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Eliminate Minimum Parking Requirements In Favor Of More Affordable Residential Infill

May 13, 2018 By TonyJ 3 Comments

Action Alert: Submit testimony to the Planning and Sustainability Commission by Friday, May 18th. You can do this easily online at this link. We encourage you to support Portland for Everyone’s suggested modifications for the Residential Infill Project and to strongly support eliminating minimum parking requirements in all residential zones.

For several years, Portland’s planners have been crafting a proposal to encourage more housing to be built in our “single-family” neighborhoods. The general goal of the proposal is to discourage the 1:1 replacement of smaller, often more affordable, single-family homes with very large and expensive homes, often called “McMansions.” Instead, the city would like to see more housing created in these neighborhoods in the form of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and internal conversions of large older homes into duplexes or triplexes.

The plan hopes to achieve these goals by allowing homeowners and developers in “single-family zones” to build additional ADUs and allowing duplexes mid-block (currently they are restricted to corners). There are a lot of aspects to the proposal and you can read a detailed analysis and suggested improvements from our coalition partners at Portland for Everyone.

It is critical to push for a complete elimination of residential parking requirements if this plan is to succeed. Even though the plan recommends waiving parking requirements in many cases, many homes will never be built if shelter for cars continues to be given a priority over housing for humans.

As an example, a garage can be converted to an ADU without providing an additional off-street parking stall for the ADU, but in most cases the homeowner will still be required to maintain at least one off-street stall! This is even more ridiculous when one considers that an off-street stall requires a curb-cut which removes one public on-street parking stall from circulation.

Maintaining our current arbitrary parking requirements will lead to more traffic, less safe streets, more pollution, less housing, more expensive housing, and more trees removed. It’s a bad policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

For some inspiration, here is the testimony I gave at the Planning and Sustainability Commission hearing on May 8th.

Send in testimony now (certainly before May 18th) to ask the planning commission to support Portland for Everyone’s recommendations for the Residential Infill Project and, particularly, to recommend eliminating minimum parking requirements.

Affordable Housing, Open Spaces, Abundant Parking: Pick Two

March 13, 2018 By TonyJ 2 Comments

It’s time for Portlanders to pick their priorities and stick with them.

ACTION ALERT: Send email to betterhousing@portlandoregon.gov by Monday, March 19th telling staff you choose affordable housing and open space over parking requirements.

Portland planners are preparing a host of policy suggestions under the banner of Better Housing By Design. The project which is a counterpart to the Residential Infill Project has four goals for improving the zoning code governing multi-family housing including (from the project website):

Help meet Portland’s diverse housing needs, including housing that is affordable to lower income households and units designed for people of all ages and abilities.
Include open space and green elements that support healthy living for residents.

These are laudable goals, but Portland’s desire for more affordable housing and open space are at direct odds with our minimum parking requirements.

a picture of housing, a picture of a garden, a picture of a parking lot, the text reads, pick 2 — Portland must choose between affordable housing and open space and more parking.

Better Housing By Design allows more density in multi-family zones and adds new landscaping and outdoor space requirements to larger lots (20,000 sq/ft+). In addition, the proposal limits surface parking to 30% of the site area and limits impermeable paved surfaces to 15% of the site area. These restrictions are meant to reduce “heat islands” and excess runoff, and those are important goals, but this is greenwashing unless minimum parking requirements are completely eliminated first. What the suggested requirements in the discussion draft do are to complicate site planning for new housing and potentially make any required parking more expensive.

A developer building a project which triggers required parking will find it difficult to accommodate the open space requirements and the parking requirements without building structured parking. Structured parking takes up space that could be used for more homes and is much more expensive than surface parking.

This plan is over-thinking solutions to our most pressing problems. We need housing and we need open space much more than we need to require parking. Eliminating minimum parking requirements will allow the flexibility for builders to erect more aesthetically pleasing, functional, and affordable housing projects. Many developers will continue to build parking, but the parking they do build will be voluntary (and more “green”). If parking demand declines in the future, developers of new projects will be free to build fewer stalls without a city council fight to change requirements again.

The Discussion Draft of the plan has gotten better from the concept draft, staff are currently proposing to eliminate parking requirements for lots which are 7,500 sq/ft or smaller. They are also proposing to cut remaining parking requirements in half, from 1 required stall per home to 1 stall for every two homes in a housing development. This is a step in the right direction, but we need to go further. Ask staff to recommend eliminating minimum parking requirements for all multi-family housing zones as part of Better Housing By Design.

ACTION ALERT: Send email to betterhousing@portlandoregon.gov by Monday, March 19th telling staff you choose affordable housing and open space over parking requirements.

Parking Permit Pilots Must Avoid NW Portland Permit Pitfalls

January 25, 2018 By TonyJ 7 Comments

Portland’s city government is finally taking steps to manage on-street parking, but new permit programs will likely have to be more fair to renters if they’re going to get approval from City Council.

On January 24th, Portland City Council voted to approve a Parking Management Toolkit and directed the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) to seek out willing neighborhood partners to develop residential parking permit pilots. Once neighborhoods are identified, City Council will need to authorize the parameters of the new permit programs and comments from the commissioners exposed concerns about equity with the city’s current pilot program in NW Portland.

While most residents in NW Portland are currently guaranteed access to permits for as many cars as they own, people living in buildings with 30 or more units may not be able to buy a permit. Only 60% of units in existing buildings can get a permit under the policy and new buildings will be limited to 40% of units. A lawyer for MultifamilyNW (the landlord lobby) argued, earlier this month, that the rationing was discriminatory and potentially unconstitutional.

MultifamilyNW Has A Point

Consider the case of former Tonight Show host Jay Leno. Mr. Leno, currently star of Jay Leno’s Garage owns, by at least one estimate, 169 cars. If Leno purchased a home on NW 22nd Avenue with off-street parking for two vehicles, PBOT would be compelled to sell him permits for the remaining 167 cars for the, relatively low total cost of $2505 per month. With some diligence, Leno could park his cars on 22nd Ave and take up, literally, every on-street parking space between W Burnside and NW Northrup on the avenue.

Graphic showing that Jay Leno's 167 cars could take up all parking between W Burnside and NW Northrup on NW 22nd ave — If Leno moved to NW PDX, he could get permits for all 169 of his cars & park them all on NW 22nd.

But if Jay Leno moved into an apartment building with 30 units on NW 22nd Avenue he would have to compete for the 18 permits available for his building. The rest of his cars would have to be garaged at his expense, which in NW Portland would probably cost $100 or more a month.

We Can Do Better

Fortunately, there are lots of good ideas of how to manage on-street parking fairly and equitably, and perhaps City Council will have the courage to let PBOT and it’s volunteer neighborhoods try them out.

The NW Portland permit program, and future permit programs, should limit the number of permits available per household and/or use progressive pricing to discourage permit hoarding. Households seeking a second (or third) permit, or households with off-street parking, would pay a higher price for each additional permit up to the limit.

The city should not pick winners and losers for access to public parking. All residents should have equal access to permits in the neighborhood they live in, regardless of whether they live in an apartment, a commercial zone, or a single family home. The best, and fairest, way to allocate permits (assuming the demand exceeds supply) is to use an auction to distribute permits, specifically a uniform price auction. A uniform price auction asks participants to bid the maximum amount they would be willing to pay for a permit, but all permits are sold at the lowest price which clears the market. Most winning bidders will pay less than their maximum bid. Low income residents can be provided with cash subsidies from the proceeds, which they can use to bid on a permit or use as they otherwise see fit.

An Ounce Of Prevention…

Regardless of the methods chosen for rationing and distribution, it is critical that PBOT and City Council move quickly to develop a program and offer it to the rest of the city’s neighborhoods. Few, if any, other neighborhoods in Portland have parking as congested as NW Portland. Other neighborhoods are unlikely to need to claw back thousands of permits from existing residents. The key is to begin managing parking before it becomes a crisis.

Portland took a step in the right direction this week and it’s important to keep moving.

Portland Council To Consider Step Forward On Permits: Tell Them It’s About Time

January 20, 2018 By TonyJ 1 Comment

ACTION ALERT: Send an email to cctestimony@portlandoregon.gov by Tuesday evening! Refer to “Agenda Item 68: Parking Toolkit and Parking Permit Pilots.” Let them know that this is long overdue and tell them how excited you are to see Portland finally moving towards better parking policy!

It’s been almost 5 years since the Portland City Council directed the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) to develop a residential parking permit (RPP) proposal, two years since a stakeholder committee overwhelmingly endorsed a framework, and one year since council first had an opportunity to approve the plan, so where is it?

On Wednesday January 24th City Council will review (and hopefully approve) the “Parking Toolkit” designed by the Centers + Corridors committee and authorize PBOT to pilot the new residential permit system in a few eastside neighborhoods. Parking reform may not be politically popular, but it is some of the most effective transportation demand management policy that exists. A robust parking permit program would help Portland meet climate action and mode-share goals as well as encourage the building of more abundant and more affordable housing.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, staff is directed to seek community input to establish a new Area Parking Permit pilot in an area that does not have an existing permit program to learn more about how to implement parking management tools fairly and equitably; and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, staff is directed to return to City Council with an Ordinance to create a new Area Parking Permit Program pilot; and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, the City Council acknowledges the dedication and hard work by the citizen volunteers who served on the Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Centers and Corridors Parking Project. — More important parts.

Since May 2017, at least 8 neighborhoods and one neighborhood coalition have joined 20 members of the Centers + Corridors Parking Project Stakeholder Advisory Committee in asking Commissioner Dan Saltzman to provide impacted neighborhoods with effective options to manage parking.

Neighborhoods like Boise and Richmond were found, at the time of the parking study, to be in need of parking management, but they were not nearly as congested as NW Portland. It’s always better to manage an emerging problem before it becomes a crisis. The multi-year delay in approving the permit program has surely allowed the problem to worsen in these neighborhoods.

Northwest Portland was expected to be the initial testbed for the framework which allows for using higher permit prices to manage demand and restricting the number of permits sold, in total and per household. That process has been rocky, however, as attempts by the NW Portland Parking Committee to only restrict the number of permits allowed for residents of larger multi-family buildings, while allowing unlimited permits for other residents, met strong resistance from building managers. The NW Portland pilot has led to an increase in the permit cost (from $60/year to $180 year with discounts for low income households); the surcharge money is being spent to subsidize transit and bike share for residents who do not renew permits.

But Northwest Portland, as committee members argued, was “not included in the [initial] study and [is] a neighborhood with very different characteristics and history than the inner SE and NE neighborhoods which clamored for [parking management options].” Much of the trouble in NW Portland is the result of a system where far too many permits are already outstanding, and parking has long been in short supply and in high demand.

City Should Require Convertible Public Parking Garages, Not Just Encourage Them

January 6, 2018 By TonyJ 6 Comments

With climate action goals and tens of millions of public dollars in the balance, is saying “please” enough to convince Prosper Portland to avoid building soon-to-be obsolete parking structures?

Take action now! Email cc2035@portlandoregon.gov and let them know what you think about this amendment! Do you think it goes far enough? What methods of encouragement should be used in the implementation of this policy? A few sentences in your own words goes a LONG WAY!

Be sure to use subject: “CC2035 Testimony” and reference Flexible Building Design Policy, Volume 1, Amendment 1.

City Council won’t act on the requests of dozens of Portlanders to remove goals to build more commuter parking in the central city from the CC2035 plan. On December 6th, however, Mayor Wheeler did propose an amendment to “encourage flexible building design and construction” of city funded buildings, including parking structures. (View this, and other amendments, here)

For years, businesses in Old Town, Chinatown, and the Central Eastside have been promised more commuter parking and Prosper Portland has been working to make new garages, and a potential short-term revenue stream, a reality. But these promises were made in a much different time. Services like Lyft, Car2Go, ReachNow, and Biketown didn’t exist yet. Autonomous transit only existed in the minds of science fiction writers, and climate action wasn’t (but certainly should have been) the urgent issue it is today. New car parking garages are a 20th century solution to 21st century problems.

Convertible parking structures are a step in the right direction, but bigger steps are needed if transportation targets for commuters are going to be met. Repurposable designs should be required for any city built structures. City agencies must also prove that new facilities are self-sustaining, are fiscally responsible, and don’t negatively impact progress on climate action goals.

Tell Portland City Council that you support this amendment, but remind them that it doesn’t go far enough. New parking structures will drain city coffers and induce more frustrating traffic. Make sure they understand that more action is needed, and soon, to avoid a costly generational mistake. Prosper Portland can assist the continued development of Old Town, Chinatown, and the Central Eastside by financing affordable housing near these job centers and more innovative alternative transportation options for folks who choose to live elsewhere.

1. Add flexible building design policy Policy section: New Regional Center Policy 1.14 Sponsored by: Wheeler (12/6/17, Table O1) New Policy 1.14: Flexible building design. Encourage flexible building design and construction, including structured parking, that allows buildings to be repurposed and accommodate a variety of uses in the future. Explanation: The policy calls for flexible building designs that allow future repurposing of buildings, encouraging structured parking to be built to be convertible to a future nonparking use(s). — Text of the amendment.

How can you help?

Email cc2035@portlandoregon.gov and let them know what you think about this amendment! Do you think it goes far enough? What methods of encouragement should be used in the implementation of this policy? A few sentences in your own words goes a LONG WAY!

Be sure to use subject: “CC2035 Testimony” and reference Flexible Building Design Policy, Volume 1, Amendment 1.

Attend drop-in hours on Tuesday, January 9, 2018, in the City Hall Atrium from 5 – 7 p.m. Let staff know if you support this step, but make sure to express concerns if you think it doesn’t go far enough.

Testify at the City Council hearing on January 18th, 2017 at City Hall at 2PM in support of this amendment.

Parking Structure photo via https://www.flickr.com/photos/schluesselbein/4445085357