Key to the City, page 11
Today, as then, most of Garden Grove (population 170,000) belongs to a residential district devoted to single-family detached housing. For ordinary single-family housing, the zoning code requires four parking spaces, two in garages and two outside. Given that families consisting of one or two adults and one or two children occupy most of these homes, a four-parking-space minimum seems a little much. It is especially excessive considering that lots in this district need only be a third of an acre large. On the smaller lots in the city, in other words, easily a tenth of a lot might have to be paved to meet the city’s parking mandates.
The requirements differ for multifamily housing, which is mostly clustered around the city’s primary commercial thoroughfare, Garden Grove Boulevard. For these developments, the zoning code requires 2.75 parking spaces for studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments, and 3.5 parking spaces for three-bedroom apartments. Common sense would dictate that even in car-happy Los Angeles someone living in a studio apartment is unlikely to have three cars to park. On the flip side of excess supply of parking is the problem of excess supply constraints on housing: Garden Grove’s parking mandates effectively limit the number of housing units that can be built on any given lot. Doing the math, someone seeking to build ten one-bedroom units would need to provide twenty-eight parking spaces on the same lot as the housing. Using a rule of thumb of requiring 350 square feet of land for each parking space, plus circulation, the parking would occupy 10,000 square feet, or about a quarter of an acre. That is a significant limitation on the footprint of any proposed building.
The curious might ask how much parking the Crystal Cathedral, consecrated as a Catholic cathedral in 2019, would legally be required to provide. For “religious assembly” uses, Garden Grove requires one parking space for every three fixed seats, plus one space for every 250 square feet of gross floor area not used for assembly purposes. With new pews expanding seating capacity to 3,000, the code would require 1,000 parking spaces for the worship-hall seating. Estimating that 15,000 gross square feet of the building serve auxiliary functions, an additional sixty spaces would be required, making a total of 1,060. The current lot, accommodating 1,700 cars, means the cathedral is 600 spaces overparked, 60 percent beyond the excessive standards of the Garden Grove zoning code. This oversupply reflects the ethos of a place whose very existence derives from catering to drivers’ spiritual needs, a congregation on wheels, with a vast parking lot as its asphalt sanctuary.
I wish I could say that the ska punk band Sublime’s song “Garden Grove,” about driving around the suburb in a smelly van, depicts an atypically dystopian scene. Or that Garden Grove’s requirements are particularly onerous, owing to the fact that Los Angelenos depends so heavily on cars. Unfortunately, it’s all sadly typical.
__________
To loosen the car’s chokehold on our communities, a few jurisdictions have combined parking reforms with a multifaceted approach to the many transportation issues that can be addressed by zoning. Buffalo has received the most attention, so let’s spend a little time in the City of Good Neighbors, which could hardly be more different from Garden Grove.
Once an industrial boomtown, Buffalo at the turn of the twentieth century was reputed to have more millionaires per capita than any other American city. Today, one can catch a glimpse of the city’s former wealth in the presence of restored masterpieces from such architectural luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Hobson Richardson, and landscapes created by Frederick Law Olmsted. But Buffalo has fallen on hard times, a poor city struggling like many postindustrial American cities searching for a new identity. In fall 2017 I visited the city with two of my kids, setting an itinerary focused on the historic places toward which we gravitate when traveling. Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building topped my list. Built near Buffalo City Hall in 1896 by some of those millionaires, this thirteen-story skyscraper combined an innovative steel structure with a terra-cotta curtain wall, all arranged in a simple classical style. Even on a cloudy day, the exquisitely detailed tile exuded warmth and beauty. A triumph! But as we walked around, seeing few other people on that Saturday afternoon, it was clear that while Sullivan’s building had been preserved, something awful had happened to the places around it. Then it hit me: downtown had been swallowed up by parking.
To understand zoning’s shameful role in creating these parking craters, we should look not at Buffalo’s original 1926 code, adopted during the first wave of American zoning code enactments, but to its second, adopted in 1953, just as the automobile roared into American households and the urban-suburban exodus began nationwide. Many provisions in the second code—from single-use zoning to minimum lot-size mandates to parking requirements—squarely aimed to reorient a dense, vibrant, and walkable city around cars. Around the same time that code took effect, the city doubled down on highway construction and road expansions and dismantled a streetcar system that had successfully ferried passengers for about seventy years. Maybe Buffalo’s leaders thought that doing everything they could to promote cars was good for residents working in factories manufacturing steel and automobile parts. Perhaps, as Hartford’s leaders did at around the same time, they thought the city should ensure that those who fled to the suburbs still found it comfortable and convenient to zip into their downtown offices. Whatever the rationale, the city’s approach proved fateful, as fully half of downtown buildings ultimately fell to parking, and over-wide roads plowed through thriving neighborhoods. As the years went by, the city lost both industry and people—with less than half of the roughly 580,000 people it had when the 1953 code took effect. And downtown gained that desolate feeling we registered that bleak Saturday we visited.
There are only so many things that a half-full city like Buffalo can do to attract the population, wealth, and vibrancy it enjoyed in its heyday. Bringing the streetcars back would be amazing, but few public entities would spend the billions necessary to hear that clang again. Tearing down highways costs money too, though Buffalonians have long agitated federal officials for just that. One of the things a city can control, though, is the way it uses its power to regulate the activities taking place within its bounds. When it comes to the rules of the real estate game, there’s no better place to start than zoning.
In 2016, Buffalo took as much as it could into its own hands, adopting an entirely new land development ordinance and dubbing it the “Green Code.” Among its positive changes are the small one I mentioned in Chapter 1: re-legalization of small-scale commercial uses in historic residential areas. But the code is also chock-full of bigger changes on housing and sustainable design. Interestingly, the Green Code is best known for making Buffalo one of the first major cities to undertake citywide parking reform. Upon first read of the code, one provision gave me pause about its effect: the requirement that developers of new construction over 5,000 square feet, substantial renovations over 40,000 square feet, or changes in the use of an existing building submit a transportation demand management plan describing how they will reduce the number of solo car rides and the number of vehicle miles traveled by site users, and promote alternative forms of transportation (walking, biking, and public transit). Such plans can be expensive and time-consuming, though the problem is less their cost than the fact that the city planning board can require off-street parking after reviewing them. When I first read the code, it seemed to me that Buffalo did not really put the final nail in the parking-requirement coffin.
As I read on, though, I noticed other aspects of the Green Code that deserve praise. As part of the transportation-demand management plan requirement, the code suggests several strategies that developers might include, such as free or subsidized transit passes and carpooling programs or benefits. Not every developer of a large building would naturally think of these types of programs for the eventual occupants. In addition, the city has instituted changes that will result in new infrastructure for “active transportation,” a term that includes walking, biking, and public transportation. The Green Code specifically spells out how property owners must site their buildings to ensure safer pedestrian access to parking lots and public transit. In addition, multifamily residences, hotels, shops, and offices must provide long-term and short-term bicycle parking. The number of spaces required is determined on a per bed or per dwelling unit basis for residential uses (for example one for every five apartments), or a per square foot of gross area basis for most other uses. Instead of requiring infrastructure for cars, the city requires infrastructure for walkers and bikers—in other words, for actual people.
The national attention Buffalo received after passing the code attracted development. When we visited, less than a year after the Green Code was passed, it was too early to see the impacts of the change. But you certainly see it today—and, as it turns out, I shouldn’t have worried so much about the transportation-demand management provision. In 2020, the Census revealed that Buffalo’s decennial population increased for the first time in seventy years. Since the Green Code was adopted, over ten thousand units of multifamily housing have been built. When my kids and I were there, we enjoyed visiting Canalside, a development at the historic terminus of the Erie Canal, which now includes a boardwalk, beer garden, paddleboats, and a roller rink. A study of fourteen mixed-use projects built in the three years after the Green Code was adopted showed that about half of major developments included fewer parking spaces than were previously required, and four provided no parking at all. All in all, Buffalo paved the way for other cities to build on its work. Perhaps in time, Sullivan’s lonely masterpiece will have new neighbors.
In the years since Buffalo’s reforms, other major cities have enacted similar reforms or expanded suites of changes. San Diego, Nashville, and Chicago have eliminated minimum parking requirements around transit, in and around the downtown, and near certain commercial corridors, respectively. The thinking behind these changes has been that people taking light rail or bus rapid transit, or people living or working in more densely populated mixed-use areas probably don’t need a car to get around. The rural Idaho town of Sandpoint—the one that required a bank to build 118 parking spaces—also repealed parking minimums for its downtown. That repeal allowed a local taqueria to add new seating, while a growing tech startup remained in town, both impossible before, because they could not pack the additional parking required onto their lots. Moreover, the town allowed nearby properties with different functions, like offices and residential buildings, to apply for approval to share parking facilities, rather than each providing their own.
More recent efforts have promoted citywide reform, rather than reforms targeting just one area of town. We have already mentioned how during comprehensive planning and zoning reviews, Hartford—which I maintain is the first major city to completely eliminate minimum parking requirements—and Minneapolis eliminated minimum parking requirements. It is worth noting that Hartford’s code also imposed maximum parking caps for every use, which are intended to prohibit overexpansive lots like those at the Crystal Cathedral. Our parking design requirements, too, require the inclusion of trees, landscaping, and decorative details to improve the aesthetics of lots. Like Buffalo, Hartford requires individual property owners to provide minimum bicycle parking spaces for nearly every use beyond small-scale housing. New offices, hospitals, and college buildings must include a shower and changing facility for 0.5 percent of full-time occupants—facilities often pushed by bike advocates to enable riders to commute to their workplaces. In Minneapolis, Janne Flisrand has hinted that vocal public debates around middle housing likely distracted the NIMBYs from focusing on the parking changes—thus smoothing the way to their passage. But the politics of parking minimums are rapidly shifting, with broader coalitions supporting repeals.
A couple more examples from the West Coast can round out the discussion—if only to illuminate how different cities have addressed the same issue. In 2018, San Francisco repealed virtually all minimum parking requirements while, like Hartford, establishing the maximum number of spaces allowed on each lot. For housing around the commercial areas of Pacific Avenue, for example, the code provides a cap of 0.5 parking spaces for an apartment, or up to one space only if the property owner successfully navigates an extra round of reviews. These are tight maximums, worth duplicating elsewhere. To address the possibility that property owners might apply for a variance, or a legal right to deviate from these requirements, the code identifies fifteen districts for which no variances for parking requirements will be granted under any circumstances. While this may seem draconian, city leaders thought it necessary to clamp down on a persistent urban ill. Sometimes, reversing the status quo means turning inside-out the old, car-centric priorities and the codes that promoted them.
As San Francisco was repealing its minimums, Sacramento—an arguably more car-centric city a hundred miles away—was experimenting with a broad range of smaller-scale reforms. Sacramento slashed parking minimums by half for affordable and senior housing, eliminated them for locations within a quarter mile of an existing or proposed light rail station, and reduced them by half for locations about a ten-minute walk from such stations. The city also fully exempted small residential lots of 6,400 square feet or less; the nonresidential uses in mixed-use buildings that were mostly residential; and historic buildings converted to residential use. Finally, the zoning code divided the city up into four parking districts, including a central business district that had no parking minimums and a maximum of one space per 400 square feet for commercial uses, as well as bike parking requirements. The other three districts reduced parking mandates from the prior version of the code as well. After incrementally testing the waters, Sacramento, too, eliminated minimum parking mandates in 2021. Its decision is especially interesting given that the same proportion of people drive in Sacramento as in Los Angeles County. It gives some hope for Garden Grove. As the Sandpoint, Idaho, planning director pointed out, just “one line of your zoning code can make a world of difference.”
__________
Zoning, like many other arts of governance, is a matter of carrots and sticks, deploying regulations to encourage some kinds of development and to discourage others. Once cities erase parking minimums and their attendant terrible consequences, and zone for active transportation, they can round out their reforms by enabling dense development around transit lines and stations. Called “transit-oriented development,” this strategy creates mixed-use, medium-to-high-density development around nodes of transit, which tend to thrive in densely developed areas. Buses can successfully operate along many commercial and residential thoroughfares, in busy cities and suburban areas, and even through and between smaller towns. Light rail and trams, which depend on fixed tracks, require more clustered development to ensure ridership, though some car-dependent places like Dallas, Atlanta, and Seattle have laid light rail tracks first, with density coming after. Subways and monorails, colossally expensive, have only worked in our very densest cities, including Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston.
Cities interested in transit-oriented development can pull several different zoning levers. Focusing on fixed stations (rather than, say, ordinary bus stops, which move as routes change), they can identify the areas around the station to be rezoned; a half-mile radius from the station, about a ten-minute walk, is a good place to start. Then they can identify the best mix of uses—the more, the better—and make these uses as-of-right to fast-track their permitting. They can also strip away minimum lot sizes, which force buildings farther apart and make density impossible. And they can focus on the building itself: removing or increasing caps on height, which often unreasonably limit the number of stories for our buildings; eliminating or increasing lot coverage caps, or the amount of a lot that can be covered by buildings; and eliminating floor-to-area ratios that establish a formula tying the amount of buildable area to the size of the lot.
In pushing for these changes, cities shouldn’t lose sight of the need to provide housing for all. San Diego’s elimination of parking requirements around transit has been combined with another zoning provision—its density bonus program, which gives developers permission to build more square footage in exchange for the developer providing affordable housing units. Incentives to build affordable housing in high-growth areas may well work better than mandates in slow-growth areas, like the inclusionary zoning ordinance that has flopped in Pittsburgh. But, once again, it’s critical to take a comprehensive look at removing barriers and building the right incentives. The density bonus program in San Diego produced just 145 units (15 affordable) in 2016, before the elimination of parking minimums. But in 2020, the year after parking mandates were lifted, the program produced 3,283 homes (over 1,500 affordable), many in the transit areas and many in 100 percent–affordable buildings made more financially viable when they did not have to provide parking.
States, too, can get in the transit-oriented zoning game. After all, when it comes to zoning, states hold all the cards. They’re also more likely to see the big picture. That was true in Massachusetts, where through the 2010s state leaders observed an increasingly acute housing shortage driving some of the highest housing prices in the country. At some point, they realized that much of the land near the state’s extensive public transportation network, concentrated in Boston and its suburbs but serving half of the state’s cities and towns, was underutilized, devoted to low-density, single-family development. In 2021, the governor and legislature responded by enacting a law requiring 177 cities and towns in the state to allow more as-of-right multifamily housing near subway and commuter rail stations. The law directed these cities and towns to rezone to create least one district “of reasonable size” within walking distance of a station that allows at least fifteen units per acre, as of right. (That’s fifteen times denser than most lots in the neighboring states of Connecticut and New Hampshire.) Boston, far denser overall, is exempt from these requirements. Local governments that fail to comply will be ineligible for certain state grants for housing and capital improvements. In this case, the “stick” of funding loss demonstrates seriousness. But the proof will be in the pudding, as my dad says: namely, in how these individual zoning codes are written and administered. It’s possible that the exclusionary suburbs near Boston will dream up novel means of subverting the law’s intent. One can imagine a clever local zoning official trying to limit apartments to elderly-only units or studios and one-bedrooms—apartments less likely to bring children (and in turn, theoretical costs to the town). State legislators already thought of that move, mandating in the 2021 law that multifamily housing “shall be without age restrictions and shall be suitable for families with children.” I predict state legislators will have to play a bit of Whac-A-Mole, tweaking the law to curb creative bad actors.
