Episode Summary

  1. Eliminate your parking requirements. Land is your cities most important asset. If you allow developers to build more housing and office space instead of parking lots you'll solve little bit of the climate problem, a little bit of your affordable housing problem, and you'll probably increase your cities tax base.
  2. Be careful with large infrastructure projects. And if you're thinking about charging a toll. Change that first before you go putting a whole bunch of extra lanes on your bridge. Sheesh.
  3. Size, Price, Location. You can only pick two.

Another city eliminates parking regulation (4 min read)

Infrastructure financing for a road that nobody drives on (6 min read)

Come on. Just give people what they want. (8 min vid)

Episode Transcript

Hey everybody it's Kyle. Where, on this podcast, I share, discuss, ponder, and deconstruct patterns through the best content I've discovered each week related to urban planning, architecture, and cities.

A common pattern we discuss on this show is the reduction and elimination of parking requirements. Toronto right before the holiday season made the leap, and might be the biggest North American City to do it.

Toronto joins a long list of cities expecting to benefit from the change which has been documented over and over again. When you reduce and eliminate parking minimums you are effectively deregulating a small part of the development process. Developers then need less land, which means they spend less money, which means they can offer rent at a lower rate.

I'm quoting now, "This more strategic and thoughtful management of the parking supply will contribute to the city's priorities to address the climate emergency, improve housing affordability, and encourage alternative forms of mobility for more people," said Deputy Mayor and Chair of the Planning and Housing Committee, Ana Bailão.

Next up, and this is probably best know as the strong towns pattern, don't build expensive, sprawled infrastructure that no one will use. Unfortunately Louisville just did it. The article in the City Observatory by Joe Cortright outlines the scary side of infrastructure projects.

We're talking about Lousiville's I-65 bridges. It turns out that just by charging a $1 to $2 toll, Kentucky and Indiana were able to entirely eliminate traffic congestion on I-65.

In the years just prior to the tolling, traffic was in the 135,000 to 140,000 vehicles per day level.  But as soon as tolling went into effect, traffic dropped to barely 60,000 vehicles per day (with a very slight further decline due to Covid-19 in 2020).

Unfortunately, they spent over a billion to expand the capacity of the bridges and now through creative financing the communities only have to pay interest for the next 25 years. The community will end up paying as much in interest on some of these bonds as they owed in principle. Yikes.

And last up this week, "Just give people what they want." People want to live in the suburbs in detached single family homes. Just give it to them.

A video in YouTube channel, "oh the urbanity", love the name by the way, covers that 2 sided American dream we've talked about so much recently. When you're thinking about a home you've got three options: Size, Price, Location. But you can only pick two.  So if you choose bigger house, lower price it probably means suburbs. You want location and price? We're probably talking a studio downtown. I've never heard of that choice triangle before. I love it.

Which leads us to the patterns of the week:

  1. Eliminate your parking requirements. Land is your cities most important asset. If you allow developers to build more housing and office space instead of parking lots you'll solve little bit of the climate problem, a little bit of your affordable housing problem, and you'll probably increase your cities tax base.
  2. Be careful with large infrastructure projects. And if you're thinking about charging a toll. Change that first before you go putting a whole bunch of extra lanes on your bridge. Sheesh.
  3. Size, Price, Location. You can only pick two.

Talk to you next week.