Parking, density and politics: balancing vibrant urbanity with practicality

Parking lot in Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Today's issue of Willamette Week includes a small blurb in its Murmurs section that got me thinking about the relationship between the urban places we most want to frequent and the parking issues that can ensue. We want to be in places with no parking, it seems, as long as we can find a place to park.

The blurb was about how Southeast Portland neighbors are asking the city to freeze construction along Division Street, "hoping to halt the boom in apartment buildings without on-site parking," it explains. The neighborhood's request comes as the result of a four-story, 81-unit apartment complex at Southeast 37th Avenue and Division Street, which has already received permits to go forward. But with a succession of apartment and condo projects along Division and and other major streets, there seems to be a growing chorus of neighborhoods feeling the growing scarcity of on-street parking, much as residents of Northwest Portland's Alphabet District near 21st and 23rd Avenues have felt for the past few decades.

“Our neighborhood will be a congestion nightmare next summer and never the same after that,” Richmond neighborhood resident and novelist Richard Melo (as quoted in WW) wrote to City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the Bureau of Development Services, calling the current course “a national case study for unchecked urban development.”

Coincidentally, just yesterday I received a form email from mayoral candidate Charlie Hales addressing parking and multifamily housing projects.

"A recent wave of new apartment projects has provoked controversy in several neighborhoods," the Hales team writes. "In our desire to support urban living and non-auto transportation, have we gone too far? When we first started trying to fit new mixed-use development into streets like Belmont, Division and Alberta, parking was a challenge, but in a very different way than today. Our struggle then was to get developers and banks to accept less parking than would be typical in suburbia. Now, the world has changed. Banks are today willing to lend on apartment projects with no parking provided. While this has resulted in affordable projects for those without cars, there are other unintended consequences impacting neighborhoods in ways that need to be carefully assessed."

So it would seem that there is growing push-back in Portland's neighborhoods about the growing scarcity of parking spots. If that's the case, it's a break from the city's reputation for progressive pedestrian and transit-oriented developments. In urban policy circles, the talk is not of disgruntlement over decreasing parking, but innovating and prospering because of such deliberate moves. In an August 7 Atlantic Cities post, Norman Garrick and Christopher McCahill of the University of Connecticut explore Zurich's approach to restricting parking while most cities in America and the west have parking minimums.

"Since the late 1980s, Zurich has developed an alternative that's worth studying because it breaks all the rules of conventional transportation planning, and yet has been vitally important to the success of that city," they write. "In contrast, the conventional approach has devastated most American cities, and many in Europe as well...Such a policy specifies the minimum amount of parking that must be provided for each square meter of floor space of new construction. The rationale of a parking minimum is to ensure that enough parking is available to meet projected demand."

In 1989, Zurich "turned this regulation on its head by adding parking maximums to their code. A parking maximum is a device for protecting the city from having too much parking that could degrade the urban character of the city....Under this new system, there is a default parking level for the whole city, which is then reduced depending on whether or not a particular location is well served by transit.

Garrick and McCahill's research at UConn found not only that cities with higher levels of automobile use generally supply more parking, but that these cities "also have a much lower density of what matters in cities, residents and jobs. American cities in our study with small numbers of parking spaces have two to four times more people per square mile. This seems to have a lot to do with the amount of space that is needed for parking. In other words, space used for parking is simply not available for more productive uses."

Granted, the Zurich example is focused more on its central core, whereas the aforementioned parking tension in Portland is taking place in close-in neighborhoods of mostly single-family homes. Yet I can't help but think of a previous Atlantic Cities post, by editor and creative-class guru Richard Florida, citing research by San Francisco real-state firm Trulia to determine which American cities have the highest concentrations of restaurants and bars. The two don't necessarily go hand in hand, it seems. The list of top ten cities for restaurants per capita, which included Portland at #10, was comprised entirely of East Coast and West Coast metropolises such as San Francisco (which took the top spot), New York, Boston and Seattle. The South and Midwest, on the other hand, dominated the list of cities with most bars per capita, including New Orleans (in first place), Toldedo, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. The bars list also reflected more cities that have lost out in the migrations of jobs, culture and knowledge to the West. When you're amidst rust rather than silicon, it's time for another round.

Richard Florida also cites a study by Arizona State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte that finds a connection between the creative class and levels of entrepreneurship in cities. In other words, if you are good at growing restaurants, galleries and arts facilities, you're also probably going to be successful, over time, at attracting and growing small businesses. For example, the tech industry today, particularly social media companies and startups, is increasingly locating itself in cities rather than the suburbs. As the New York Times' Norimitsu Onishi recently reported, Twitter and other big tech companies are heading from Silicon Valley to San Francisco. Portland is also seeing a proliferation of startups headquarting here rather than in Hillsboro and Beaverton.

When I think of the parking tension along Division Street that Willamette Week reported, I can sympathize with the frustration of trolling for parking in one's own neighborhood, as I used to do daily when I lived downtown in the late 1990s. I think of the trolling we all do when we go to Northwest 23rd. But 23rd is ultimately getting a parking garage - not an eyesore of multistory concrete, but one thoughtfully tucked away. I think that's a better solution than restricting apartment and condominium projects because they'll add neighborhood congestion or requiring new developments to build their own parking, as we once did. Nobody likes parking, but it's a bit of a Catch-22 situation here: the more you build parking, the less likely it is to be a place where people want to go - and park, and spend money, and contribute to a vibrant local economy. Portland has long since committed itself to density over sprawl, and we can't have it both ways. And I'd rather we be more Zurich than, say, Houston or Toledo.

 

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Comments

[Maccoinnich]

Great article, Brian. I was depressed to read a post in bikeportland (bikeportland!) this week, arguing against the current zoning codes' lack of parking minimums. I really hope that the City doesn't make a retrograde move on this issue, just when we're starting to see developers embrace an option not available in most other US cities.

[Jacob Spence]

Good post! It's an interesting problem to have, and as a native of Dallas and Houston, I would hate to see any progress in square footage allotments for surface parking. Your mention of solutions in Zurich reminded me of a lecture we had at the UOPDX by Umberto Dindo about the 2000-Watt Society (http://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/portal/en/index/portraet_der_stadt_zuerich/2000-watt_society.html).

I think it is also worth looking into vertical parking solutions. These mechanized and SF minimum strategies have been around for quite some time but have yet to make it to Portland it seems, though I believe the new project at NW 12th & Everett has one.

[Dhaneckow]

I live in one of the neighborhoods (Overlook) where one of the complexes is planned. The general tone of the conversations I've heard is 1) while the complex is located along a Max line, dwellers will still use cars and flood the largely single dwelling, geographically constrained neighborhood with automobile traffic in search of parking. In other words, that cost savings for the developer will be assessed in livability to the neighborhood. 2) That it is a done deal. Portland city officials are committed to ideals rather than to stakeholders.

There are good reasons for both of these perceptions.

[Mjanssen]

Like you mention Brian, there is a definite catch-22 in play here. Whereas Portland, as a progressive urban pedestrian oriented city, has long embraced (1997) the ‘maximum parking requirements’, the fact is that not providing tenant parking, in most but not all cases, can push this discussion outside the boundaries of the project and into the surrounding environment. Burying our head in the sand and overlooking this fact is dangerous. That isn’t to say that not providing parking is not an option, but strategically understanding the trends of tenants and users on a case by case basis is crucial to the success of the project. Lenders and investors have definitely opened their eyes to non-parking inclusive project financing and thus opened up development that does not include this amenity. Though, I would suggest that one failed project, because of this non-inclusion, will close that door rapidly. It seems that one must be committed to a brand that caters to a bike based culture (such as EcoFlats or the Milano) as a great option for dense(r) urban living for those without cars and not needing those parking options.
I would be suspect of a statement like “the more you build parking, the less likely it is to be a place where people want to go”. The Pearl district developed over a very short period of time with most, if not all, of the buildings having on-site, or direct access to, parking. I don’t see how this has limited peoples’ want to go there. One can only imagine what would have happened had there been no project based parking - First Thursday would be … interesting. Or, imagine what the environment around the Edge would be like without on-site REI parking. Comparing ourselves to a transit rich city such as Zurich seems to be a bit of a stretch to me. Portland must continue to develop its transit system to get up to the ideals of a non-vehicular based environment and then many of these discussions will become mute.
As well, there is a bigger cultural discussion to be had here about the needs and functions of the car in our vehicular-based society. I don’t believe that projects such as this can resolve this discussion, but it is exciting to see that discussion happening through its instigation.
In the meantime, we must also make sure the discussion does not limit itself to “do you have parking?”, but also address the many architectural and urban design questions associated with the project’s contribution to the surrounding built environment. It reminds me of the many design commission discussions I have seen over the years that spend mounds of time on bike parking requirements and ignore the fact that the project being discussed contributed nothing to the urban, pedestrian environment.

[Jim Heuer]

Brian, you are right on to bring up this issue. The City seems to be favoring car-less development while failing to recognize that such development requires substantial improvements in bicycle routes (such that us older folks can feel comfortable using them) and in mass transit for those who prefer it.

In the absence of tying these developments together, you wind up with the result on Division and similar ones where I live in Irvington. Here we find new apartment construction that has no parking, but an estimated 40% of the residents own cars. Those cars then invariably are parked on the street in the surrounding single-family areas. So far the new apartment construction has been sufficiently limited in our area that we've been able to absorb the parking, but the City's nearly complete N/NE Quadrant plan calls for dramatic increases in high density housing along the Broadway/Weidler corridor (likely without much or any parking) without any estimates of the required increase in transit frequency (and costs to Trimet) to support it.

[GreyTao]

Mjanssen, I think you hit the nail right on the head. We're focusing too much on the parking aspect of these new developments, and not enough on what other contributions are provided.

The planning principles our City embraces are a direct result of New Urbanism and PUDs (which is a good thing in most people's opinions). Places should be walkable and have a healthy mix of building type and income classes. Development should be infill so as to reinforce the natural progression of development in the area.

All this to say that I don't see parking as the large issue here. It's been statistically proven that where greater vehicular accommodations have been made, congestion grows to fill it. To paraphrase Andres Duany, do we want to live in a city that has vehicular congestion on a massive scale or on a smaller scale? Because either way, there's no escaping that fact that auto demand will meet supply.

The larger problem I see is allowing the zoning ordinances in these controversial areas (like CS - Commercial Storefront) to allow residential uses on the ground floor. This absolutely KILLS the intent of creating vibrate communities with walkable streets and mixed uses. Not providing ground floor commercial will in fact increase auto dependance, because now you don't have the option of walking down the street to work, you must get in your car (or take the underfunded public transit system) to commute to work elsewhere.

I think the neighbors of these new developments are feeling the growing pains of what was once strictly a residential district starting to become part of a PUD, where a variety of uses will be available (restaurants, offices, retail, etc.). Part of the success of the Pearl was that there was no existing residential neighborhood to speak of and the development happened so rapidly, that there were no "growing pains" to speak of.

[Fred Leeson]

It's a thought-provoking discussion, indeed. One thing to think about is that the younger generation is much less car dependent than the boomers. I have two adult sons, 25 and 28, and NEITHER is a car owner. I once lived in Northwest Portland, where literally dozens of apartments were built in the teens and 1920s without parking. Yes, parking was difficult (I owned a car at the time) but the Northwest neighborhood was then -- and still is today -- perhaps the most vibrant in the city. Yes, I think the city needs to monitor the impact of these new developments, but let's not jump to premature conclusions.