• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Portlanders for Parking Reform

Better Parking Policy For The City of Roses

  • About
  • Get Involved
  • What’s a Shoupista?
  • Posts

Parking Garages

Tell City Council: “Ted Wheeler” Parking Garages Are Bad For Portland

September 12, 2017 By TonyJ 3 Comments

Testimony for the Central City 2035 plan is accepted until Friday, September 22th at 5PM. A burst of testimony could keep Portland from making a BIG mistake by wasting millions on new parking structures.

Take five minutes today and make a difference!

2 Minutes – watch this testimony from September 7th:

30 Seconds – Start an email to cc2035@portlandoregon.gov with the subject: CC2035 Testimony

1 Minute – Ask council to require that any new parking built with city involvement be 100% convertible to active uses.

1 Minute – Ask council to remove incentives to build new parking garages from action plan items TR7, TR22, RC58, and RC4.

30 Seconds – Sign your name and address. Hit send.

Of course you can always take more time and write a longer letter.  Check out our previous coverage for more details.

There are lots of other important things in CC2035 to comment on, for example:

  • Many people asked council to reduce allowable heights in the west end of downtown, lowering these heights will make it harder to build much needed housing in the city core.
  • The proposal contains support for widening our urban freeway (Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter). Widening urban freeways has never solved traffic congestion.

Thank you for taking the time to make Portland a better and more sustainable city.

Filed Under: CC2035, Parking Garages

City Council To Consider Plan To Build More Parking In Central City

September 5, 2017 By TonyJ 1 Comment

On Thursday, September 7th, Portland City Council will consider adoption of the Central City 2035 plan, a document which will guide development in the city center for the next 20 years.

Portlanders should be able to look at this plan and envision the city in 2035. Let’s do an experiment:


Think for a second about the world as it is now and what you would like Portland to be in 20 years. Think about where you’d like to live in the city, pretend you work downtown, and then close your eyes and imagine a commute in 2035.

How did you get there? Did you ride a bike? Did you take a bus? Was a robot driving that bus or a human operator? Maybe you lived downtown? Maybe you took a jetpack? Maybe you took a Lyft or Uber or something we can’t imagine yet?

Did your vision for 2035 include driving your own car to the central city and parking in a parking garage?

Probably not.


Why then do so many of the Performance Targets and Action Plans for our city’s next 20 years seek to incentivize and build new expensive car parking for central city commuters and visitors?

While Mayor Ted Wheeler has publicly criticized the plans of Prosper Portland to bet its future on parking revenues, when he (most likely) votes to pass CC2035 they will be codified in a set of Action Plans.

Building Parking, For Your Health?

For an example, look at the bizarrely named “Transportation Health and Environment” Action TR7. This action calls for “Incentives to Create Off-Street Parking” in an area that was “built prior to the automobile age.” The supposed problem for the Central Eastside is that developers don’t want to pay the high cost to build parking that no one will be using in 20 years. The solution proposed in this plan is to retrofit the district to accommodate automobiles, at a time in our history when we not only are well aware of the damage car culture has caused, but when we can, for the first time, see the likely end of the automobile age as we know it.

Old Town and Chinatown Parking Garages

But that’s not all they have planned for the Central City. Old Town / Chinatown is another area of town where they would like to mortgage our future tax revenues to build more parking garages. Check out Action Plan item RC44.

There are some great ideas in the CC2035 plan, we should definitely make more efficient use of the parking we have as peak car passes us by.  It may even be the case that new parking garages will help spur development, but the public must be honestly informed about the true cost of these garages, the poor outlook for self-sustainability, and the negative impact they have on our transportation and climate action goals. Every dollar spent on a car parking garage is one less dollar we can spend improving transit, building affordable housing, and incentivizing non-car modes. We’ll lose the opportunity to spend many many millions of dollars on sustainable practices if we build more public parking garages and we will be paying the mortgage on them when they are, inevitably, empty.

Convertible Parking Garages? Not In The Plan

Proponents of new parking like to point to trendy articles about converting parking garages into housing or offices. This is probably less likely than we think. Underground parking will only be used as housing in dystopian scenarios and building parking to be convertible makes it even more expensive.

Public Portland Parking GarageBut there’s another reason we probably won’t see convertible Prosper Portland parking garages in the future, it’s not required in the plan. Developers won’t build much parking at all, unless we force them. Prosper Portland knows new parking garages won’t pay for themselves, so it’s trying to get PBOT to help pay with meter money. Any requirement to make new parking be “convertible” would only make those projects harder to pencil out.

City Council should require that any structured parking built with public subsidy be convertible to other active uses (not just storage). If PBOT and Prosper Portland claim these projects can be turned into housing or retail space, then there should be no resistance to this amendment.

Tell City Council To “Stop Building More Parking Garages”

There is a hearing on CC2035 on September 7th at 2PM at City Council and there will be another hearing on September 14th. If you plan to testify, please mention that the city should not build more parking garages. Let developers build parking if they require it. Demand that any new public parking be completely convertible to active uses.

Please write to city council today and tell them to commit to climate action goals, transportation goals, and affordability by removing Action Plans TR7, TR22, and RC58 and modifying RC44. Tell them that new parking will be a significant cost burden on the city and will tie up critical funds that could be better used subsidizing transit or housing.

Please send an email now and demand that any parking built with public money (or in agreement with Prosper Portland) be built such that it is convertible to an active use by design.

For more inspiration, check out our coverage of the CC2035 Discussion Draft and read over the testimony sent in by Portlanders for Parking Reform.

Building more parking now in 2017 is a mistake; it certainly shouldn’t be part of our long range plans for Portland.


How to Testify

To testify, please provide your full name and address. Testimony to City Council is considered public record. Testifiers’ names, addresses and any other information included in the testimony will be posted on the website. You may submit testimony to the Portland City Council on the Recommended Draft CC2035 Plan in any of the following ways:

By Email
Send an email to cc2035@portlandoregon.gov
Subject: CC2035 Testimony

In person at the public hearing
September 7, 2017 at 2 p.m. City Council Chambers: 1221 SW 4th Avenue, Portland
Additional hearing dates may be scheduled. Please confirm dates and times by checking the City Council calendar one week in advance.

Filed Under: CC2035, Parking Cash Out, Parking Garages, Parking Maximums, TDM, Unbundling

Prosper Portland Breaks Ground On Money Pit

August 8, 2017 By TonyJ 2 Comments

Dump Truck Dumping Money Bags On Convention Center Garage
Prosper Portland is dumping money into a parking garage venture that may lose money and hurt climate goals.

Prosper Portland, the organization formerly known as the Portland Development Commission, celebrated the groundbreaking for the Convention Center Hotel and adjacent combination $26,000,000 parking garage and transit police station/jail.

Prosper Portland is looking to replace expiring tax-increment financing cash-flow with parking revenues from this garage and commuter garages in Old Town/Chinatown and the Central Eastside Industrial District.  The organization’s consultants say the projects will pencil out in the long run, but for that to be true, the city would have to fail to meet its own commuter mode-share goals and disruptive technologies, like ride-share and autonomous vehicles, will have to vastly underperform expectations.

Prosper Portland is mortgaging its own future for a short-term revenue stream. It might be too late to stop construction on this garage, but Mayor Wheeler and city council can tell Prosper Portland to stop undermining climate action policy and find other investments, like affordable housing, that the city actually needs and are more fiscally responsible.

If Paul Allen wants an NBA All-Star Game that badly, maybe he should finance the garage?

Do you want Prosper Portland to stop building new garages?  Email Mayor Wheeler and tell him to put a stop to Prosper Portland’s self-destructive plans.

Filed Under: Parking Garages

How green is my free parking structure? Not very.

July 26, 2017 By Joe Cortright 3 Comments

Why does the National Renewable Energy Lab give its employees free parking?

The researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab are hard at work on a lot of cool ideas for reducing pollution and promoting greater energy efficiency. They’re figuring out ways to improve photovoltaics and increase the efficiency of wind energy generation, and are a research leader in integrating these renewable energy sources into utility scale energy systems. The staff are also developing biofuels that could one day replace fossil fuels in transportation and other uses.  They have an entire program dedicated to transportation:

NREL research, development, and deployment (RD&D) accelerates widespread adoption of high-performance, low-emission, energy-saving strategies for passenger and freight transportation. Dedicated to renewable energy and energy efficiency, NREL and its industry, government, and academic partners use a whole-systems approach to create innovative components, fuels, and infrastructure for electric, hybrid, fuel cell, and conventional vehicles.

When the scientists working on tough problems of how to maximize the use of renewables and minimize energy use and pollution are charged with building the place they work, you can bet they’ll put a lot of thought into how to make things as smart and efficient as possible. It’s festooned with arrays of photovoltaic cells to generate electricity on site. Because it’s one of the lab’s newest structures, they’ve extensively modeled the daylighting of the building to minimize lighting requirements, and made extensive use of recycled (and re-cyclable aluminum).  The building’s lights are mostly on only at night, and only when motion detectors recognize occupants. This new $31.5 million building is shooting to be LEED Platinum and even be a “net zero” energy structure.

The NREL Garage
Net zero, provided you ignore what its used for. (Haselden Construction).

But there’s one big environmental (and energy) problem with this shiny new structure:  It’s an 1,800 space parking garage.  Not only that, but (if you’re Don Shoup, please don’t read this) they don’t charge employees anything to use the garage.  The whole thing strikes us as utterly tone deaf and a flat contradiction to the organization’s mission statement. So, in addition to the lab being located in a suburban office park on the fringe of the Denver metro area, its employees are strongly incentivized–nay, subsidized–to drive their private cars to work.  And that’s exactly what an overwhelming majority of them do.

A giant, free garage encourages energy consumption and pollution

We contacted the Lab to learn more about commute patterns and parking policies.  They shared with use the mode split from their latest (2014) commuting survey.  Not surprisingly, about two-thirds of all workers drive alone to work daily, almost ten times the share that either carpool or vanpool.

Drive alone – 65%

Walk – 0%

Bicycle – 4%

Carpool – 5%

Vanpool – 2%

Transit – 14%

Motorcycle/Scooter – 1%

Telework – 9%*

These figures represent typical commute patterns. As many as a quarter of lab employees telework at least some days, and the lab estimates that telework offsets about 9 percent of commute trips.

We asked about parking prices for commuters.  Lissa Myers, who is the Lab’s Sustainable Transportation &  Climate Change Resiliency Practice Leader told us:

Parking is free on our campus and we have an abundance of it.

That’s the problem, really.  We have an abundance of proven technologies that are “high-performance, low-emission, energy-saving strategies”–they include dense cities, cycling, transit, walking and car pooling.  But technologies don’t work, or don’t work well if we subsidize people to use energy-wasting alternatives and locate large concentrations of workers in places where they have few alternatives but to drive single-occupancy vehicles.

Location, location, location

And because the lab is located on the urban fringe, rather than in a central, transit served location (like say, downtown Denver) its employees have few nearby housing options that would let them bike, walk or take transit to work. The lab has a Walk Score of 30 (out of a possible 100) making it “car dependent”–the nearest coffee shops, restaurants and grocery stores are more than a half mile away, and generally on the other side of the I-70 freeway, meaning that if they leave the lab for errands or a meal, its most likely they’ll drive.

Promoting renewable energy is (and energy conservation and greenhouse gas reductions) is a matter of both technology and incentives. An agency that’s supposedly dedicated to these tasks ought to do a better job of aligning its policies with its mission. There’s little hope that people will use a non-polluting bicycle or take transit to work, for example, if they have free use of parking.

Excess capacity

We also have to note the capacity of the NREL garage, relative to the size of the institution is enormous. The garage, completed in 2012, contains 1,800 spaces, while the lab has just 1,500 employees.  So that’s about 300 spaces more than are needed to provide one space per employee.  Based on the lab’s mode split, only slight more than 1,000 spaces are occupied per day (about 975 by single occupancy commuters, about 30 more by carpools (if we assume 2.5 workers per carpool), and about 6 spaces for van pools (assuming six workers per van pool) and the equivalent of 8 spaces by motorcycles and scooters (assuming 2 two-wheelers per parking space).  That means the garage has almost 75 percent more capacity (1,800 spaces supplied for about 1,025 vehicles) than is needed to house NREL’s worker’s vehicles–and that a price of zero to the users.  (To be sure, the garage also accommodates visitors, but that doesn’t materially affect our analysis.  According to the NREL’s economic impact statement, the lab gets about 25,000 visitors per year, which works out to about 100 visitors per day; if they each needed a parking space for an entire day, that would work out to about 100 parking spaces. In reality, typical demand would be less because most visitors stay less than an entire day and many arrive in multi-occupancy vehicles or via transit or hired vehicles).

Having built the garage, their are powerful bureaucratic incentives to see it as full as possible; that, and employee resistance to having to pay for something that they’ve been given for free, means this problem is likely to persist. It’s hard to say what’s worse: an over-sized garage that’s mostly empty (representing a waste of resources that could be better used for other things, like say research on clean energy) or a garage that’s nearly full of single-occupancy vehicles (because its free to users). As we’ve suggested, and as our colleague Tony Jordan reminds us, dedicated parking garages are likely to become big stranded assets with the advent of autonomous vehicles. But it looks like that’s not something that’s on NREL’s mind.  The agency’s construction manager Tony Thornton tells the American Galvanizer’s Association NREL wanted a building that would last  for a 100 years. Whatever they’re planning for renewable energy, it doesn’t look like they expect it to influence car ownership or driving patterns, if they expect their parking garage to be around through 2100.

Aerial view of NREL Parking structure and adjacent surface lot (Google Maps)
Aerial view of NREL Parking structure and adjacent surface lot (Google Maps)

The claim that a parking garage can be “zero net energy” requires casting a blind eye to the structure’s central purpose. It’s only zero net energy if you completely ignore the energy used by the cars it’s designed to store, and that you ignore how building garages and subsidizing their use prompts more driving, more energy consumption and more pollution.

This article was originally published on City Observatory.

Filed Under: Parking Garages, Uncategorized

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

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Search

Subscribe to Our Blog

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.

Upcoming Events

Nothing from May 8, 2025 to June 8, 2025.

Like Our Facebook Page

Like Our Facebook Page

Latest Tweet

My Tweets

Recent Posts

  • More housing and no required parking. It’s time to pass the Residential Infill Project!
  • Proposal would effectively eliminate minimum parking requirements in Portland
  • Better chances for affordable housing? Not if parking is required.
  • Changes coming to NW Portland Parking
  • You’ve got a rare opportunity to tell the IRS to tax parking fairly, seize it.

Copyright © 2025 · Portlanders for Parking Reform · Log in

 

Loading Comments...