Analysis by Matthew Yglesias | Bloomberg
May 14, 2023 at 8:09 a.m. EDT
Representative Robert Garcia of California, a little-known first-term member of Congress, introduced a bill last week that is so simple, powerful and quietly radical that it deserves serious consideration — even though it stands absolutely no chance of passage, in part because it touches one of the true third rails of American politics.
I refer, of course, to parking spots. The People Not Parking Act would give property owners “sole discretion” over how much off-street parking they want to build as part of any residential, commercial, retail or industrial project — at least if it’s within a half mile of a major transit stop.
The basic idea is clear and compelling.
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As you’ve probably heard by now, free markets are powerful tools for matching supply and demand. They do a good job of aggregating preferences and weighing tradeoffs. There is, after all, no “right” answer to the question of how much parking a given project “needs.” A retail lot that never gets full — not even on the Friday after Thanksgiving — is almost by definition going to have lots of wasted space. On the other hand, a constantly crowded lot is probably deterring prospective customers.
What’s the right balance between avoiding waste and encouraging commerce? The answer most in keeping with truth, justice and the American way is to say that this is something for business people to decide for themselves.
How expensive is the land that’s wasted when vacant? What’s the exact nature of the business? What are the transportation options for getting there?
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The same logic applies to other kinds of projects. Most condominium buyers would probably like to have a place to keep their car. But a minority of purchasers don’t have a car. And some are part of two-car households. So how big of a garage should builders include with their project? Well, it depends: on the local market, on the price of garage construction (which depends in part on the specifics of the local geography), on the overall state of the industry.
All else being equal, it’s surely better for a condo to have more garage space rather than less. But all else is never quite equal. Developers are expected to decide for themselves whether it makes business sense to include such amenities as top-end appliances and an in-house gym. So why don’t they get to decide what kind of garage to build?
In practice, this free-market approach is extremely rare in the US. Instead, parking is governed by a Soviet-style system of central planning that would make Khrushchev proud.
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In Washington, where I live, Subtitle C Chapter 7 of the zoning code spells out in excruciating detail how much parking any new building most include. A retail establishment, for example, needs 1.33 spaces per 1,000 square feet in excess of 3,000 square feet. But if it’s a hotel, it needs only 0.5 spaces per 1,000. Eating and drinking uses are the same as retail, unless it’s a strip club (“sexually-based business establishment” as the zoning board calls it) in which case the parking requirement rises to 1.67 spaces per 1,000. A single-family home needs one space per dwelling, while a multifamily home requires only one spot for every three dwellings (with an exemption for the first four units) unless it is in a R or RF zone, where the rule is one for every two units.
What terrible misfortune might befall someone who built a six-unit apartment in an RF zone with only two parking spaces? What are the central planners trying to save us from?
Well, someone might live there and own a car and park it on the street. We couldn’t have that, because there are plenty of people who already live there and already have cars and already park on the street, and they don’t want the competition. That’s not a crazy concern, but it hardly warrants throwing everything we know about the virtue of markets out the window.
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Street parking is a classic tragedy of the commons. Neighborhood street parking is free or very cheap, so those who use it worry about overconsumption. In Washington, the way the system works is that residents who want to park on the street in their neighborhood pay a nominal fee to get a parking permit.
A better way would be to scrap the off-street parking regulations altogether and stop issuing new permits, but give existing permit-holders the right to their parking permits. They could keep using them as long as they liked, but they could also sell them. That would turn parking scarcity from something incumbent parkers fear into a financial win-win for newcomers and longtime residents alike.
How would people get around without so much regulated parking?
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Well, some of them might walk or bike or ride the train or even the bus. Beyond those possibilities, simply saying that parking isn’t required doesn’t mean that nobody will build it. Air conditioning, for example, is a standard feature of new housing in most parts of the country but not a requirement — if people are willing to pay for it, it will be installed.
More flexibility with parking regulation simply means that it won’t get built in specific situations where the costs are unusually high or the benefits unusually low. It also means that existing under-used parking facilities might simply sell parking spots to people in need rather than having new parking automatically bundled with new construction.
The point is not that parking is bad. It’s that the whole set of circumstances is too complicated to be fully optimized by central planners.
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What does all this have to do with Garcia’s bill, which as I said is going nowhere? As an attempted federal preemption of local policymaking, it will naturally raise questions about constitutionality and subsidiarity. But I appreciate his effort to go big on the subject rather than just nibble around the edges of the American parking regime. This is an area where the nation needs not just policy change but a fundamental rethinking.
Parking, at the end of the day, is not some kind of public good that requires or deserves subsidies. A space in which to store your car is a quintessential private good, highly rivalrous and totally excludable, and it should be provided at market prices by people who want to provide it, in quantities that are freely chosen based on the particular circumstances. Parking freedom, in other words, rather than free parking.
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