Parking Reform in Shoreline and Bellingham
Two More Cities Leap Ahead of Seattle
I’m a huge fan of fixing the expensive parking quotas that continuously harm our communities. I think we should instead let people decide how much parking they need for themselves. I have been doing some consulting work with Sightline on this kind of reform, and I am so thankful that this work got me involved in efforts in Shoreline this week.
On Monday, both Shoreline and Bellingham voted to end their costly quotas. Shoreline updated its comprehensive plan, and instructed staff to do all it needs to remove the mandates within six months. Bellingham appears set to remove mandates from its code in January, through an emergency ordinance that will presumably be finalized within a year. They follow Spokane and Port Townsend in this transformative action. Shoreline also plans to allow small shops all over its city, except for cul-de-sacs and other dead end streets, leapfrogging Seattle in yet another area of urban best practice.
This fantastic development follows evidence out of Colorado that parking reform may be more effective at stimulating housing production than legalizing backyard cottages (+21%) and up-zoning a bunch near transit (+13%) combined. In this study, parking reform opened up enough opportunities to build homes that it was likely to increase housing production by 41%, and a whopping 70% near transit!
While I’ll probably write more another day about this topic, I thought I would share the coalition letter that Sightline and our partners sent to the council, as well as the testimony I presented on Monday night. These are a matter of public record anyway!
To: Shoreline City Council
Re: Support for Parking Reform
Nowhere in Washington is there a parking space that is more important than a home or a job. Unfortunately, our outdated laws tell a different story. Shoreline’s parking mandates forbid countless residents from creating a home or a job without also spending significant sums and paving over lots of land. This means many of those jobs and homes never get created. It also means fewer green spaces and far fewer trees for our residents.
In fact, these mandates make it illegal to build the affordable, walkable main streets and neighborhoods that used to be the standard in our state. The quotas apply whether or not anyone thinks the space will eventually be used.
Costly parking quotas are a poison pill for housing affordability. Mandatory over-paving increases the cost of housing by adding $5,000 to $60,000 per stall, harming buyers and renters. The unnecessary expense often pushes projects into the red, meaning many homes never get built. The added permitting and complexity only makes this worse. And the space that excess parking eats up is often space that could have been homes. All this makes housing more expensive and scarce.
Mandates also raise the price of most everything else. When we require builders to bundle excess parking with new buildings, we hide the cost of all this pavement inside the price of everything we buy, from groceries to sporting goods, childcare to healthcare. This also puts an unfair burden on nondrivers, who are disproportionately poor, elderly, BIPOC or people living with disabilities.
In addition to increasing costs, parking quotas are terrible for the environment. Mandates frequently force builders to chop down mature trees that shade our neighborhoods and clean our air. Paving over trees and other green spaces with concrete worsens heat-islands and toxic runoff. Because parking takes up so much space, the quotas create sprawl, and have been shown to induce more driving. They are poisonous to local environments, to efforts to reduce emissions, and to the cause of environmental justice.
Removing parking mandates does not ban parking. Owners and builders still build plenty of parking even when it’s not required, because they know better than anyone how much their tenants or customers will need and use on a specific site. Enabling them to fine-tune parking on a case-by-case basis is far more effective than relying on outdated, cut-and-pasted city rules that are arbitrary and err on the side of excess.
So far, in places where parking mandates have been eliminated, people mostly haven’t even noticed. In Washington, Spokane and Port Townsend have already made parking spaces optional, returning the decision to homeowners, local builders, and small business owners. In fact, around 3,000 jurisdictions have reformed parking, mostly in smaller towns and cities that tend to be car-dependent places with low residential density. Ninety-three jurisdictions have fully eliminated mandates—towns of every type: large and small, urban and suburban, walkable and not-walkable. Full parking flexibility makes sense in every community.
Please return this decision to the people. Our planet and our pocketbooks are relying on you.
Habitat For Humanity
Sierra Club
FUSE Washington
Puget Sound Sage
Housing Development Consortium
SEIU 775 (Long Term Care Workers)
Sightline Institute
Although I wrote a three minute version and a two minute version of my testimony, there were so many people present, I was only able to give the two minute version, so that is what I’ll share here. Note that speakers testified about many issues, and those testifying re: parking outnumbered those against by perhaps 8:1!
Here is my testimony
Parking quotas are a poison pill for affordability, and it’s past time to drop them.
I’m Ron Davis, here on behalf of Sightline, a Pacific Northwest think tank whose research is focused on housing, affordability, and the environment.
We put together a coalition of seven organizations and sent a letter urging the council to remove parking mandates. That letter was signed alongside Sightline by Habitat for Humanity and the Housing Development Consortium, a large coalition of affordable housing developers; the equity champions at Fuse Washington, the largest progressive organization in the state, known for their progressive voters guide; Puget Sound Sage, the leading voice in racial equity in Washington State and a leader in environmental justice; SEIU 775, one of the state’s largest unions, representing caregivers; and the environmental champions at the Sierra Club of Washington.
Together, these organizations have laid out the reasons–including affordability, equity, environment and environmental justice, safety, accessibility and walkability–that this community deserves parking reform. These organizations recognize that reform does not get rid of parking, it only gets rid of extra parking. Arguments against reform almost all ignore this, which is much of why the objections don’t hold water with equity-focused organizations.
Sightline’s research has shown that for every large city that has removed mandates, twice as many small towns have done so. Reform does not require transit. In fact, Spokane and Port Townsend have already dropped their mandates, and Bellingham looks likely to do so tonight.
We all know parking is expensive and that drives up construction costs. But many people don’t realize it also makes the problem worse by preventing lots of housing from ever being built.
To get a sense of the scale, we can look to a Colorado study that compared three bills focused on housing reform. A backyard cottage bill would increase housing production by 20%. Upzones near transit would increase production by 13%. But parking reform increased it by 41%!
While there is no magic solution to the housing supply problem, parking reform is one of the most important steps. Given that it comes with so many environmental, equity, and quality of life benefits for the community, there is no reason to wait.
Seattle is currently on track to not bother with any of this, because we have a Mayor whose ambitions for this city are meager and whose interest in public policy expertise about what builds a great city appears to be close to nil.
Would that we had leadership here like two Mayors that were pushing this and passed it with the support of their collaborative, progressive councils.
Mayor Chris Roberts of Shoreline
Mayor Kim Lund of Bellingham