Comments on: If we want density, parking must come at a premium

By: If we want density, parking must come at a premium | Commercial Real Estate, Portland, Oregon

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:58:37 +0000

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By: Dwaine Dibbly

Dwaine Dibbly — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:09:32 +0000

People parking “down the street” just moves the problem down the road.

I agree that there are unrealized societal costs to the devotion of space to the storage of automobiles, but we’re not at the point were we can provide zero parking in new developments.

The problem with building without parking is that it forces people with cars to either park on the street, or to park in a commercial lot or structure. Both are bad. On-street parking takes away space that should be used for other purposes, such as bicycling infrastructure. Devoting space to parking lots or garages with no other uses results in dead zones. The better solution is to provide some amount of underground or otherwise on-site parking in new residential buildings. Instead of zero spaces, include somewhere in the range of 0.5 to 1.0.

(For the record, I live downtown and drove less than 1000 miles last year, and that included a trip to Bend for a professional conference.)

By: Shawn Sullivan

Shawn Sullivan — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:55:17 +0000

The other market driving factor is a successful project. In past years even some housing projects built on light rail that we under parked, could not maintain occupancy levels. Therefore the projects were unsuccessful. Developers see the success of some small projects infill projects in niche locations and lick their chops because they don’t have to include the cost of the parking, and are able to include more units per acre. A couple of projects not renting because people won’t park “down the street” will result in a market change back to supplying a reasonable amount of parking.