Portlanders for Parking Reform

Better Parking Policy For The City of Roses

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Update: Affordable Housing Plans In Sellwood Still Somewhat Stymied

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Children playing and a parking lot divided by a question mark.
Will Portland choose to prioritize new residents or new cars?

In September, Portland’s Bureau of Development Services released a review of the impact of the inclusionary housing (IH) policy enacted in February 2017. Highlighted in the review are three proposed buildings in Sellwood which make up the bulk of “good news” in the report, but the news would be better if Portland would stop requiring mandatory shelter for cars.

Post Inclusionary Housing Permit Activity Between February 1, 2017 and August 1, 2017, permits were filed for 11 projects subject to IH requirements. Six were privately financed and five were affordable housing projects receiving some level of assistance from the Portland Housing Bureau. The six privately financed projects included 406 market-rate residential u
The report from BDS highlights the proposed affordable units in Sellwood.

Urban Development Group (UDG), the developer, was initially planning to build three buildings in Sellwood containing a total of 187 market-rate apartments and 46 required car parking stalls. After the passage of the inclusionary housing rules, the developer sought assistance to determine the feasibility of utilizing the parking waiver for projects under the IH program to, instead, build 210 total units, 170 at market-rate, 31 affordable to households making 60% of the MFI and 9 for households at 80% of MFI, with no on-site car parking.

While transit-frequency requirements disqualified one of the buildings from receiving a waiver for mandatory car parking, UDG is still pursuing the project reconfiguration, albeit with less affordable housing and more car parking. The most current proposal includes 170 market-rate units, 29 units at 60% MFI and 9 units at 80% MFI, along with required 19 car parking stalls at 1717 SE Tenino.

This reconfiguration demonstrates the impact that parking requirements have on affordability. Parking requirements for mid-sized housing projects (50-150 units) are suppressive and expensive. When allowed to build 27 fewer parking stalls, UDG is willing (and able) to build 21 more homes total and 38 permanently affordable units.

Portland is in dire need of more affordable housing and the city should be aggressively seeking to work with developers who are willing to participate in the IH program. If UDG wasn’t required to build shelter for 19 cars at SE Tenino, what other incentives or changes could unlock the potential to build another 15 or 20 homes, including several more affordable units. Portland should eliminate all parking requirements for multi-family housing and use parking management, such as residential permits, to encourage developers to “right-size” their parking.

 

 

Proposal to Allow More Housing Choices Needs Support

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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.

 

Worse Than Wasteful: New Parking Garages Undermine Climate Goals

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TAKE ACTION: Testimony is accepted before September 22nd, 5PM on the CC2035 plan which includes goals to build new car parking structures with city backed bonds and parking meter revenue. Click this link for more information.

Portland City Council is considering a massive plan for the next 20 years of development in the central city. This plan is supposed to set the stage for a more sustainable, equitable, and livable city, but it contains plans to waste money on single-use commuter and visitor parking garages that will take decades to pay off, siphoning critical money we could use to transition to transit and other modes.

It is worse than wasteful to build publicly funded or financed parking garages in our central city. If the Convention Center Hotel Parking Garage is any indication, these hulking structures will be filled with car parking stalls costing more than $50,000 each. To pay back the loans required, those parking stalls will need to be filled with motor vehicles, parked at premium prices, nearly every day for the next 20-30 years.

This is a no-win situation for Portland. If those garages are profitable, it will mean that our goals to cut car traffic to downtown have failed. If we succeed at our critical and ambitious climate goals, then taxpayers will be on the hook for millions of dollars. It would be better to burn the money than build garages with it.

A 100 dollar bill burning.
It would be better to burn the money than spend it on a parking garage.

In the next two days, please take a minute and tell City Council that this is a very bad idea.

Let’s Use What We Have Already

The desire to build more parking is based on the belief of Prosper Portland and other groups that we don’t have enough car parking in the central city. This is debatable. There are many many thousands of parking stalls in the city, but at any given time they are empty due to regulations (residential parking in downtown can’t currently be leased to commuters) or they are parked up with cars that might not be there if we had higher prices for meters or if we had better transit. Let’s use smarter parking management tools to make better use of what we have. Let’s prioritize transit traffic on our streets so that taking the bus is a more viable option. We can make do with what we have now before future trends reduce parking demand.

Let Private Capital Take The Risk

If car parking was a good long-term fiscal bet, then private developers would be begging for the opportunity to build it, but it isn’t. Parking is expensive to build and a very risky investment in this time of extreme transportation disruption. Developers aren’t willing to build new parking garages unless the city is willing to take all the long-term risk. The city has far greater priorities than parking, like deeply-affordable housing.

Require That Parking Garages Pencil Out

If the city is still going to consider building (or buying) a parking garage, shouldn’t it be required to show the real risk of taxpayers footing the bill? Consultants for Prosper Portland can produce projections that show the garages can be self-sustaining in today’s market, but if you ask how much money the garage will make in 2030, they will say “no one knows the future.”

We need to demand better than that. Surely no one can know the future, but we can take into account the impact that ride-share, self-driving buses, and our own climate action goals will have on parking demand. If a car parking garage can’t pay for itself, Portland taxpayers should know about it. Require realistic projections for long-term viability and, better yet, require a vote of the public to green-light a garage.

Require 100% Convertibility To Active Uses

Prosper Portland and PBOT say that it’s ok to build garages that might be empty because we can convert them to homes or offices in the future. If this is true, then there should be no controversy in the city passing an ordinance requiring any city-involved parking structure be 100% convertible to active uses in the future, storage units don’t cut it. Without that guarantee, it’s very likely that new garages will be single-use facilities that will be an albatross around the neck of Portland residents for a generation.

Take Action In Three Minutes

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.

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

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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:

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

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

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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.