If you want to build apartments and homes in Nashville, you are required to build parking for cars. Otherwise, the city council will kill your project.
While the fuck cars sentiment is as important as always, planning rules like this have a few goals which aren't all so malicious, including stopping projects decoupling their parking space and selling it for extra, or avoiding 30+ cars all over the sidewalks once everyone is moved in.
Planning codes tend to try and anticipate a community's immediate vicinity needs. The best approach though would be "$x000 per unit to provide and maintain local public transport facilities and routes"
Japan at least seems to direct this at the car owner instead of at the property developer. If you don't have proof of owning or leasing a parking space, you can't register a car.
Parking mandates are some of the most egregiously bad laws on our books.
They increase housing costs significantly; land isn't free and cars structures are expensive to build. This is a punitive for those who are trying to make ends meet, or those who are unable to drive. Why would you force a blind man to pay for a two car garage when you're also disallowing them to drive? Doubly so when you don't allow them to sell their unused parking to their neighbors. Oh, and parking minimums significantly reduce our housing inventory. Parking reform alone can boost home building by 40% to 70%. If you haven't noticed yet, we have a bit of a housing crisis going on.
These laws also increase public expenditure because a car is used as transport from A to B. If A is your home, where is B? Pushing parking onto private developers is why in US there are, on average, 6 parking spots per vehicle. That's 5 car spots in your downtown and on your streets that you pay for, be it taxes or increased grocery prices, that sit empty most of the time.
Parking mandates are broken. So broken that it's the #1 campaign item for Strong Towns. We must remove parking minimums or we'll continue to pave over our downtowns and create insolvent cities.
As far as I'm aware, the big issue is the parking minimums at businesses, not residential buildings. I.e. what you call point B, rather than point A. That's what basically forces huge unwalkable strip malls. Which forces them out of the city. Which forces people to always drive there.
Now, the numbers in Nashville do seem a bit high. But the alternative to built-in parking spots in residential buildings is street parking, which costs just as much as built-in parking, but is entirely paid for by taxes instead. Street parking also takes up space that could be used for protected bike lanes.
including stopping projects decoupling their parking space and selling it for extra
They already sell it for extra, those parking spaces are never free and you always pay for them
OP posted another article with more details on it: !https://lemmy.world/post/31486375
From the article:
Construction costs run from $10,000 per parking space in a surface lot to $70,000 per space in an underground garage. That gets baked into what developers must recoup from tenants and buyers, whether they own a car or not. The rules drive up the per-unit cost to build affordable housing (in New York, affordable units near transit are exempt from parking minimums, but the rules still apply elsewhere). And they often require more parking than people actually use.
$70,000 per space in an underground garage.
i was old enough to remember people buying 2 bed rooms apts in third tier cities for this kinda of money.
i think that is a really smart idea as a transition. not having parking minimums within x meters of public transit is a great start because a lot of public transit is shit in usa (no funding, etc).
i hate being forced into owning a car in my neighborhood and wish i didnt need one for basic everyday things, but if there were no parking minimums where i live then it would be a shitshow while waiting for some kind of public transit to never be built.
i agree with this as a starting transition goal : D
Sure. But Nash specifically has a lot of nimby bigots - so while 2 car park spots is great, they won’t vote for a future in which no car spots is acceptable because that would mean an increase in public transit. cf the whole light rail idea that was killed even though a light rail from downtown to east or bellevue would have been fantastic.
Not just Nashville. Any city in the US and undoubtedly other countries. Also not just apartment buildings.
Any city in the US
I don't think that's correct, for example, San Francisco:
On December 11, 2018, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance (the “Ordinance”) eliminating required parking minimums citywide for all uses.
Yeah, surely at least Manhattan isn't like that as well
Huh that's interesting, maybe because San Francisco is so densely packed. It's the exception not the rule. In our car centric country having parking space requirements is common sense like building codes.
My town outside of Boston, technically a city, has like three screenfuls of parking minimums listed to cover many situations. New apartment buildings in the center require 1.25 spots per unit, as part of othe statewide goal for transit oriented development
I looked into opening a bar long ago in a fairly rural college town. One of the regulations was to have one parking space for so many seats. It's an issue in a neighborhood where I once lived. Most of the houses were built before cars so most residents park on the street. It became the hip new place to be and high end restaurants and bars popped up causing lots of conflict
2 parking spots per apartment seems uhh excessive.
Here in Toronto you get 0-1 if your apartment has a garage, otherwise you can get a fairly cheap residential permit that lets you ignore metered parking on your street. The number per street is limited, so you're almost always guaranteed a spot.
On the one hand, that sucks, on the other...well, what really sucks is that it's probably necessary given the state of public transit and bikeability. (Haven't been to Nashville, so I can't comment on public transportation there.)
Parking requirements totally killed the vibe at a brewery by me. During COVID they were relaxed so that there was more outside seating, and then the permit was revoked. Now there's 16 more parking spots and three total outside tables. Totally sucks.
Wtf kind of regulations are those?
I think in their case it may have been an ADA requirement, because two of the outside spaces were handicapped spaces. But overall the application of the regulation or the intersection of it with city codes has an awful net result. Just outside of the parking lot is another parking lot for the connected strip mall that has more than enough spaces for anyone to park there even when people are going in and out of the adjacent office buildings and warehouses...but yet they had to lose a spacious, outdoor area with probably 10 or 20 separate picnic tables and restore the parking anyway.
Changing rules for parking generally serves only to create local parking shortages (and subsequent emotional discussions) as rhetoric underlying problem is not addresssed. This is a bit chicken-and-egg, but consider what happens if a standard subdivision is built without driveways, parking lots, or garage space. A 2 mile walk to the grocery store doesn’t really work. Instead, the regulations should be for higher density, space for bicycles (and transit), and space for essential amenities like small, local grocery stores and restaurants. ETA - with current conditions creating unplanned multigenerational housing, dad, mom, kid1, kid2, and partners makes for tight parking even with 3 spots.
You know, like they used to build before it was about maximizing the revenue per square mile of land?
The issue here is that for those things you suggested to exist we would inherently need to reduce parking as part of the change in regulation. Parking spaces are currently taking up the spaces that those amenities would be built, just as you described.
Unfortunately, NIMBY fools hear "reduce parking" and completely turn their brains off to screech about it, without ever considering the rest of the proposal and what it would do to benefit the community, simply because it makes them change their habits and they don't want to.
Like, yes, there will be parking shortages, but that's kinda the point so that people have to utilize alternatives instead.
Are you conflating the idea of banning parking with repealing mandatory parking? These are two very different policies. Developers will still build parking infrastructure when the market demands it and it makes sense for the neighborhood and project. They just won’t be universally required to even when literally no one wants it.
An apartment building in a walkable area with a parking garage is more walkable than a regular suburb without the cars.
This raises the price of housing for everyone, since it compels developers and the end user to pay for the added work, physical space, and opportunity cost.
At the same time it enforces car dependency since it arbitrarily reduces density making walking, biking and public transport unfeasible.
Not to detract from the arguments made, but even in my state where we have a big metro populace and big cities, we still have to drive to places. There is a minuscule amount of the population that can maybe walk to places but I'd wager they still have to drive to their job like I do. Apartments here just don't all have enough parking and it becomes a problem. I for one would like more rail so that I don't have to take the bus or drive but go figure.
If you really need a car, then you should look elsewhere, not everyone have a car so forcing all options to include parking is just unfair for them.
If I had it my way, I wouldn't drive. The way the infrastructure is setup here leaves me no choice.
It really shouldn't be the government's concern whether a developer offers parking or not.
So if you're old they expect you to ride a motorcycle?
Some of the newer communities in my city have that... fiddlehead greens design. None of them are walkable in the slightest, they don't even have sidewalks! The houses are built so tight you could scratch your neighbor's ass if the windows were open. And there is absolutely zero street parking. Many of them would require a 10-minute walk to a single bus that comes once every 70 minutes. In some communities there is one bus in the morning and one bus in the evening.