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Worse Than Wasteful: New Parking Garages Undermine Climate Goals

September 20, 2017 By TonyJ Leave a Comment

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

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.

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.

But 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.