A new SPARCC publication, authored by MZ Strategies, offers recommendations for right-sizing parking for TOD and for people. Free download available at SPARCC.

All politics is local, and this is especially true when it comes to parking. Otherwise sane people can quickly become unhinged over the fear of a lack of parking. Several years ago, when my family lived a quarter mile from the Clarendon metro station in Arlington, VA our neighborhood rallied for curb, gutter and sidewalks. Our street had been overlooked for years as the rest of the county urbanized. An elderly neighbor a few doors down started a petition requesting these upgrades. His motivation was simple. He wanted an easier and safer walk from his house to reach the Metro and other neighborhood destinations. Most neighbors supported this effort and readily signed on. However, one neighbor who owned a double lot held out. He was concerned about losing parking in front of his house.

As we worked with the County engineers to find a solution to making our historic, tiny street work we were told that we could either have sidewalks or parking but not both. We also learned that the neighbor concerned about the loss of parking had 10 cars of which 9 were parked on the street leaving his double wide driveway largely unused. He felt completely entitled to this public benefit. All forms of NIMBYism were on display including aligning with environmentalists concerned about the potential loss of trees. The final compromise after many months of heated debate was to have parking and a sidewalk only on one side of the street and save all but one of the trees. This story is not unique but illustrates the incredibly strong and illogical feelings of self-entitlement that parking debates bring even at the smallest scale. It also illustrates issues of equity. Was this one landowner more entitled to public funds spent to preserve his right to park, over the rights of the dozens of renters who lived on our street and wanted a safe, convenient pedestrian pathway?

Much has been written over the years to try and inform planners, engineers and architects about appropriate parking supply, location and pricing. Among the best are works by:

Across America, the standard parking practice is relatively simple: provide ample free parking especially at commercial, office and retail locations. The true costs of free parking are hidden. Excessive parking drives up housing costs, adding on average, $24,000 per space for surface lots and $34,000 for underground structures. Across America, we have more than 2 billion parking spots for the 200 million cars on US roads.

Yet this dynamic is starting to change. Over the last two decades traditional parking approaches are being questioned, especially in urban neighborhoods where the costs of land and providing structured parking add significant financial burden to a project. Advocates of reducing automobile dependency in favor of more walking, bicycling, transit and shared mobility options encourage the reduction or elimination of parking requirements in new developments. Other strategies such as shared parking between different uses are gaining popularity. The concept allows tenants to park their vehicles overnight in parking garages that in the daytime are prioritized for retail or office uses. Charging the true costs of parking is another strategy growing in popularity, especially in areas that are well served by transit and where the costs to provide parking are high.

Balancing needs of transit riders, drivers, and pedestrians all within a surface parking lot area at this mixed-income housing project in Minneapolis, MN. (Photo: M Zimmerman)

Parking is a critical ingredient in strategies to promote transit-oriented development. Transportation planners and engineers have written extensively about parking, but little attention is traditionally given in parking literature about the equity impacts of parking policy on lower-income people including both those who drive and those who do not. SPARCC partners who are working to advance equitable TOD are looking at parking with an eye towards equity. In its work to implement the City of Chicago’s 2019 eTOD Ordinance, Elevated Chicago is looking critically at how future parking policies in the city can better align with equity goals and goals to reduce single occupant vehicle parking.

MZ Strategies authored a new SPARCC publication, Rethinking Parking to Achieve Equitable Transit Oriented Development, to examine smart parking policies that support both TOD and equity goals. The paper delves into several promising strategies:

Utilizing an equity screen to examine equity impacts, and identify mitigation strategies.
Designing inclusive community engagement strategies including determining how parking revenues are used to ensure community benefit.
Targeting parking revenues to support increased mobility options and ensure that low-income households are not unduly burdened.
Unbundling parking costs from housing, including in affordable housing and multi-family housing projects.
Right-sizing parking requirements through reducing or eliminating minimums in TOD neighborhoods, or setting parking maximums that foster shared-parking opportunities.
Investing in more frequent, accessible transit to increase regional coverage and availability.
Committing to fair and frequent parking enforcement, including of vehicles illegally parked in transit corridors.

Writing this new parking report provided an opportunity to reflect on some of the parking paradoxes, such as my entitled neighbor, that I’ve witnessed over my career working with communities to implement TOD and build affordable housing near transit. Here are three important insights that I have gained --- not from formal parking guidance documents or industry conferences --- but from interviews and personal stories shared with me over the years of working in the eTOD trenches that I offer to help my peers in the profession reconsider how you approach parking:

1. Parking imposes unnecessary costs on housing. Soon after founding MZ Strategies, I worked with the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency to examine the challenges and needs for equitable TOD projects utilizing public finance resources such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and HUD funding. In my interviews with developers of affordable housing, I heard several stories about the burdensome additional costs that overparking created in financing their projects. One story has stayed with me over the years. The St. Anthony Mills Apartments in downtown Minneapolis near the Vikings Stadium and Guthrie Theater opened its doors in 2007, just a couple of years after the first light rail line began operating nearby.

Structured parking adds significant cost to residential development, making it an even harder challenge to finance affordable housing projects. Right-sizing parking requirements to TOD requires reducing the amount of required spaces, allowing for mo… — Structured parking adds significant cost to residential development, making it an even harder challenge to finance affordable housing projects. Right-sizing parking requirements to TOD requires reducing the amount of required spaces, allowing for more shared parking, and unbundling parking costs from the rents. (Photo: M. Zimmerman)

The project was a bit of a unicorn. It introduces multi-family residential to a formerly industrial and vacant neighborhood. It tested mixed-income housing and mixed-use TOD in the City. And, most radically it wrapped housing and commercial space around a city-owned parking ramp that would be built. The affordable housing developer hoped to lease parking space for residents, thus reducing her up front financial burden. However, things quickly fell apart as the city still required 1 parking space for each residential unit and financing challenges mounted.

The result was an overparked eTOD project with 25-30 years of fixed parking costs. Scarce affordable housing dollars were being used to subsidize parking for market rate units. Investors were scared away, and refinancing challenges remain to this day even as the surrounding market has picked up. In the long run, a mission-oriented developer made it work but the amount of financial loss and challenge involved would scare away most other developers.

2. Low-Income Households Are Disproportionately Impacted by Parking Policies. National transportation statistics tell us that lower-income households own fewer cars. These reduced automobile ownership rates should be considered for eTOD projects that serve predominately lower-income households. Yet, this data also tells us that low-income households DO own cars, even if at lower percentages than higher-income households. This means that affordable eTOD projects should not eliminate parking entirely, specially if located in areas without extensive transit options, and should consider the equity impacts of parking policies in a more nuanced context.

“Households with annual incomes less than $25,000 were 10 times more likely, on average, to be zero-vehicle households than households with annual incomes of $75,000 and above. Of workers below the poverty level, 65 percent drive to work compared to 76 percent of workers overall in 2017.” - USDOT FHWA NHTS 2017

A few years back I was touring a suburban jurisdiction that had taken incredible steps to update its zoning to allow for TOD densities, mixed uses and multi-family housing. The jurisdiction had devoted local resources to help finance an affordable housing project located within a half-mile of a future light rail station and next door to a community park. The project included many of the elements TOD advocates applaud, including limited parking. However, low-income residents soon felt the impacts as frequent transit was not yet regularly running. Street parking was limited, and no long-term affordable parking options existed. Those who worked split shifts or relied on family members to help watch their children while at work were penalized both by the lack of options and by paying parking tickets. Parking approaches had to be refined to account for this reality to ensure those most reliant on both transit and driving were not unfairly penalized. For me this was a huge awakening to the fact that statistics alone is not enough to understand the needs and tailored solutions we need to develop for equitable TOD.

3. Surprise! Parking Policy is Criminal Justice Policy and Eviction Policy. Many low-income people and people of color are forced to drive given inadequate transit options and poor transit coverage or service hours. Increased costs of parking or greater enforcement of parking violations can create greater financial hardships for those living on modest incomes. Greater enforcement leads also to more opportunities for racial profiling and inequitable ticketing. Parking violations and unpaid fines can compound. In some states, the courts take away residents’ driver’s licenses for unpaid court fees and fines, adding to the burden of low-income families that goes beyond even their economic impact.

Groups like the Legal Aid Justice Center are working to address issues created by parking policies and other transportation decisions that unfairly burden lower-income workers, when equity issues are not addressed in policy creation.

Shortly after moving to Richmond, VA a few years ago I met a group of lawyers working for the state Legal Aid Justice Center. I quickly discovered that one of the major legal justice efforts they were working to overturn was a state law that penalized low-income drivers, many of whom were people of color. Unbeknownst to me until that moment was how parking policy was yet another tool being used to criminalize poverty.

Many low-income households across the state must drive because transit options and job opportunities are limited. Driving becomes a necessity and in areas with tight parking enforcement and fees parking costs may quickly escalate. Paying that $50 parking fee could mean you are unable to afford your rent this month. The cycle continues and for some, the result is a court action for unpaid tickets or an eviction notice. Either further destabilizes families, and the ability to access economic opportunity. Legal action requires money.

In Virginia, those unable to pay their court fees were further penalized by having their licenses revoked. The cycle continues, and those most vulnerable pay the greatest price. In virtually every community, this price is disproportionately born by people of color. The lesson from this tragic reality is that none of us who work on urban issues are immune to the equity impacts of our work. Even parking policy is not race or class neutral.

The SPARCC publication, Rethinking Parking to Achieve Equitable Transit Oriented Development, offers up some ideas for how to rethink our approach to parking. Promising approaches to right-sizing parking and using parking revenues to address equity impacts are emerging in places like San Diego, Seattle, Minneapolis, Arlington and Portland. Discussion is underway in Chicago about how its traditional approaches can be revised.

Equity impacts are real. The solution is not to accept the status quo in how we approach parking management, pricing and regulations. We also cannot accept the status quo in how we create parking strategies. All community members need to be considered and be engaged in creating parking policies, including those who don’t drive or own a car. Adopting an equity analysis, similar to that created by King County, Washington, is a powerful approach to considering unintended consequences for who benefits and who is burdened. Looking ahead, we have the opportunity to think much more creatively and equitably about how parking revenues are used and what kinds of flexibility is provided to setting parking regulations.