Beaverton council votes to eliminate minimum parking requirements for new projects

City councilors in Beaverton voted unanimously to do away with including parking in new developments in the city. Kevin Teater is the newest member of the council and campaigned on this issue. Beaverton joins seven other cities in the state that have made the same shift recently, including Portland, Salem and Bend. Last year the state’s Land Conservation and Development Commission passed rules to lift parking requirements in many places and encourage cities to do the same. Teater calls the policy “absolutely transformative.” We talk with him about the vote and what this could mean for his city and others in Oregon.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Developers in Beaverton no longer have to put in a minimum number of parking spaces when they create new buildings. That’s because of a recent unanimous vote by the Beaverton City Council. Beaverton is not alone; seven other cities, including Portland, Salem, and Bend, made similar changes recently with more cities likely to follow. All of this is a result of a new statewide policy. Last year, Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission passed rules to force cities to either reduce or remove parking requirements. New Beaverton city councilor Kevin Teater campaigned on this issue, and calls this change in his city “absolutely transformative.” He joins us now to talk about what this will mean for Beaverton and the rest of the state. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Kevin Teater: Thank you, Dave. It’s nice to be here.

Miller: I wanna start with the change at the state level. What did the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) do last year?

Teater: DLCD passed a series of administrative rules that were going to require cities above a certain size to update several of their development code policies and ordinances in an effort to address some of our climate issues across the state. Included in some of this was a conversation around parking minimums, and either eliminating parking minimums entirely across the city or pretty dramatically updating them so that they’re less restrictive for property owners and developers.

Miller: Why? A lot of this is focused on climate change. What’s the connection between parking minimums and climate change?

Teater: There is a huge connection between parking minimums and climate change, and housing and housing affordability, and all of these different issues that matter to our state. Specifically, when you’re in a city, you might be driving through Beaverton and see a lot of large parking lots. You might see most of the time, these parking lots are mostly under used or unused in vacant and ignored or overlooked parts of the city. These black parking lots get very hot in the sun and contribute to urban heat island effects and warming of our cities. They also contribute to more driving. When people know that they have a free place to park, and parking is more than abundant, they will drive more. It also disrupts the ability for people to walk or bike or take transit because it makes those modes of travel a little bit more impractical or unfeasible.

The parking minimum conversation seeks to improve some of that so that people aren’t forced to build such large parking lots, and can invest in other areas such as the cost of housing or preservation of different trees or tree canopy or other transportation infrastructure around their property.

Miller: You mentioned housing affordability as well. What’s the connection between required numbers of parking spots and the affordability of a unit?

Teater: Well, let’s start first with just how expensive parking is to actually provide. A surface parking space costs upwards of $10,000 for the land and the construction of the space and maintenance. But for covered parking, tuck-under parking, garage parking, you’re looking at prices cost per space increasing upwards of $40,000-$50,000 per space. When that adds on to the cost of development, somebody has to bear the weight of that, and that’s gonna be renters and people trying to afford their way of life here in Beaverton and across the state who will feel that burden. And so by reducing the required amount of parking that people will be forced to provide, developers and property owners can work with what’s more financially feasible to make projects more practical, be able to be built in the first place, but also reduce some of that cost that people are seeing on their rent bills each month.

Miller: Is it possible for you to estimate the percentage of parking spots that are in any place, next to an apartment building, next to a store, that are there purely because they’re required by local codes, as opposed to being there because the developer or the business owner put them there because they think their customers or their tenants want them?

Teater: That’s a really good question, and I think it depends a lot on the specific property and the use of the property. I’m not comfortable in myself creating or giving an estimate across the full city or across the full state. But there are estimates that show that there are approximately eight parking spaces for every person in the United States of America. We don’t need eight parking spaces for every single car. What we need is better parking management and pricing of parking so that people drive less or car pool or use the parking for less amount of time and have turnover in these spaces. But I think what we will see as this code is implemented, as people develop their properties and build new businesses and new housing, is that we’ll see more of these parking lots get a little bit more right sized for this specific use, and what people actually think that they’ll need. So I would be really interested in comparing that data as time goes forward.

Miller: Sightline, which focuses on urban policy issues including transportation, had an article about this statewide change in all the cities that are changing their policies as a result. And in it, they included a graphic from planners in Salem where they outlined the choices that Salem faced, which are no different from what you in Beaverton had to decide on recently and every other city of size in the state. And they boiled down the rules from the state in a pretty humorous way.

Option one, they write, is “eliminate all minimum parking requirements citywide.” Option two and three, they both are “many things and more things and more things.” And the reason they did that is because it’s pretty complicated what would have been required if you hadn’t just made this very simple and got rid of minimum parking requirements citywide. But can you give us a sense basically for the choice that you and other cities had?

Teater: I remember that article from Sightline, and it’s not too far off from reality. Option one was eliminate them across the whole city. Then the other options had a series of conditions that would be applied if you wanted to keep parking minimums in certain zones across the city or certain neighborhoods or proximity to transit stations. So when we looked at this, we mapped out across the full city of Beaverton, if we were to go with an option that just said no parking minimums in major commercial areas or near 15 minute transit stations, that pretty immediately restricts a lot of the city from having parking minimums anyways. And so when we considered the administrative burden that it would have taken to update all of our codes across the full city to have this kind of context specific approach, it just seemed very burdensome.

But that said, I personally have always been a fan of just eliminating them entirely and letting the private market, the private property owners, homeowners decide what they need for their own units. And that’s what we’ve got, and I think that’s the right direction to go.

Miller: It’s interesting you mention letting the private market figure out for themselves what they want because it does seem like this is a case where the traditional inclinations of the political left, which currently is a lot more focused on mitigating climate change and perhaps more focused on housing affordability, and the American political right which says let the market decide, don’t tell me what to do in terms of mandates. This is one of the relatively unusual cases where I think both sides might get a version of what they want.

Teater: Yes, exactly. And this is something that excites me so much about this parking reform conversation, is that it doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on or what political perspectives you might have. There is likely a piece of this that will appeal to some value that each of us has. For some that might be climate change. For some people that might be housing affordability or housing supply. For some people it might just be “get government off our backs and let us do more of what we wanna do.” I’m excited because this now shows that we as Beaverton city government can get out of the way a little bit, can free up people to decide what they need to do with their property. So if they want to build a new bedroom or expand their business, they’re not constrained as much by this really arbitrary burden of how much parking the government is going to force them to provide. They can choose that for themselves.

Miller: Was that first example you mentioned a potential real life example, putting in a new bedroom could trigger the necessity of another parking spot?

Teater: Yes. Parking minimums vary across municipalities. However, it’s common to see that there will be a certain number of parking spaces depending on the number of bedrooms in a home or an apartment complex. And so that often leads to either smaller apartment buildings or people not being able to expand their housing. Now thankfully, I think with some of House Bill 2001 that passed a few years ago, the housing bill that legalized a lot of the middle housing across the state and across cities, some of that was being relaxed anyways. But it is a very real example, that if somebody can’t provide one more parking space, they might not be able to expand their business.

Miller: I’m glad you brought up House Bill 2001. As you said, that’s intended to increase so-called middle housing. Another way to think about it or talk about it is that for almost any city in Oregon that you can’t only have single family homes in place, they got rid of single family zoning. What it didn’t do is what some people sort of heard it as, which is require that in places where currently there are single family homes that you can only build multi family homes or cottage clusters. It simply gives developers the ability. And that’s what this does, this gets rid of requirement as opposed to creating a new requirement. How much do you think developers are actually going to change the status quo version of our built environment?

Teater: I’ll start by saying, I think that there’s often a lot of fear in people’s reactions when they hear, “there’s no more single family zoning” or “parking minimums are being eliminated.” But what’s actually happening is we’re just freeing up cities to grow incrementally with changes that can happen over time. So for the housing bill, Sightline published another article when all of that was being passed and being studied that showed that there might not be a lot of middle housing that’s being built right away. But it can act as a pressure release as values keep increasing where it becomes more financially feasible to build duplexes and triplexes and townhomes. And that would kind of level off the rate of increase in housing costs.

The same I think can be said for parking minimums, where parking is not going to be going away entirely. What we’ll instead see is there will be a business on Main Street that maybe wants to add on an expansion or add another storefront. And doing so maybe they’ll just take away a few more parking spaces and be able to add a new kitchen or a new dining room. And that will now be possible. But it’s not gonna happen all across the city all at once, it’ll happen as people try and experiment and learn new things and learn what makes cities stronger and people healthier, and our city is just happier all around.

Miller: You’re the former executive director of the Beaverton Downtown Association. When we’ve talked in the past about efforts to get rid of some on street parking spots as a way to make way for a bike lane, we’ve often heard complaints from business owners who say “I’m worried that people who are used to parking in front of my store to go buy stuff, they won’t easily be able to find a parking spot and I will lose their business.” What have you heard from business owners since this change was made or when the city was considering this change?

Teater: I think there is a broad range of perspectives where people hear this and they think “how are people gonna access my business?” The first thought is how are people gonna access my business by car, because that’s been how people have done it in Beaverton for so long. And I think there are multiple pieces of this. One is accessibility in general is more than just people driving a car and parking it right next to the business they want to go to. It’s also how would people ride a bus to get there, or a bike, or rolling their wheelchair? How would people ride a scooter? What other forms of transportation are there that can make a community more accessible, that can make a business more successful and accessible? And I think you’ve got to combine that with parking management strategies.

And if we look at downtown Beaverton right now, parking has been free for forever. And it’s also been pretty unmanaged and unenforced. So you’d have people who live in apartment buildings downtown who park in the same spot for a week at a time. And that results in no turnover in spaces, which means that businesses can’t have customers who park there anyways. So what we need to do is better management of the spaces that we have. And Beaverton has started to do that too. So I think it’s a multipronged approach that’ll make it successful for everybody.

Miller: What do you see as the next step in climate focused planning? What are you hoping to see?

Teater: Oh, man, there is a lot here. I think Beaverton is doing a lot of really great stuff with our downtown. I think we’ve got to have a hyper focus on the support, on the growth and development and success and sustainability of our main streets and of our downtowns. And this isn’t just Beaverton. I do work in main street programs all across the state and in the Pacific Northwest, from very rural towns with 25 people up to where I am in Beaverton with 100,000 people. And we need a healthy main street district because that allows people to live closer lives, be able to walk more, to be able to see their neighbors out on the street, and not spread so far outwards to the edges where people are forced to drive, where our climate impact is higher. I think when we live closer together, we’ll have closer community and better bonds between each other, and better support and stewardship of our environment.

Miller: Kevin Teater, thanks very much.

Teater: Yeah, thank you, Dave.

Miller: Kevin Teater is a member of the Beaverton city council. He joined us to talk about the end of parking requirements in most of Oregon’s larger cities following a change last year at the state level.

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