Archinect - News

Austin becomes largest city in the U.S. to dump parking requirements

2023-11-05T09:00:00-05:00

Austin on Thursday became the largest city in the country to stop requiring new developments to have a set amount of parking — a move aimed at both fighting climate change and spurring more housing construction amid the city’s affordability crisis. The Austin City Council voted 8-2 Thursday to wipe out minimum parking requirements for virtually every kind of property citywide. That includes single-family homes, apartment buildings, offices and shopping malls.

As noted by The Texas Tribune, housing advocates, developers, and climate activists have increasingly advocated for the erasure of parking requirements, which have been found to drive up housing costs and fuels a dependency on cars. Cities across the country in recent years, including Portland, Minneapolis, and San Jose, have taken similar actions to scale back requirements. In 2019, the L.A. City Planning Department released its Downtown Community Plan, called DTLA 2040, which included plans to eliminate parking requirements for all of downtown Los Angeles.

Previously on Archinect: Are vacant parking lots affecting the cost of housing? A new study in Boston sheds light on the issue

According to Austin City Council Member and the proposal’s author, Zohaib Qadri, keeping parking requirements contradicted the billions of dollars the city has set out to invest in its public transit system.

Opponents of the move worry that getting rid of parking requirements will redirect parking to near...

Downtown LA planning update scraps minimum parking requirements

2019-11-05T07:00:00-05:00

the L.A. City Planning Department (DCP) released its full draft Downtown Community Plan, called DTLA 2040. Once approved, the plan would eliminate parking requirements for all of downtown Los Angeles. DCP has been working on the new DTLA 2040 plan since 2014. It is the first city community plan update that incorporates the city’s new modular planning code, developed under re:code LA

Under the proposed plan, up to 60-percent of Downtown Los Angeles would be eligible for residential uses, up from just 33-percent today.

The planning document states: “By the year 2040, Downtown will include 125,000 new residents, in addition to 55,000 new jobs — representing 20% of the City’s population growth in 1% of its land area.”

The latest trend in luxury real estate? Bespoke automated parking

2019-09-23T12:59:00-04:00

“[Parking is] sort of becoming an expected amenity for a high-end condo,” said Andrew Bradfield, a principal of Orange Management, a developer that has installed automated garages in two Brooklyn condos: Waverly Brooklyn in Clinton Hill and the Symon in Downtown Brooklyn. “To not have parking hampers marketing.”

Despite having one of the best public transportation systems in the world, New York City's developers have taken to embracing bespoke and automated parking options as luxury building amenities in recent years. The spots can cost upwards of $200,000 per stall to rent, depending on the development.

The New York Times reports that Renzo Piano Building Workshop's 565 Broome SoHo, BIG's XI residences, and Robert A.M. Stern's 70 Vestry are among many recent Manhattan condo projects that offer "hefty amounts of accessory parking."

Philadelphia moves to allow ADUs in historic buildings

2019-08-28T21:00:00-04:00

A bill allowing these “accessory dwelling units” (ADUs) on historically designated properties won approval Tuesday from the city’s Planning Commission. The nod advanced a policy change that backers hope could help ease the burden of preserving creaky old houses while addressing growing demand for both affordable housing and dwellings suitable for aging in place.

The push to formalize Accessory Dwelling Units in historic buildings comes as the Philadelphia Planning Commission also moves to lower parking requirements and allow a greater number of uses for historic structures.

Visualizing L.A. County's bad urban planning decisions

2019-08-27T19:00:00-04:00

Like most American cities, Los Angeles has too much parking. Way too much parking.

In a recent online essay titled No Parking Here, designer and illustrator Josh Vredevoogd takes a researched look into the failed urban planning ethos that underpins Los Angeles County's massive sea of parking stalls.

According to Vredevoogd's research, Los Angeles County is currently home to 18.6 million parking spaces, a number that eclipses the county's population (10.2 million residents). If collected into a single parcel, the gargantuan parking lot would span 110,000 acres of asphalt, or, an area roughly 7.5 times the size of Manhattan. If populated at Manhattan's density, Vredevoogd agrues, that sizable lot could host a population of 12 million residents.

The illustrative example highlights a central issue for Los Angeles's urbanism: the area's parking minimums fuel many of the region's deeply entrenched social problems, including the housing affordability crisis, the homelessness crisis, and...

New report presents staggering amount of parking in US cities

2018-07-16T15:13:00-04:00

Groundbreaking research presents credible estimates of the total parking supply in several American cities, and it's not pretty. Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception persists that there’s “not enough parking.” And so cities require parking in new buildings and lavishly subsidize parking garages, without ever measuring how much parking exists or how much it’s used.

A new report from Eric Scharnhorst at the Research Institute for Housing America, an arm of the Mortgage Bankers Association, estimates the total parking supply in five US cities. Looking at satellite imagery and tax record data, Scharnhorst tallied on-street parking, surface parking, and garage parking in New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming. The results show staggeringly high amounts of land use dedicated to parking with low use percentages.

California to decrease parking requirements for affordable housing

2015-10-14T13:10:00-04:00

Late in the day on Friday [Governor Jerry Brown] signed Assembly Bill 744, which allows affordable housing developers to build less parking than many local zoning regulations currently permit. The bill is a victory for affordable housing advocates, who have been saying for a number of years that the burden of building more parking than tenants use has made affordable housing too expensive to build.