Episode Summary

  1. Over 19,000 cities and towns have adopted reducing parking minimums in the United States. Best practices include: remove parking requirements for projects, properly price on street parking, and use collected revenue from parking to improve public space and public services
  2. To make missing middle housing more appealing to communities make it match the pattern language. In Utah that idea is to make it look like detached single family homes.
  3. Safe Systems funding includes designing streets to reduce speed by design (smaller lanes, trees, tighter turn radius) help force people to drive slower..which helps save lives.

Analysis of the recent adjustments to parking requirements in the United States. (5 min read)

How might you make missing middle housing more appealing? Ask Utahns. (4 min read)

U.S. Transportation Secretary national strategy to reduce traffic deaths. (4 min read)

Road diet myth buster asset (2 page pdf)

Episode Transcript

Analysis, Strategy, Myth

This is patterns of development.

Hey everyone. I’m Kyle Gulau and on this show, patterns of development, we take less than 10 minutes to deconstruct what's going on in real estate, architecture, and urban planing.

The value proposition of this show? You don't have a lot of time and I find interesting stuff related to our cities and summarize it here. Giving you the next secret weapon, the knowledge bomb, to drop in the meeting.

My own goal, is if I truly study this stuff long enough, patterns will emerge and I'll be a better developer, consultant, coach, neighbor, and citizen. And that's what this podcast is. My studies, shared and summarized for you.

This week. Analysis of the recent adjustments to parking requirements in the United States.

We can't talk about parking without talking about internally known parking expert Donald Shoup and his three rules:

  1. Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers.
  2. Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages.
  3. Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.

An article by Patrick Siegman published on streetsblog USA covers what was once radical is now becoming common place in urban planning.

2021 included:

  • South Bend, IN removing parking requirements
  • Sacramento, CA removed remaining parking minimums
  • Berkely, CA removed minimum parking mandates for residential projects.
  • Emeryville, CA launched on-demand paid parking program.
  • Minneapolis, MN abolished parking minimums.
  • St. Paul, MN followed suit.
  • Richmond, VA eliminated parking requirements.
  • Raleigh, NC eliminated parking requirements.
  • San Diego, CA removed parking mandates for businesses in transit priority areas.
  • Alameda, CA abolished minimum parking requirements.

Those are likely the big names you've heard of but, according to Patrick Siegman over 19,000 cities and towns have adopted these practices. A couple stories to share and why so many other's are adopting theses practices in their cities.

Fewer parking spaces means lower cost of construction and building maintenance costs. So, projects began offering rents below the market’s established levels. In Minnesota, new studio apartments, which typically went for $1,200 per month, were being offered for less than $1,000 per month. We talked about this in a podcast episode around August of last year.

UCLA Professor Michael Manville and colleagues published new research last year on the results of San Diego’s 2019 decision to stop requiring parking for housing near transit. The city had done so over the objections of some housing advocates, who feared that removing the mandates would reduce affordable housing production. Manville and colleagues found that instead, parking reform had “helped make 100-percent-affordable projects more economically viable, and removed a major arrow in the NIMBY quiver: objecting to affordable housing on the grounds of insufficient parking."

One less rule to keep track of for city staff and developers. And now the city can shift from requiring everyone to make parking to managing the parking the city owns, on street, more effectively. See above with Shoup's points.

Up next, what's the strategy...is there a strategy...to make missing middle housing more appealing?

A recent report from the Utah Foundation, an independent research group, shows that 72% of respondents say "style is the most important factor in their housing preferences."

And the style is?

You guessed it, single-family detached units, extra points if the garage is not visible.

The Utah Foundation is focused on the people of Utah and, quoting the report now, "Utahns' preference for the appearance of single-family homes suggests that middle housing will meet with greater acceptance if developed in a manner that mimics the style and scale of single-family dwellings," the study concludes.

Shawn Teigan of the Utah Foundation, "People have a lot of conflicting interests. They want to live close to work, and live by a grocery store, and have bike lanes and trails — but they also want to have large homes with large yards, but there are trade-offs," said Teigen. "People don't want more apartments in their city. But when you phrase it as an aspect of housing affordability, they can start to see how it's important."

We start to disguise missing middle housing as detached single family housing we might take a step towards addressing the affordable housing situation.

What about the record number of traffic deaths? Well, U.S. Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has some thoughts.

If you didn't know, even though we drove less in the pandemic (time and miles) there are more deaths...an all time high.

Over the next two years, he said, his department will provide guidance as well as $5 billion in grants to states to spur lower speed limits and embrace safer road design such as dedicated bike and bus lanes, better lighting and crosswalks. When roads become safer for bicyclists and pedestrians, that opens up transit options overall and can lead to fewer dangerous cars on the road, he said.

This "safe systems" approach is important because what we're doing is not enough. Obviously, reducing speed limits and increase enforcement isn't working. I was driving around the other day and looked over to my passengers and said are speed limits even a thing any more? The flow of traffic was easily 15mph the posted...

The Atlantic just posted an article today titled "the other speed trap" which discusses how traffic fines should be proportional to house hold income. Right now those fines disproportionally affect those on lower socioeconomic levels.

Which leads us to our patterns of the week:

  1. Over 19,000 cities and towns have adopted reducing parking minimums in the United States. Best practices include: remove parking requirements for projects, properly price on street parking, and use collected revenue from parking to improve public space and public services
  2. To make missing middle housing more appealing to communities make it match the pattern language. In Utah that idea is to make it look like detached single family homes.
  3. Safe Systems funding includes designing streets to reduce speed by design (smaller lanes, trees, tighter turn radius) help force people to drive slower..which helps save lives.

That's all for this week. Talk to y'all soon.