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Portlanders for Parking Reform

Better Parking Policy For The City of Roses

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Minimum Parking Requirements

Proposal to Allow More Housing Choices Needs Support

November 27, 2017 By TonyJ 1 Comment

Parking reforms, such as eliminating minimum parking requirements, are important policy actions to help ensure an adequate and affordable housing supply in growing cities, like Portland. But parking reforms won’t have much impact on housing supply if a city’s zoning discourages enough homes from being built in the first place.Screenshot of city Residential Infill Page

Portland has been developing a proposal, the Residential Infill Project (RIP) based on the recommendations of the Residential Infill Project Stakeholder Advisory Committee (RIPSAC) for several years and comments on the discussion draft are due Thursday, November 30th 2017.

This proposal is opposed by those who claim the policy will lead to widespread demolitions and change the “character” of Portland’s single family neighborhoods. In reality, the proposal reduces incentives to replace existing homes with “McMansions” and is not nearly aggressive enough to solve our housing problem, let alone dramatically remake Portland’s single-family neighborhoods.

In addition, unless the current minimum parking requirements for single family zones are eliminated, several of the housing options (duplexes, triplexes, and internal conversions) will be difficult to execute on many lots due to lack of space for required parking. On other lots, removal of trees and/or open space would be needed to make space for required car parking.

Replace McMansions w/ Duplexes!

We encourage you to take action to support this project and advocate for parking reforms as a necessary enhancement.

What can you do?

Send an email (TODAY, deadline is 11/30/2017) to residential.infill@portlandoregon.gov

Generally the proposal is a step in the right direction, but we think the project proposal would be much stronger if it would:

  • Eliminate minimum parking requirements to preserve trees and remove barriers to duplexes, triplexes, and internal conversion.
  • Allow the “housing opportunity” provisions in all areas of the city to improve equity outcomes and encourage the creation of additional walking scale neighborhoods.
  • Make the affordable housing incentives workable to increase the likelihood that they will be utilized.
  • Allow internal conversion of existing houses into multiple units in all areas, and provide additional incentives for housing preservation.
  • Create a true cottage cluster code that will encourage the development of smaller, more affordable homes.

For more information, review the call to action by Portland for Everyone as well as this article describing the project. The city has a page with more details on the project and timelines.

 

Filed Under: housing, Minimum Parking Requirements

Portland Plans To Make Parking More “Green” And More Expensive

August 30, 2017 By TonyJ 4 Comments

Can minimum parking requirements be “green?” Portland’s planners are considering new rules that claim to make parking more environmentally friendly, but the end result might just be more permanent (and more expensive) parking.

As part of an ongoing comprehensive planning process, the city of Portland is reviewing zoning and design guidelines for multi-family residential zones.  The “Better Housing By Design” project released an 18 point concept report in July for public comment (the period for which has already ended). The report mostly deals with building design elements like setbacks and floor-area-ratio (FAR), elements which are better covered by our coalition partners at Portland For Everyone, but there is one concept in particular which raises a parking reformer’s eyebrows.

CONCEPT 4. LIMIT LARGE SURFACE PARKING LOTS. y Limit the amount of ground-level area that can be devoted to impervious surfaces, such as surface parking lots and driveways (potentially limiting these areas to no more than 30 percent of site area). Further analysis will be undertaken during code development to determine the appropriate limit, and whether this would apply only to vehicle areas or to all ground-level impervious surfaces.

Concept 4 is part of a few proposals called “Green Site Design” and it deals with impervious surfaces, generally surface parking lots. The concern given is that too much paved area leads to heat island effects, water pollution, and stormwater management problems. The concept proposes to limit the amount of ground-level area that can be covered by impervious surfaces. In practice this would lead developers to either use permeable pavers (which need regular maintenance and can cost much more than asphalt) or to “tuck under” some of the parking, which displaces potential housing and makes parking a permanent part of the structure.

There’s nothing wrong with restricting the amount of impervious surfaces, but it’s a bit backward to require parking and then force developers to spend more money building it. If Portland planners are honestly concerned about urban heat and the environment then they should propose eliminating minimum parking requirements. If there are no parking minimums, then the restrictions on surface parking will likely lead to less parking, while the current proposal will likely lead to less housing.

Disloyal Boyfriend Meme about parking

Portland should have already learned the lesson that making it more expensive to build housing by requiring more expensive storage for cars is a bad political move. Planners and officials might be worried that neighbors will complain about developments with fewer parking stalls, but maybe it’s time to show city officials and planners that people concerned about housing affordability, climate change, and traffic safety can make just as much, or maybe more, noise.

Portlanders for Parking Reform submitted comments on the concept report calling for elimination of minimum parking requirements in the multi-family zones before any additional regulations are imposed which may lead to more expensive and permanent car parking. City staff are reviewing the comments and drafting code language which is scheduled to come back for public hearings and adoption later this year and in early 2018.

You can help make it easier to build more affordable and sustainable housing by sharing this article, emailing betterhousing@portlandoregon.gov with your concerns, and writing to your city commissioners. Subscribe to our blog and follow us on Twitter or Facebook to keep informed about this and other opportunities to reform parking in Portland.

Filed Under: housing, Minimum Parking Requirements

Revised Portland Apartment Permits Prove Parking Math

August 10, 2017 By TonyJ 1 Comment

Parking makes housing more expensive and harder to find.

Professor Donald Shoup has been telling us about the high cost of free parking for years, but skeptics point to skyrocketing rents and say “rents in the buildings with no parking aren’t any cheaper.”  It is also very hard to isolate the effects of parking minimums on the supply of housing, creating additional uncertainty.

An Unintentional Experiment

Former mayor Charlie Hales may have unwittingly set up a grand experiment in the impact of parking on new developments through a series of parking flip-flops that spanned 15 years. In 2002, as a member of city council, he approved the elimination of parking requirements in apartments near frequent transit. In 2013, as a new mayor, he cast a vote to impose a new regime of parking minimums, buildings with less than 30 units would need no on-site parking, but starting at 31 units a stepped series of required ratios would kick in. Finally, in one of his last actions as a one term mayor, he oversaw new regulations waiving those ratios in developments with affordable housing. This ill-advised back-and-forth may have a silver lining, providing examples of “before and after” projects that could expose the role required car parking has played in our housing crisis.

Encouraging Results

Less Housing = More (And Affordable) Housing. Permitted development has 187 market rate units, 0 guaranteed affordable, 46 parking stalls, proposal is for 170 market rate, 40 affordable, 0 parking stalls.

A multi-site project, still seeking approval, in the Sellwood neighborhood was the first indication we had that parking could be exchanged for more and cheaper housing. Under the old rules, the 187 permitted market-rate apartments would require 46 parking stalls. The developer, Urban Development Group (UDG), proposed to revise the project under new inclusionary housing rules and trade 46 parking stalls for 23 more apartments.  Of the 210 proposed units, 31 would be affordable to households making 60% of the median family income (MFI) and 9 more to households making 80% of MFI.

Graphic showing a comparison of a 2 bedroom apartment layout with 675 sq feet and similar sized layout for two parking stalls.

Trading two parking stalls for one apartment (and some affordable units) is a good deal, but that’s not all UDG has planned. As described in this article on BikePortland:

  • At 2548 SE Ankeny St., a planned 77-home building with about 26 parking spaces and no homes below market rate is set to become a building with 81 market-rate homes, 15 below-market-rate homes and no on-site parking.
  • At 316 NE 28th Ave., a planned 74-home building with about 25 parking spaces and no homes below market rate is set to become a building with 101 market-rate homes, 18 below-market-rate homes and no on-site parking.

UDG is turning 51 previously required parking stalls into 66 more homes, 33 of which would be below market.

Parking Requirements Made the Housing Crisis Worse

But perhaps the most telling of UDG’s new permits is a pending development in the Sullivan’s Gulch neighborhood. UDG had a permit to build 30 market rate apartments and no parking. At the time of permitting, if UDG wanted to build one more apartment, they would have to provide 6 off-street parking stalls. In July 2016, we showed city council evidence that there were was a spike in 30 unit buildings after the 2013 regulations, but we could only speculate as to how much potential housing we were losing.

Urban Development Group has filed for a new permit for 2789 NE Halsey St which describes a building with 53 homes, 8 of which will be below market (there will still be no parking).

A chart showing distribution of developments with 30-39 units. 12 with 30 units, 1 with 31, 2 with 33, 2 with 35, 1 with 36, 3 with 37, 1 with 38, 2 with 39.

Portland’s parking requirements, which were lower than many other cities, were clearly the impediment to more housing and more affordable housing in this case. It is likely that hundreds of homes for people weren’t built in a construction boom cycle because of required shelter for cars.

Let’s Learn From Our Mistakes

It’s time for Portland’s leaders to stop waffling on parking reforms. In 2013, even though mandatory inclusionary housing was pre-empted by state law, Portland City Council could have created a voluntary affordable housing program which could have allowed developers to trade parking for affordable housing, but they failed to seize that opportunity. Let’s not make the same mistakes again.

Portland neighborhoods need effective on-street parking management options. Commissioner Dan Saltzman is proud of his work on inclusionary housing, but his reluctance to propose the ready-to-go residential parking permit program will lead to neighborhood backlash to much needed projects containing below-market-rate housing.  Furthermore, council should eliminate the problematic high frequency transit requirement for a parking waiver. While some neighborhoods are mildly congested, Portland is in little danger of too many apartments being built without parking. Portlanders aren’t in a position to turn away projects that add affordable housing and the remaining parking requirements, we now know for sure, are making our housing crisis worse.

Want to do something to help? Email Commissioner Dan Saltzman and tell him to bring the residential permit program back to council for a vote.

Filed Under: housing, Minimum Parking Requirements

Bundled Parking Adds a 17% Premium or $1,700 a Year to Your Rent

July 18, 2017 By Shoupista 6 Comments

(Source: East Bay Express)

The housing affordability crisis has reached record levels in American cities.  According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies, about half of the renters in the U.S. are cost-burdened  (paying over 30% of their income for housing) and one in four are severely cost-burdened (paying over 50% of their income for housing) in 2014.

Part of the problem is that local government requires housing development to over-build off-street parking. As a result, most Americans pay for parking as part of their rent regardless if they need a parking space. Policy experts and housing/transportation advocates have argued that parking requirements should be eliminated or reduced as this arbitrary regulation has made housing more unaffordable by (1) imposing substantial development costs that get passed onto tenants; and (2) reducing overall housing supply by limiting density.

The Hidden Cost of Bundled Parking

To answer the question: What are the effects of on-site garage parking on housing costs in American cities? A recent study by Gregory Pierce and C.J. Gabbe found that renters living in metropolitan areas pay approximately $1,700 per year or 17% of a unit’s rent for the bundling of a garage space with housing. Moreover, the authors estimate that there are about 708,000 urban carless renter households with a garage parking space. Altogether, these households pay $440 million a year for bundled garage parking; that is $36 million more than the amount of federal money the State of Oregon spends on rental assistance in 2016.

(Source: “The Hidden Cost of Bundled Parking”. ACCESS 51, Spring 2017)

Using data from the American Housing Survey, Pierce and Gabbe concluded that 71% of carless renters live in a housing unit with bundled garage parking and they pay an average of $621 a year or a 13 percent premium on their rent for parking they do not use.  This raises a serious equity issue since carless and renter households are much more likely to be lower-income than their counterparts (households with car- and/or home-ownership). Indeed, the study finds that the average income for carless households with a garage space is about $24,000 compared to $44,000 for other households. Because bundled parking forces poor carless renters to pay for a luxury they do not need, it inevitably makes it more difficult to save money to meet other basic needs such as education, healthcare, or better living conditions.

The study argues that when developers are required to provide parking on-site, they have little or no incentive to unbundle parking costs from rent because there would be an oversupply of parking spaces. Thus, the authors recommend that cities reform parking regulations to either eliminate or reduce parking requirements for housing development and enable developers to charge parking separately from rent.

Parking Stalls Housing Affordability in Portland

The study explores parking’s effects on rents at the national level but the policy implications are very relevant to Portland. According to the Portland Housing Bureau, more than half of Portland renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent. At the same time, only 59% of renters drive to work. But parking minimums have not only raised rents but also stopped affordable units from being built since 2013, and efforts to increase affordability are currently stalled by parking in Southeast Portland.

In February 2017, the new Inclusionary Housing rules went into effect in Portland, allowing housing projects near frequent transit to apply for a waiver for parking requirements. The Urban Development Group (UDG) filed an early assistance request for three proposed residential projects in Sellwood. The proposal, if approved, would provide 40 affordable housing units and 170 market rate units in exchange for waiving a total of 46 parking spaces that the projects are required to provide.

Despite the need for more affordable housing units in walkable and transit-friendly neighborhoods, the Bureau of Development Services (BDS) thinks that one of the projects provide on-site parking spaces as required by the City’s Development Standards because it is not located within 500 feet from a transit street with 20-minute peak hour service. If BDS refuses to interpret the Code and transit service standards more favorably grant a variance (which can be appealed by the neighborhood slows/kills the project), Sellwood will lose the opportunity to gain 40 affordable units and get 46 private parking spaces instead. It will also set an unwise precedent that will discourage future development proposals from trading parking stalls for affordable housing units.

But the impact is more than the lost opportunities to build affordable units. “By driving up the cost of development, parking requirements not only make the cost of developments that do get built more expensive (developers have to pay for the land and construction for parking, and pass these costs on in rent), but parking requirements also have the effect of reducing the amount of housing that gets built and because fewer units are built, there’s less supply, and that serves to drive up the rents on all the units in the marketplace,” said Joe Cortright, a Portland urban economist and contributor at City Observatory.

While the Inclusionary Housing ordinance was a positive step forward in parking policy reform, it did not go far enough. Allowing affordable housing projects near transit to apply for a waiver for parking requirements is good but eliminating parking requirements entirely is much more effective in supporting housing affordability. In May, Mayor Wheeler publicly said that “the debate: ‘Parking vs Housing?’ It’s really over“. But as long as Portland City Council continues to allow stealth parking subsidies in the form of parking requirements, the majority of renters will continue to be burdened by the hidden cost of parking.

Filed Under: Equity, housing, Minimum Parking Requirements, Parking Garages, Unbundling

Parking vs Housing: Mayor Wheeler Calls Debate ‘Over’

May 4, 2017 By TonyJ 5 Comments

Convenient parking is a problem in parts of Portland, Mayor Ted Wheeler conceded last week. But it’s a smaller problem than housing — and Wheeler says that when the two come in conflict, housing must be the priority.

“I want to put a marker down. The debate: ‘Parking vs. Housing?’ It’s really over.” – Ted Wheeler  

The mayor’s words came at a Rose City Park Neighborhood meeting April 25th. Wheeler was asked by RCPNA board member Deborah Field what his plan was to “require developers to put in ample parking spaces” with new housing projects.

The mayor’s response was definitive:

But I want to put a marker down. The debate: Parking vs. Housing? It’s really over. That piece of the conversation is over. When younger families or younger people say they want to locate here, the first thing they’re saying isn’t ‘Boy I wish I had another parking space, or had access to a parking space.” What they’re saying is, “I can’t afford to live in this city.”  And, so, the city, meaning the debate that happened over the last three years actually made a choice, and the choice was affordability and housing over access to parking. I just want you to be aware that that is a real dynamic and is a real choice and it was made with full community involvement.

The mayor told the crowd that “parking adds significantly to the cost of affordable housing.”

(This is true for both market-rate and publicly backed homes, for the simple reason that urban space costs money. You can read more about the effect of excessive parking on housing prices here.)

He suggested that neighborhoods, like Rose City Park, which want to manage their parking supply should form parking districts similar to those in Northwest Portland and the Central Eastside Industrial District.

The Portland Bureau of Transportation has spent years working to develop a framework for neighborhoods to create parking permit zones and parking benefit districts, but the policy has yet to be voted on by Portland City Council. Wheeler said he wouldn’t suggest simply taking the plan from NW Portland and moving it to Rose City Park, seemingly a contradiction to Commissioner Saltzman’s position that NW Portland is conducting a pilot for other neighborhoods to follow.

The mayor’s comments can be read here or viewed below (starting at 35:30).

20170425-RCPNA-Wheeler from portland politic on Vimeo.

Thank you to Catie Gould and E.J. Finneran for tipping us off to this news.  Thank you to Michael Anderson for edits!

Filed Under: housing, Minimum Parking Requirements, Parking Benefit Districts, Permits

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