On occasion of it being Earth Day, I thought a post on urban planning was in order, specifically regarding policies in Los Angeles (one of the least sustainable cities I know). I’ve never understood why L.A. can’t accommodate both the car and build mass transit. It isn’t either/or, as most Angelinos like to believe. Some people want to drive, others prefer to take transit (providing it is reliable, safe, and clean). Why limit choice by forcing people to drive?
But here’s what most people in L.A. don’t understand: current L.A. parking regulations don’t reflect reality, even in L.A. New market condos require 2.25 parking spaces per unit (or, in some cases, 2.5 spaces or even 2.75 spaces in special districts), regardless of the size of the unit. That literally means that they expect every single household to have 2 cars and every other household to have someone over for dinner every other night (0.25 guest spaces). Since this doesn’t reflect reality, what we get are fewer housing units and a lot of expensive empty parking spaces in new buildings.
In most cases, parking requirements in L.A. — not density — is what limits how many units of housing can be built. You simply cannot park the required number of cars on the site, so you build fewer units than is allowed. In many cases, you can only build about 75% of the number of units allowed by zoning. We are literally choosing to house cars over people, because the more cars you house, the less housing units you get. What’s worse: because it costs so much money and space to build the required parking (and because they can’t get the number of units allowed on the site), developers are forced to build bigger units, which means there are few small (and thus more affordable) market-rate units available. That L.A. hasn’t met its housing demand in over a decade is one symptom of the problem (even now, with prices falling due to the mortgage meltdown, there still is more demand than supply).
But here’s the rub: if you look at the number of cars vs. the number of housing units in L.A., you find that on average, there are about 1.4 cars per unit (which is to say that about half of households have 1 car and half have 2 cars, and a few even have none!). Adding 0.25 guest spaces per unit and the actual number of spaces required per unit in L.A. is 1.65. Now, let’s be clear: 1.65 spaces per unit is a very high number. In New York City, by comparison, there are 1.7 million registered vehicles for 3.4 million housing units — a ratio of 0.50 per unit — 3.3 times fewer than the 1.65 required in L.A. So, indeed, L.A. is a driving city. But we need only 1.65, not 2.25.
Think about it, we could reduce the parking standard by over 25% — from 2.25 to 1.65 parking spaces per unit and still accommodate all the cars required in L.A.; this would allow us to build over 25% more housing units without even changing the density (since in many cases, as I said above, you can only build about 75% of the allowable units).
Now imagine if we required all projects throughout the city (over a certain size, let’s say 10+ units) to set aside 10% of the units as affordable. It’s a win-win for everyone. We accommodate cars at the ratio required for L.A. (1.65 spaces per unit), developers get over 15% more market units and we institute a mechanism to generate 10% affordable units for every new project in the city. All it takes is leadership.
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