017 By TonyJ 4 Comments

The Portland Development Commission has a parking problem.

The agency has committed to spending $32 million in taxpayer provided urban renewal funds to build an obsolete-on-arrival valet-only hotel parking garage which is steps away from a MAX station. That project’s price tag has increased by $6 million dollars before construction has even started, casting doubt on PDC’s already shaky projections that the garage would generate a $500,000/year profit.

A parking garage right next to a light rail station. — Drawing of PDC’s Hotel Parking Garage

An additional $5 million in PDC money is earmarked to upgrade another parking garage, the 10th and Yamhill SmartPark Garage, in a project that will likely lead to the displacement of several existing businesses in the city core. Another $3 million dollars is budgeted to secure resources to build district parking garages in the Central Eastside Industrial District, building the parking itself will surely cost many more millions.

The fact that these projects are at odds with the city’s climate action and transportation goals should be enough reason for Mayor Ted Wheeler to initiate a change in strategy, but a report PDC delivered to the Planning and Sustainability Commission reveals more problems.

PDC’s parking obsession hinders it’s ability to deliver on it’s strategic goals to advance social and economic equity and support a vibrant central city. PDC commissioned a policy impact calculator from ECONorthwest to “help PDC and its partners understand potential financial impacts to PDC’s development activities and to help PDC respond to the new policy environment” which includes: inclusionary zoning (IZ), new green building requirements, system development charges for parks, and a construction excise tax. The calculator was used to conduct pro forma analysis on 5 prototype projects.

Included in these prototype developments is a potential affordable housing project and parking garage in Old Town. This prototype project would contain 3 floors of residential space made up of 79 multi-family units. This, much needed, affordable housing would be built above 3 floors of podium parking. The report notes that a density bonus for more housing would be allowed for this project, but wouldn’t be used because the extra height required for the building would trigger more expensive building materials or significantly more expensive underground parking. Notably, the parking in this building isn’t required or even targeted for the residents of the building, it would, instead, induce more commuter and visitor traffic to downtown.

This report is only exploring options for PDC and it points out that the density bonus for affordable housing isn’t a true financial incentive due to the fact that other costs scale with the development. Nevertheless, the inclusion of a parking garage in the project instead of more housing is further evidence that PDC is pursuing short sighted goals to encourage driving when it should be focusing on building affordable housing in areas of economic opportunity.

Mayor Ted Wheeler and his fellow Commissioners should ask PDC to calculate what a 6 story building with 5 floors of affordable housing for humans and no shelter for cars would look like. It may not pencil out, but it would be a project far more worthy of public subsidy than a parking garage disguised as affordable housing.

Portland’s Parking Policy Puts Car Storage Before Housing Affordability

November 15, 2016 By Shoupista 1 Comment

A brand new apartment building with 268 units on N. Williams Ave. opened last month. This apartment is within a 10-minute walk from four TriMet bus routes (#4, #6, #24, & #44), a New Seasons grocery store, and served by the Vancouver-Williams bike lanes and two Biketown stations. The location is excellent for carless Portlanders. Since owning and operating an automobile can cost about $9,000 a year, savings from living without a car means that you have more budget for necessities like housing, health-care, or food. By this logic, the City should encourage more housing development in neighborhoods with abundant transportation options to enhance affordability.

However, housing in transit-rich neighborhoods is becoming increasingly unaffordable. In this new building, a one-bedroom unit costs as much as $1,870 a month. In addition, despite being very accessible by walking, biking, transit, and bike-share, this development includes 237 underground parking stalls (185 residential and 52 commercial), a luxurious amenity that does not benefit people without cars.

I was told by the leasing office that they are running a special offering 9-months of free parking to new tenants. So if you are a car residing in Portland, you will never be homeless because free parking is available almost everywhere. But if you are a renter looking to live in a walkable and transit-accessible neighborhood, you may be out of luck.

Portland’s Perverse Priority: Shelter for Cars, Not Housing for People

In 2013, pressured by residents anxious about growth, City Council adopted a tiered system of minimum parking requirements for new development with more than 30 units. Many housing and transportation advocates believe that this arbitrary mandate have suppressed housing supply and increased the costs of housing.

In September, the White House released a policy document stating that “[p]arking requirements generally impose an undue burden on housing development, particularly for transit-oriented or affordable housing.” As housing gets more and more unaffordable in Portland, our city policy continues to prioritize provision of free park over affordable housing units. Moreover, minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars. Portland’s 2013 parking mandate has undermined its own climate and transportation goals by inducing more driving, air pollution, and carbon output.

Parking Requirements Raise Income Requirements

Free parking isn’t free. Underground parking costs about $55,000 per space to build according to the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. In this apartment building’s case, that is $1.3 million added to the development cost, and it is very likely that every unit is now marketed at a higher rate in order to recoup the high costs of free parking. In other words, parking requirements may have ended up raising the income requirements for living in transit-accessible neighborhoods.

To afford paying $1,870 a month on rent, you would need to earn about $68,000 a year. The units in this apartment building may have been more affordable if the development had cost $1.3 million less. Affordable rental units in Portland’s transit accessible neighborhoods are diminishing and parking requirements exacerbates this issue by escalating new housing development costs.

Excessive Parking Supply Won’t Fix Neighborhood On-Street Parking

If a underground parking stall costs $55,000 to build, why would the building management offer 9-months of free parking? Because while the City can require new development to provide on-site parking, it cannot require tenants to park in them. As long as on-street parking remains free, tenants will be incentivized to use curb parking instead of paying to park on-site.

Parking requirements force developers to over-supply parking, which they then give away for free because demand for paid parking is too low to fill the stalls. But the high costs of free parking need to be recovered somehow. As a result, carless tenants end up subsidizing other people’s free parking with their rent.

When buildings offer free parking, they are providing a strong incentive for new tenants to bring their cars with them. In this case, after the 9-month free parking period is over, tenants who brought their cars with them will be inclined to park on the residential streets for free instead of starting to pay for off-street parking. Neighbors who support minimum parking requirements hoping it would prevent parking spillover may soon find their plan backfiring.

As one resident states in her public testimony, Portland’s parking policy is absurd:

“I live in a building with garage parking that is not even full. I do not own a car, but my rent subsidizes the cost of these spots which were “free” at the time I signed my lease because the apartment company was unable to fill them with paying car owners. When I toured apartments on SE Division, THE LEASING AGENTS suggested that if I had a car it was better to park on the street because that was free but the building was charging for garage space. This is all so absurd! Street parking demands should be managed via a residential permitting system. Parking minimums will not help.” – Ellie H

We Can Fix It: Support Housing for People, Not Shelter For Cars

Mayor Hales has proposed to repeal the 2013 parking mandate with Amendment 34 to the Comprehensive Plan. This amendment will effectively eliminate parking minimums for sites near frequent transit service.

This a critical opportunity to set housing for people as priority over shelter for cars, but it won’t happen without your help. City Council needs to hear from you. You can take action in one of the following ways:

Write today to City Council telling them why you support eliminating parking requirements. Write to cputestimony@portlandoregon.gov with subject line “Comprehensive Plan Implementation” Please cc: or bcc: pdxshoupistas@gmail.com. Tell them in your own words that housing is more important than car parking and they should pass Amendments 34 to the Comprehensive plan to eliminate minimum parking requirements in mixed use zones.

If you are available to testify in-person on Thursday, November 17th (or if you can help sign others up at lunch) please RSVP here: https://goo.gl/forms/8ICMdizpy8nIUsZQ2

The Portland Independent Chamber of Commerce (http://picoc.org) is sending an open letter supporting this policy change. If you are a business owner, please sign-on. If you are not a business owner, ask your favorite small businesses (food carts, retailers, etc) to endorse this letter

More information about testifying can be found on this article

Portland Is Building Parking For Cars That Won’t Ever Park

August 31, 2016 By TonyJ 3 Comments

Within a matter of days, Ford has announced plans to mass produce fully-autonomous vehicles by 2021, Uber said it would be debuting (semi) self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh, and folks in Singapore started taking rides in robot taxi cabs. Simultaneously, Portland plans to renovate a public parking garage for $25 million and build a 425 stall parking garage next to a Rose Quarter light rail station.

Autonomous vehicles are coming. The technology is here, the industry players are lining up, and given their track records with disruptive technology (see: Uber, AirBnB, Tesla Autopilot) our cities are unlikely to stop driverless cars from operating on our streets. But rather than crafting regulations to ensure that this technology is applied to solve transportation and planning problems, Portland is planning to spend millions of dollars to build more garages for conventional automobiles.

The threat of robot cars making things worse is real. It won’t do much good for us to trade privately owned single occupancy vehicles (SOV) that sit idle in parking stalls 98% of the time for privately owned SOV that sit idle in traffic 98% of the time. There are people making great arguments about what we should do to prevent a worst-case-scenario and Portland is lucky to have a planning commissioner, Chris Smith, who is pushing for policy about self-driving cars to be included in the upcoming Transportation System Plan.

The End of Parking?

While the virtues of autonomous cars and the timelines for their arrival are still open for debate, it is increasingly acknowledged that self-driving vehicles will greatly diminish demand for on-site parking in most areas with even a moderate amount of commercial or residential density. Wasting valuable land and money on parking stalls (already a bad idea) will be completely impractical once cars can park themselves in the hinterlands or, more likely, spend the entire day moving people and goods.

The possibilities for repurposing on-street and surface lot parking are exciting. Surface lots can be re-developed into new buildings. On street parking can be removed and replaced with bike lanes, parklets, bus rapid transit (BRT), or even additional lanes for car traffic. The curb lane is a massive public asset, worth billions of dollars in a mid-size city and how we’ll use it in a post-parking world is an exciting thought exercise.

Like a banana slicer or a butter cutter, a parking structure is, generally, only good for one thing.

Parking garages, however, are single-purpose structures. Like a banana slicer or a butter cutter, a parking structure is, generally, only good for one thing. Standalone parking garages can be torn down and housing or offices can take its place, but the parking built beneath or within a building is single-use space we will be stuck with for generations.

We can see the end of parking demand as we know it and it’s time to stop building parking for future generations; they won’t be needing it.

There’s Money For Parking But Not For Housing

In the past month Portland officials have committed over $40 million dollars to publicly financed parking garage projects and the Portland Development Commission (PDC) is just getting started. These projects are simultaneously in opposition to the city’s own mode split and climate action goals and foolhardy investments.

But why must we ask voters to pay for housing while we pay for parking garages with available funds?

As we have covered, the PDC is committing $18 million dollars to build a 425 stall parking garage as part of the convention center hotel project which PDC claims will be profitable for decades to come. Will visitors to Portland in 2025 rent cars and personally drive them to a hotel which is immediately adjacent to the MAX line? Only in the most dystopian of futures.

Parking garage at SW 10th and Yamhill — SW 10th and Yamhill Garage

Perhaps even more foolish is a plan to renovate the SmartPark garage on SW 10th and SW Yamhill. This project, which will cost $25 million dollars is said to be necessary because the building is old and the ground floor retail is lacking in modern amenities. It is irresponsible to spend this much on a parking garage, which will last many decades, in the heart of downtown Portland just as we begin a transition into a very different era of transportation. At the very least, if the city must rebuild this garage, then housing or office space should be built on top of it. A city that is moving forward in 2016 doesn’t just replace an old parking garage with a new one. It’s shameful.

Our city council is asking us to commit $250 million dollars in new property taxes to build affordable housing. This is a critical need and a worthy ask. But why must we ask voters to pay for housing while we pay for parking garages with available funds? Isn’t this backwards?

Voters should be asked if they want to raise taxes to rebuild a parking garage and city council should use those dollars to build affordable housing. City Council should direct PDC to abandon its bizarre parking garage strategy and, instead, to look to affordable housing as a long term investment.

Diversifying Portland’s Parking Toolkit with Unbundling Parking and Parking Cash Out

August 15, 2016 By Shoupista Leave a Comment

8715267346_57f4c2d72f_z — (Commuter traffic coming off the Broadway Bridge. Photo source: BikePortland.org)

Two weeks ago, Portlanders for Parking Reform wrote about the proposed Central City 2035 (CC2035) Plan may create more parking by increasing existing parking maximums in some of the Downtown parking sectors. While “parking is a fertility drug for cars”, to change travel behavior, parking policy cannot only target the supply side of this issue. If the City of Portland wants meaningful parking policies to help meet its mode-share targets–85% non-single occupancy vehicle (SOV) trips–and climate goals, such policies must address both supply and demand. Not only may the CC2035 Plan take a step backward on curbing parking supply, it also does not mention any parking demand management policy.

The good news is that there are viable parking policy options that can be applied to Portland’s downtown and neighborhoods to reduce the demand for parking. The Planning and Sustainability Commission and City Council ought to consider adopting unbundling parking and parking cash out for Portland’s Central City and gradually expand these policies into other neighborhoods.

Bundled Parking: Paying for Desserts That You Don’t Eat

Building and operating parking has high costs. Unbundling parking means separating the costs of parking and charging the users of parking directly. To illustrate how parking is currently bundled with the prices of housing, goods, and services that we consume and the need to unbundle it, let us think about the following scenario:

Imagine that the City of Portland requires restaurants to provide free dessert with every meal ordered by customers. The price for meals would increase to cover the cost of “free” desserts. While this may be good news to people who love desserts, such requirement has negative consequences. First, all diners now have to pay more for each meal whether or not they want to eat dessert. Second, some people would eat desserts they would not have ordered if they had to pay for them separately. Bundling desserts with food induces people to over-consume desserts, which leads to more obesity, diabetes, and heart diseases.

The City of Portland does not require free desserts with every meal but it does have parking minimum requirements for new development. Although the Central City district is exempt from such requirements, there are no guidelines on unbundling the costs of parking from development. Just as unbundled desserts would give diners more control over what they eat, unbundled parking will give travelers more choices by allowing people to decide how much parking they need and want to pay for.

When cities require developers to build off-site parking spaces, the cost of parking usually doesn’t get separated from the other costs of the development, making unbundling parking difficult. The good news is Portland’s Central City has no parking minimum requirement, which makes implementing unbundling policy more feasible. Parking can be unbundled from housing by offering residents the option to lease apartments and parking spaces separately, thereby reducing the cost of housing for those who do not own cars. Parking can also be unbundled from office and retail leases, allowing businesses to only purchase the number parking spaces they deem necessary for their employees and customers. Alternatively, parking costs can be listed as a separate line item in commercial lease agreements to show tenants how much parking costs and allow businesses to recover such cost by charging parkers directly.

Unbundling: Tried and Tested

Many cities in the U.S. has adopted unbundling parking policies. For example, San Francisco’s zoning code requires off-street parking spaces for residential buildings with 10 or more dwelling units to be sold or leased separately from the rental or sale of dwelling units. Berkeley also adopted a similar ordinance that requires unbundling parking. In central Seattle, approximately 50% of all multifamily units have unbundled parking from rent.

Lastly, Los Angeles’s Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (ARO) has permitted developers to unbundle parking to encourage converting and redeveloping old buildings. A recent research study shows that ARO apartment units with bundled parking cost about an additional $200 per month, proving that housing does become more affordable when it gets separated from parking.

Unbundling parking may be difficult to apply retroactively to all existing buildings, but it is not impossible. The City should at least explore the option of unbundling parking for current affordable housing units. This will offer existing low-income residents the same benefits of not paying for parking they do not use, freeing up more budget for housing. Portlanders for Parking Reform urge the Planning and Sustainability Commission and the City Council to consider adopting unbundling in CC2035 first for new development and then apply the same policy to existing affordable housing units.

Parking Cash Out: A Second Paycheck

According to the Parking Cash Out Report, “free parking is the most common fringe benefit offered to workers in the U.S., and 95 percent of American automobile commuters park free at work.” Most employers in Portland either provide parking for free or partially-subsidized employee parking. Even though many workplaces provide additional commuter benefits such as transit passes, the financial subsidy for parking often exceeds the subsidy for transit or other modes. Therefore, free or partially-subsidized parking is an invitation to drive alone to work.

Another policy to effectively reduce demand for parking is to offer workers the option to “cash out” their employer-paid parking subsidy. Parking cash out provides commuters the option of cashing out their employer-paid parking subsidy, and use it on other transportation modes or to keep it as a second paycheck. In addition, parking cash out would reward commuters who do not use parking by giving them financial incentives to use healthier and greener modes of transportation, such as walking, biking, and public transit, thereby changing travel behaviors and contributing to the City’s mode share targets and climate goals.

California passed a state law in 1992 that requires many employers to provide cash out options to their workers. A 1997 study in Los Angeles County estimated that mandatory cash out reduced the number of daily vehicle trips to work by 11 percent and commuter parking demand by 13 percent, or 0.4 spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space. If Portland wants to meet its mode-share targets for Downtown (85% non-SOV trips), it would need to set parking maximums at 0.25. That is an ambitious number that will undoubtedly cause a lot of political push back. However, parking cash out is an appealing policy option to help meeting that goal because it brings modest and incremental change and does not require employers and commuters to suddenly change behaviors.

Good for Employers

According to the U.S. EPA, “employers provide an estimated 85 million free parking spaces for commuters—spaces with a net worth of nearly $31.5 billion”. The same U.S. EPA report estimates that annual per space costs vary between $360 and $2,000. In the High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup shows that employers save $40 a year per $1 annual cost for doing parking cash out, with the assumption that the capital cost per parking space is $10,000 (this number is likely far below the average cost of an office parking space in downtown Portland).

Subsidizing parking costs employers a lot of money. Coupled with unbundling parking, parking cash out can significantly reduce demand for parking and offer savings to businesses. There are several benefits to employers associated with decreasing commuter parking demand:

(1) Employers can reduce costs associated with leasing or owning and maintaining parking spaces.
(2) Lower parking demand allows businesses to convert employee parking to customer parking, which may attract more customers.
(3) Businesses can also convert parking spaces into profit-generating activities.
(4) Reduced commuter parking demand will eliminate the need for new parking construction.
(5) Recruit and retain workers by offering parking cash out as a valuable fringe benefit.

Good for Employees

Not only does parking cash out create benefits for employers, it also does for employees. For starters, it increases equity among all commuters. Employer-paid parking does not benefit commuters who ride public transit, walk, or bike to work. However, cash out allows commuters receive the same benefit regardless of how they travel. Secondly, cash out benefits non-auto commuters without disadvantages for auto-commuters. Workers who want to park for free can continue to do so, but they will be able to receive the same amount of benefits if they decide not to drive.

Research in transportation planning has repeatedly demonstrated that higher-income individuals are more likely to drive to work alone, while lower-income individuals are more likely to carpool, ride public transit, bike, or walk. As a matter of fact, using the best available data from the Census Transportation Planning Products, BikePortland reported that only about 5% of all downtown Portland workers who drive alone to work are low-income.*

5% of all drive-alone downtown commuter earn less than $30,000 a year — Image source: BikePortland

The same general trend is also applied for homeowners versus renters (Portland renters are 6 times more likely to not own a car). Thus, without parking cash out, many employers regressively provide subsidies to help wealthy commuters save money on transportation but excludes poor commuters from the same benefit. In addition, just as unbundling parking would lower housing costs, cash out would provide financial benefits to car-less low-income households and renters who are increasingly getting priced out of Portland’s housing market.

Basically, parking cash out is a win, win, win.

Moving Forward

On July 26th, Portlanders for Parking Reform asked the Planning and Sustainability Commission to amend the proposed CC2035 draft, incorporate unbundling parking and parking cash out as recommended policies, and direct city staff to study how these policies will be implemented and administered. Portland has set ambitious transportation and climate goals for the next twenty years, but our currently proposed policies, namely parking ratios, only focus on managing parking supply and lack demand-based approaches.

Unbundling parking and parking cash out are the other side of the parking equation that have proven to be effective, low-cost, and more politically favorable. These policy ideas are not only important to Portland’s long range plan but will also influence the results of the City’s current parking projects, such as the residential permit program, performance-based pricing, and shared parking. Unbundling and cash out will diversify our current parking toolkit but most importantly, they will also contribute to other community goals such as housing affordability and access to more travel options.

Update: *The author added a sentence and a chart to highlight percentage of drive-alone downtown commuters who are low-income

Did This Landlord Prove That Parking Reform Can Lower Rents?

July 15, 2016 By TonyJ 3 Comments

Portland is getting a new bike share service starting on July 19th and the city is installing 100 bright orange bike corrals all over town to support the system. Despite a process for bike share that has taken years and a public outreach and comment period that has spanned several months, some residents were surprised (and unhappy) to see the bike racks installed where they usually park their cars.

But perhaps the most interesting part of this story, so far, is a quote from the landlord who owns the duplex directly behind the new racks. Mike Papas, who runs a blog called “LandLordZen” claims that the loss of on-street parking will force him to reduce the rent he is charging to his tenants.

Landlord Mike Papas told KOIN news he will lose $250 in rents due to the bike rack removing parking. — Landlord Mike Papas told KOIN news he will lose $250 in rents due to the lost parking.

Charging For On-Street Parking?

Papas’ duplex doesn’t have dedicated parking for his tenants so, assuming they have cars, they park on the street. Although the building is on a duplex, SE Cesar E. Chavez is a busy street with no parking. Papas’ tenants will have to park at least 50 feet from their home from now on. Although the street usually has available spaces on the block face (Note: the author commutes by bike on this street every day) the inconvenience and loss of parking in front of the residence is apparently valued by Mr. Papas at $125 per month.

Access to that amenity is reflected in the rent Mr. Papas, whose tenants say is an extremely honest and ethical landlord, is charging them. This is no surprise. One common argument against reducing or removing minimum parking requirements is that allowing developers to build less parking doesn’t lower rents. Opponents to parking reform have gobs of tables showing rents for comparable studios in buildings with and without parking which reflect little to no discount (and surely not the $200+/month the parking is likely adding to the cost burden).

The problem with that argument is that given ample free or underpriced on-street parking, there is no major difference in the amenities offered by the building with parking and the building without parking. Often, when developers do build parking, they charge for it and if the off-street is cheap the lot will be mostly vacant.

Photo of sign reading "Got Bikes, Need Parking!" in front of new BIKETOWN station. — Neighbors at SE Taylor and SE Cesar Chaves have put up signs protesting their loss of parking.

Reform Parking and Reduce Rents

If cities permit parking, charge market rates, and only sell as many permits as there are parking spaces, then we expect to see developers build the amount of parking they need. If a developer chooses not to build parking in such an environment, the expectation is that the rent for the building will be cheaper and fewer residents will own cars.

In all likelihood, Mr. Papas will not be lowering his rents by $125 a month. Parking on this block is not extremely congested and even if it were, the market rate for off-street parking in this neighborhood is likely closer to $50/month rather than $125. The area doesn’t have permitted parking, yet, and in the event neighbors ask for permits, the monthly cost of on-street parking is unlikely to be above $10/month.

Nevertheless, if Papas does lower his rent because the BIKETOWN station was put in front of his property, one can imaging tenants all over Portland begging for a station to be put in front of their home next.