Pave Paradise, Put Up a Parking Lot.
I purchased Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking in order to get a better understanding of the effect of parking requirements on land rents. Four years ago, I conjectured, "Parking requirements, which constrain land use to include parking spaces to go with the eateries, dwellings, offices, and server farms, raise the effective rent on the land devoted to the uses the parking is incidental to. (The requirements work as a leakage from the flow of goods and services, just as taxes do. The same math that one uses in income-expenditure macroeconomics, with a 1/(1-t) term standing in for the parking requirements, works.)"
That's loosely how it works, although as the parking requirement puts the builder in the position of providing a bundle of work or living space and parking space, with the property owner generally paying one price for the bundle, the builders make such substitutions as building free-standing stores with large parking craters on cheap land in exurbia or on the periphery of edge cities, or providing fewer, more lavish, dwelling units or office suites in multi-story buildings. For technical details, note a passage from more recent research,Minimum parking requirements in municipal zoning codes drive up the price of housing, and thus represent an important potential for reform for local policymakers. The relationship between parking and housing prices, however, remains poorly understood. We use national American Housing Survey data and hedonic regression techniques to investigate this relationship. We find that the cost of garage parking to renter households is approximately $1,700 per year, or an additional 17% of a housing unit’s rent. In addition to the magnitude of this transport cost burden being effectively hidden in housing prices, the lack of rental housing without bundled parking imposes a steep cost on carless renters-commonly the lowest income households-who may be paying for parking that they do not need or want. We estimate the direct deadweight loss for carless renters to be $440 million annually. We conclude by suggesting cities reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements, and allow and encourage landlords to unbundle parking costs from housing costs.
Book Review No. 2, however, will focus on a few surprises, as well as highlighting the challenges contemporary land use planners, or their political masters and the electorate, face, in attempting to manage land use. We start with my post's title. Yes, Professor Shoup does invoke Joni Mitchell and her song, but the Paradise I'm referring to is Adam-ondi-Achman, a location in Missouri that Mormon tradition holds to be the Garden of Eden. The faithful had plans to build a temple there, but in 1838, Missouri governor Liliburn Boggs issued an executive order mandating a final solution to the Mormon problem in Missouri. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and the flock moved to Nauvoo, in Illinois.
The story has plenty to do with parking mandates.
Years later, after the church gained respectability and money, its members sought to restore its historic sites in New York, Illinois, and Missouri. Nauvoo, for example, offers a spectacular view of the Mississippi River, with a restored temple, secular buildings, and a visitor center. The Missouri site, near Lee's Summit, was never built on, but when the church went to build a visitor center on the land it had purchased, it came to pass that there was a parking mandate, yes, a parking mandate, there in Jackson County, Missouri, and that mandate was not inscribed on golden tablets dug up somewhere in New York, let alone inscribed by the Hand of God on some mountaintop. Spoiler alert: somebody made it up.
That mandate: pure Technocratic Overreach. and the cause is easy to see, turn to page 8. "Most markets depend on prices to allocate resources - so much so that it's hard to imagine they could operate in any other way. Nevertheless, cities have tried to manage parking almost entirely without prices."
Perhaps that response is a survival of earlier institutional arrangements. I consider the private automobile to be a Marshallian improvement: social welfare increases in the aggregate despite losses to some agents. Consider transportation and land use before the development of the automobile: carriage houses for people well-off enough to employ stable hands, or, in thickly settled areas, there might have been provision for a small stable along an alley behind the house. So it was in many of the older neighborhoods of Milwaukee or Detroit, and so it remains on the southeast side of DeKalb, platted sometime in the late nineteenth century. People who lived in row houses or triple-deckers likely made do without a horse, let alone a buggy. Now comes the private automobile, and some of those residents of detached houses or row houses who would not consider paying for the upkeep of a horse had the means to buy an auto, and, particularly after the development of ignition keys and locking doors, they were easier to leave outside, on the street, than a horse. That didn't sit well with everyone. "As early as 1917, car owners started asserting their entitlement to simply swipe the public curbside space. As detailed by the Brooklyn Eagle, the practice of storing a car in the public right of way was so bizarre that the police commissioner ordered a crackdown." Drivers vote, and that space in front of the row houses or the detached houses becomes parking space, unless otherwise posted, and those parked cars become impromptu traffic taming obstacles. That's a story for another day.
The automobile, to use Northcote Parkinson's formulation, is a great thing to have if nobody else has one, and Lewis Mumford later noted that making urban parking mandatory had the effect of destroying the city. At the same time, that private mobility made moving to the open space more attractive, at least at first. "Almost by definition, those of us who live in suburban areas depend on our cars to get around. It would simply be unthinkable for suburban shops, restaurants, office buildings, and the like not to provide free and convenient parking. By contrast, there’s never enough convenient parking in the center city."
That, too, is for another day. Parking spaces are productive assets, and ought be priced accordingly. It's not so much the lack of pricing that contributes to the high cost of free parking, it's the rules that dictate how many spaces be provided that do. Like much else that I lament, it began with good intentions. "Motorists would circle the block, seeking limited curb space to park their cars, contributing to congestion. Thus mandatory parking minimums were born, a well-meaning initiative meant to ease traffic." The good intentions broke down, though. Parking mandates that assured drivers of a place to park wherever they went encouraged more driving, until the roads and then the parking lots got congested, and eventually something had to give.
The mandates, however, were based on guesswork. What Professor Shoup writes at page 88 about the humbuggery of urban planning generalizes to Wise Experts everywhere. "In the 1939 film, the unmasked Wizard resembles a hapless urban planner trying to set parking requirements: he desperately twiddles knobs, wrenches levers, and - when his audience expresses doubts - roars, 'Do you presume to question the Great Oz?... The Great Oz has spoken!'" At least the Wizard didn't say "I represent Science," which is just a higher level of confidence trick. "Only after the experts approve will the public be allowed to try something." Didn't work for parking, didn't work for urban renewal, didn't work for fighting poverty, didn't work to contain the coronavirus.
Yes, I sound a lot like David Strom, a contributor to Hot Air.Do cars bring their own problems? Of course they do, because we live in the real world. But on balance a world with lots of cars is better than a world with fewer. Mobility is one of the great advances in human standards of living in modern times. What used to be a trip that took hours, days, weeks, or even months can now be accomplished in minutes to hours.
Urban planners have created far more problems than they have solved, and ironically almost every major city that they want to duplicate was built before they were able to control anything. Boston. New York. Paris. London. All built before zoning. Urban planners made them much worse.
Parking mandates and road expansion simply make his mobility troubles worse. We could start with parking charges and expressway tolls. Mr Strom prefers to have more "free" parking. Sorry, that's not likely to happen.Regardless of your view on the matter, it’s difficult to deny that the market is being undermined, an exceedingly strange occurrence in a market-minded country where decisions are often made based on what is best for the economy. Despite that, U.S. zoning laws have remained oddly draconian.
What we get, in the end, is a tragedy. We assume there should be plentiful parking and create a self-fulfilling prophecy where there is no choice but to drive. If this cycle continues, we will all remain stuck in traffic, wondering why we have to drive hours every day just to do our daily tasks. When we visit some walkable, vibrant city in Europe, we will lament once again about how our cities aren’t like this. And if we do a little research, we’ll see that the choices made over the last half-century have made all the difference, crafting a landscape that is designed for cars rather than people.
The zoning laws are for another day, although they represent the same sort of Technocratic Overreach that gave us parking mandates. I might be more favorably disposed to reliance on markets to allocate other land resources than Professor Shoup, although our disagreements are more about methods than about desired ends. Bet on emergence.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
That's loosely how it works, although as the parking requirement puts the builder in the position of providing a bundle of work or living space and parking space, with the property owner generally paying one price for the bundle, the builders make such substitutions as building free-standing stores with large parking craters on cheap land in exurbia or on the periphery of edge cities, or providing fewer, more lavish, dwelling units or office suites in multi-story buildings. For technical details, note a passage from more recent research,Minimum parking requirements in municipal zoning codes drive up the price of housing, and thus represent an important potential for reform for local policymakers. The relationship between parking and housing prices, however, remains poorly understood. We use national American Housing Survey data and hedonic regression techniques to investigate this relationship. We find that the cost of garage parking to renter households is approximately $1,700 per year, or an additional 17% of a housing unit’s rent. In addition to the magnitude of this transport cost burden being effectively hidden in housing prices, the lack of rental housing without bundled parking imposes a steep cost on carless renters-commonly the lowest income households-who may be paying for parking that they do not need or want. We estimate the direct deadweight loss for carless renters to be $440 million annually. We conclude by suggesting cities reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements, and allow and encourage landlords to unbundle parking costs from housing costs.
Book Review No. 2, however, will focus on a few surprises, as well as highlighting the challenges contemporary land use planners, or their political masters and the electorate, face, in attempting to manage land use. We start with my post's title. Yes, Professor Shoup does invoke Joni Mitchell and her song, but the Paradise I'm referring to is Adam-ondi-Achman, a location in Missouri that Mormon tradition holds to be the Garden of Eden. The faithful had plans to build a temple there, but in 1838, Missouri governor Liliburn Boggs issued an executive order mandating a final solution to the Mormon problem in Missouri. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and the flock moved to Nauvoo, in Illinois.
The story has plenty to do with parking mandates.
Years later, after the church gained respectability and money, its members sought to restore its historic sites in New York, Illinois, and Missouri. Nauvoo, for example, offers a spectacular view of the Mississippi River, with a restored temple, secular buildings, and a visitor center. The Missouri site, near Lee's Summit, was never built on, but when the church went to build a visitor center on the land it had purchased, it came to pass that there was a parking mandate, yes, a parking mandate, there in Jackson County, Missouri, and that mandate was not inscribed on golden tablets dug up somewhere in New York, let alone inscribed by the Hand of God on some mountaintop. Spoiler alert: somebody made it up.
That mandate: pure Technocratic Overreach. and the cause is easy to see, turn to page 8. "Most markets depend on prices to allocate resources - so much so that it's hard to imagine they could operate in any other way. Nevertheless, cities have tried to manage parking almost entirely without prices."
Perhaps that response is a survival of earlier institutional arrangements. I consider the private automobile to be a Marshallian improvement: social welfare increases in the aggregate despite losses to some agents. Consider transportation and land use before the development of the automobile: carriage houses for people well-off enough to employ stable hands, or, in thickly settled areas, there might have been provision for a small stable along an alley behind the house. So it was in many of the older neighborhoods of Milwaukee or Detroit, and so it remains on the southeast side of DeKalb, platted sometime in the late nineteenth century. People who lived in row houses or triple-deckers likely made do without a horse, let alone a buggy. Now comes the private automobile, and some of those residents of detached houses or row houses who would not consider paying for the upkeep of a horse had the means to buy an auto, and, particularly after the development of ignition keys and locking doors, they were easier to leave outside, on the street, than a horse. That didn't sit well with everyone. "As early as 1917, car owners started asserting their entitlement to simply swipe the public curbside space. As detailed by the Brooklyn Eagle, the practice of storing a car in the public right of way was so bizarre that the police commissioner ordered a crackdown." Drivers vote, and that space in front of the row houses or the detached houses becomes parking space, unless otherwise posted, and those parked cars become impromptu traffic taming obstacles. That's a story for another day.
The automobile, to use Northcote Parkinson's formulation, is a great thing to have if nobody else has one, and Lewis Mumford later noted that making urban parking mandatory had the effect of destroying the city. At the same time, that private mobility made moving to the open space more attractive, at least at first. "Almost by definition, those of us who live in suburban areas depend on our cars to get around. It would simply be unthinkable for suburban shops, restaurants, office buildings, and the like not to provide free and convenient parking. By contrast, there’s never enough convenient parking in the center city."
That, too, is for another day. Parking spaces are productive assets, and ought be priced accordingly. It's not so much the lack of pricing that contributes to the high cost of free parking, it's the rules that dictate how many spaces be provided that do. Like much else that I lament, it began with good intentions. "Motorists would circle the block, seeking limited curb space to park their cars, contributing to congestion. Thus mandatory parking minimums were born, a well-meaning initiative meant to ease traffic." The good intentions broke down, though. Parking mandates that assured drivers of a place to park wherever they went encouraged more driving, until the roads and then the parking lots got congested, and eventually something had to give.
The mandates, however, were based on guesswork. What Professor Shoup writes at page 88 about the humbuggery of urban planning generalizes to Wise Experts everywhere. "In the 1939 film, the unmasked Wizard resembles a hapless urban planner trying to set parking requirements: he desperately twiddles knobs, wrenches levers, and - when his audience expresses doubts - roars, 'Do you presume to question the Great Oz?... The Great Oz has spoken!'" At least the Wizard didn't say "I represent Science," which is just a higher level of confidence trick. "Only after the experts approve will the public be allowed to try something." Didn't work for parking, didn't work for urban renewal, didn't work for fighting poverty, didn't work to contain the coronavirus.
Yes, I sound a lot like David Strom, a contributor to Hot Air.Do cars bring their own problems? Of course they do, because we live in the real world. But on balance a world with lots of cars is better than a world with fewer. Mobility is one of the great advances in human standards of living in modern times. What used to be a trip that took hours, days, weeks, or even months can now be accomplished in minutes to hours.
Urban planners have created far more problems than they have solved, and ironically almost every major city that they want to duplicate was built before they were able to control anything. Boston. New York. Paris. London. All built before zoning. Urban planners made them much worse.
Parking mandates and road expansion simply make his mobility troubles worse. We could start with parking charges and expressway tolls. Mr Strom prefers to have more "free" parking. Sorry, that's not likely to happen.Regardless of your view on the matter, it’s difficult to deny that the market is being undermined, an exceedingly strange occurrence in a market-minded country where decisions are often made based on what is best for the economy. Despite that, U.S. zoning laws have remained oddly draconian.
What we get, in the end, is a tragedy. We assume there should be plentiful parking and create a self-fulfilling prophecy where there is no choice but to drive. If this cycle continues, we will all remain stuck in traffic, wondering why we have to drive hours every day just to do our daily tasks. When we visit some walkable, vibrant city in Europe, we will lament once again about how our cities aren’t like this. And if we do a little research, we’ll see that the choices made over the last half-century have made all the difference, crafting a landscape that is designed for cars rather than people.
The zoning laws are for another day, although they represent the same sort of Technocratic Overreach that gave us parking mandates. I might be more favorably disposed to reliance on markets to allocate other land resources than Professor Shoup, although our disagreements are more about methods than about desired ends. Bet on emergence.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.