This opinion article was written by Michael Clemson, who has more than 15 years of experience in the energy, sustainability and transportation fields. He currently works at the CSU Chancellor’s Office, managing the statewide Energy Efficiency and Transportation Programs. He serves as a member of the Long Beach Planning Commission and formerly sat as the Chair of the Long Beach Transit Board of Directors. Michael is a resident of Long Beach District 3.
When a new apartment building starts going up, often the first thing a builder does is dig down. Depending on how big the building is, it could be 30 or 40 feet down, which requires tens of thousands of tons of dirt to be moved. But this isn’t to make homes for people to live in, it’s to make room for people to store their cars.
For most new homes in Long Beach, the city’s parking mandates force home builders to include at least one and a half parking spaces for a one-bedroom apartment, and two spaces if it’s a two-bedroom. It doesn’t matter if the person who lives there owns a car or will drive or not.
These mandates might seem reasonable, but they are not only a barrier to building affordable housing, but also add more drivers to the road and force new buildings to be huge and out of scale of the neighborhood character.
Adding parking comes with a cost: it adds as much as $56,000 and increases the cost of building a home by 27 percent. Affordable housing projects already have razor-thin margins and any added costs can delay the project or kill it outright, leaving Long Beach with fewer affordable homes. If they were to get built, the added cost of parking would increase the mortgage payment by more than $400 per month, keeping homeownership from thousands of Long Beach families.
Parking also takes up a huge amount of space; space that could be a home for another family instead of being used to store cars. Two parking spaces take up about 510 square feet, which is nearly the size of a small two-bedroom apartment. Mandating parking basically doubles the size of smaller apartments, the kind that are going to be naturally affordable and can be built without government support.
Taking up that much space results in another thing that you probably don’t like about new buildings: their size. Those massive block-sized apartment buildings are that big because it’s the only way that home builders can fit in the mandated parking spaces.
Classic Southern California home styles like garden apartments and bungalows can’t be built when the garden is paved over or the parking space is bigger than the bungalow. Hell, a lot of craftsman houses couldn’t be built today since those tiny Model-T garages wouldn’t meet the two-parking space mandate.
Again, smaller apartments and homes like these – the kind that are common south of PCH – are naturally affordable housing that can be built without government support. They’re also easier to fit in with the neighborhood character, but they can’t be built if the city forces parking to be included.
There’ve been enough studies that prove parking mandates greatly increase driving and stop people from finding alternatives to driving. All these new cars on the road sabotage transit by clogging roads with traffic that delays buses, leaves no space where people can bike safely and makes streets too dangerous to walk down.
Simply put, parking mandates put more cars on the road, which ruins the alternatives to driving and leaves people with no choice but to own a car, resulting in yet more cars on the road … and so on. With no choice, nearly everyone is forced to spend around $12,000 per year to drive [3], an expense that’s on average 30 percent of a low-income family’s budget.
Giving people the freedom to choose how to get around can help to get cars off the road. Since nearly half of trips taken in Los Angeles are less than three miles, we’re so close to taking a lot of cars off the road without leaving anyone stranded.
People could choose to walk, bike or take transit for these trips as long as we make them work. To do that, we need to support the city in building bike lanes and safe streets. To give even more people the freedom to choose, we should also call for more ambitious projects like transit-priority lanes, street cars, lane reductions or closing streets. Any of these would help slow traffic and give people safe and convenient ways to get around.
If even a few families could get rid of their car this way, it would have a bigger impact than any project to add parking that the city could hope to do. We could see this happen… if it was made safe, fast and convenient to do it.
Or we can just keep digging that hole deeper.
I appreciate the continued passion for guiding people to bike or take public transportation however, southern California is not of that mindset in general. We are not New York City where markets and drug stores, theatres and restaurants are on nearly every corner! Long Beach began this mission years back with approving housing along the transit corridors (i.e. Long Beach Blvd). That I understand, but to suggest that residential, single family neighborhoods should give up their investment dream to support MORE housing is not right. IMO…….If you were not around for the “1980’s cracker -box-era” I suggest you look into the nightmare that created. Density of 6-8 unit buildings located in residential neighborhoods brought unkept properties and crime to what had been quiet, cared for surroundings.
This is so poorly thought-through. “Builders have to dig down 40 ft and remove tons of dirt.” “This is space that apartments could be put in.” Who wants to live 40 feet underground? (I assume the same people who would rather take a 25 minute walk/ bus ride instead of a 10 minute car ride to go 3 miles.)
If we were able to reshuffle all of Southern California’s land use, it could be designed in a way that doesn’t leave people reliant on cars. The fact that this is completely impossible seems lost on idealists who want to make life harder for everyone in the name of reducing emissions that are already going away due to the transition to electric cars.
Making it harder to own cars by having fewer parking spaces available where people live is like raising food prices to combat obesity. Give opportunity-cost the slightest consideration, and you’ll see that you’re only hurting poor people by taking away the minuscule amount of free time they could have if they commuted by car.
One last point: If you want people to use public transportation, the very first requirement is that it is safe. Enforce laws that require people to buy a ticket. Prosecute those who smoke drugs next to people who have no other options for their commute. Fire the worthless Metro ambassadors and hire hundreds of transport cops. Give the rule of law meaning once again and grant safety to your least fortunate citizens