Parking Reform Network founder says his mission is key to reducing car travel and meeting climate change goals

What does parking have to do with climate change? Everything, according to Parking Reform Network founder and president Tony Jordan. Getting rid of parking mandates in Oregon means that housing developers can also build more units rather than having to set aside space for car infrastructure. Four years ago there were fewer than a dozen cities nationwide that had lifted their parking mandates. Since then, the number has grown to 70, with 18 of them in Oregon. Jordan joins us to talk about how his Portland-based, national nonprofit group helps cities around the country remove parking requirements to support the larger goals of reducing emissions and creating sustainable infrastructure.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. What does parking have to do with climate change? Everything, according to Parking Reform Network founder and president Tony Jordan. He says that the country is making progress on this. Four years ago, fewer than a dozen cities had lifted their parking spot requirements. Since then, that number has grown to 70. Eighteen of those are in Oregon.

Tony Jordan joins us now to talk about his Portland-based national nonprofit, and the connection between parking and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s good to have you on the show.

Tony Jordan: Thanks, Dave.

Miller: How did you become focused on parking?

Jordan: Well, I got rid of my car in 2008. I had a small kid and our car broke down and we just tried going without it. And then a couple of years later, I read a blog post about a book called “The High Cost of Free Parking” by a professor at UCLA named Donald Shoup. And this book highlights the reason why parking is required for businesses and the impact it has on housing and transportation. And as I was reading this book, I really felt like I was … maybe [like] if you’re eating a hamburger and reading “The Jungle.” I  looked around – I live across the street from a parking lot – and I realized there’s this huge force impacting how our cities are built and how we get around. And I’d never thought about how much it cost, or how much space it really took up, or why we had as much parking as we did.

So it really just captivated me. And then a few years later, there was a controversy in Southeast Portland around apartments being built without parking. I’d worked as a union organizer, and I just started getting involved, trying to raise awareness and fix some of these regulations.

Miller: What goes through your mind when you look at a parking lot, a surface parking lot, I guess like the one you’re saying that was across the street from you in the middle of a city?

Jordan: I see the cost, like dollar signs in a way, and I see kind of like the ghosts of what was there before, maybe. In a lot of places we’ve torn down buildings, housing – great things to pave over. And the problem …

Miller: When you say the dollar signs – the cost – do you mean the literal cost of putting in that asphalt or what having that there costs us going forward?

Jordan: Both. There’s a tremendous opportunity cost for the space, a surface. Then there’s a monetary cost. Surface lots aren’t that expensive, but they are thousands of dollars per stall. Structured spaces like a garage vary from $20,000 to $60,000 for above ground spaces and you can double that for below. And if you think about per cost space, if you have an apartment with two required parking spaces, if each space costs $30,000 that’s gonna add $600 a month to the rent. So the cost is really … Then when I see these spaces too, I think it’s a promise we do have, there is some optimism about what could go in all these empty spaces that are in our cities now.

Miller: What’s the connection though between parking lots, parking spaces and climate change?

Jordan: Great question. A lot of our emissions in the United States come from transportation and a large portion of that is personal transportation with automobile trips. So one thing is car parking lots and requiring a bunch of them, they spread things out. It makes it difficult to put housing, commerce and employment together. So people have to drive more just to get from one place to another. It also bundles the cost of driving into almost everything you do. So you’re kind of missing out if you’re not using the free parking that exists everywhere. If you go without a car, you’re paying for it, but you’re not getting the benefit.

There’s also just a fact of, if we want to really reduce our climate emissions, we have to probably build things a little closer, and allow for more walkability, and less climate intensive building patterns and travel. So these regulations are really a stumbling block in allowing more walkable communities and more sustainable communities from being built.

Miller: What did Oregon lawmakers do in terms of parking just this year with Senate Bill 1537?

Jordan: Senate Bill 1537 allows developers who want to build housing that has affordable housing in it to apply for variances. I mean, developers can always apply for variances, but a builder might not do so because they think it’s likely to get denied. So this was an attempt to say if it wasn’t a variance required around health and safety or other important things, they could request a variance and the city would have to automatically grant it. This is an admission by the state, partially, which the state already has moved on this, that parking has an impact on housing affordability – a big one – and on climate.

The impact of this particular bill, it’s fairly probably pretty easy for cities to kind of get out of this variance. A city just has to maybe get a developer [or] a couple of developers to say, “oh, we’ve been granted variances in the past.” But it does apply to every city in the state, where the climate friendly and equitable communities bill – that has led to a lot more cities getting rid of all of their mandates – applies to just metro areas with 50,000 and above.

Miller: When I hear about cities getting rid of mandates, it reminds me a little bit of the state getting rid of single-family zoning. Both of them remove a requirement, but they’re not new requirements on their own. In other words it doesn’t prohibit a developer from putting in any number of parking spaces, if I understand these policies correctly. So how do developers respond, in general, when they are told they don’t have to put in a certain number of spaces?

Jordan: TYou’re exactly right. We’re not evaporating parking overnight, we’re not preventing it or prohibiting it. It allows for right-sizing and marginal improvement. There are some examples from around the country. Buffalo, New York has done this pretty early on. Areas of Los Angeles had done this with adaptive reuse. And what you often see is parking still gets built, so you get more homes. That’s one thing. It’s very clear, you get more homes that will be built ...

Miller: Studies have shown that?

Jordan: Yeah, I don’t have the numbers correctly on the top of my head, but there’s a study in Buffalo that shows you get more … Buffalo and Seattle. Sightline Institute covered this. The majority of homes that were built after reforms on parking would have been illegal under the previous rules. And in Los Angeles …

Miller: Meaning, fewer homes, temporary homes for cars, can mean more actual homes for people?

Jordan: Exactly, because the limiting factor on building an apartment isn’t often how many apartments you put in. [It’s] not usually like the height restriction or the size of the building you’re allowed to build. It’s often the parking ratio. A parking lot … this guy Mott Smith in L.A. says, “parking is like pizza, you can sell it by the slice, but you have to build it, you have to bake it by the pie.”

A developer will come in and look at how much parking they can fit on a lot and then they’ll build as many apartments generally as are allowed by the code. So if you remove this requirement, which is arbitrary – these requirements are arbitrary – you’ll end up maxing out the amount of housing you can get. And this may only be like five or 10 apartments in a building. But if we had been doing that for the last 70 years, we’d have a lot more housing.

Miller: What do you mean when you say that these requirements are arbitrary? Because I can imagine plenty of people listening right now who say, “Wait a minute. Yes, it would be great if I didn’t have to drive. But my home is here. My work is 15 miles away. My kids have to be picked up. I have to drive. It would be great if I didn’t, but I do and I need a place to put that car.” And if this person I’m describing hears the word arbitrary, I think I can imagine them saying, “This is not arbitrary. This is necessary.”

Jordan: Well, if you look at the zoning code, which I’ve looked at a lot around the country … I’ll do a survey often if I’m giving a presentation of cities within 50 or 100 miles of where I’m giving my presentation. I’ll look at their zoning code and I’ll look for specific land uses to compare. One of my favorites is bowling alley, because it shows, one, how kind of outdated these are – the 1970s. But they also vary widely. So it’s very common for me to be able to find two per lane, three per lane, four per lane, five per lane, six per lane, seven per lane requirements.

Miller: Literally city by city, it says if you’re putting in a bowling alley, you need this many parking spots for this many bowling alleys?

Jordan: Yeah, for each lane. And one city over might be very different. There will be a 10 to 12 times difference on things like funeral homes. There’s super crazy ones. There’s a city, Woodbury, Georgia, very small. Often these are very specific, they have two significant figures. But this one little city has a separate requirement for heliport and helistop. Now like hell if I know what the difference is between these things. But these are real things in the code. They were put in place so long ago and they aren’t calibrated. No one knows the answer of how much parking needs to be in a specific place.

Miller: OK. I take your point then about the gigantic variances, which could lead you to say that there’s a true arbitrariness in terms of the number of necessary spots. But to me, there is a broader question of the extent to which you can modify people’s behavior, which in the end is what you want to do. You don’t care truly about parking spots, right? What you care about is housing affordability, about climate change. And it seems that getting rid of parking spots is perhaps a way to change people’s behavior and to make them less dependent on cars.

What I’m wondering is how that works, what the mechanism is and if this is a way to frustrate people or encourage them to lead the kind of lives that would lead collectively to a better world?

Jordan: I mean, in the first case, we’ve overbuilt parking. No one even knows. People ask me all the time, how much parking is there in the United States? Uncountable. It’s really just like no one knows how much parking there is. We already know, if you look at census data on renter households in the United States, almost always more than half the households own one or fewer cars. But almost all cities require at least one-and-a-half parking spaces for a regular apartment in the United States. So we’re overbuilding parking, house by house across the country as it is.So getting rid of these mandates allows for a right-sizing. There’s tremendous demand for housing, for access to things without cars. Most people don’t like to drive in the city. Places that are walkable are highly in demand. And so getting rid of these requirements allows for a right-sizing over time.

Now, in popular areas you might have more congestion, but that’s a fact of geometry. Main streets across the United States that people like to go to exist and are popular because they’re not full of parking lots. So when people do want to go to a place that’s popular, you have to get them there in ways that isn’t driving – public transportation, walking, biking. And then people who do choose to drive, you want to provide them access, and the best way to do that is probably pricing.

Miller: Pricing – meaning, in your mind, there are few public policies worse than free parking?

Jordan: It’s tremendously damaging. I mean, obviously, if there’s a lot of parking, which there is in most of the country, you don’t charge if no one wants to park there. But in the places where people do want to drive, having free parking creates an entitlement around driving to that place. But it also leaves a lot of money on the table you could spend for alternate modes and it makes congestion. People are frustrated and they can’t get where they want to go in a timely manner because it’s free.

Miller: It does seem significant though that when you were talking just now about having people arrive, say, in a popular area in ways that don’t involve cars, that getting rid of the parking spots then is just one piece of a larger transportation policy quiver. So what else should go along with getting rid of free parking spots if a city wants to be smart and actually help their residents?

Jordan: I mean, there’s a policy Professor Shoup has come up with, it’s called Parking Benefit District. So the idea is when you need to you set the price at the lowest price that leaves a space available on every block, and then you reinvest the money in things that improve the desirability or walkability of the area. So you can install lighting that allows people to more safely walk to a lot that’s a little farther away. Or you can invest directly in transportation subsidies or transit services to help more people get to a place.

Cities also should reform other zoning codes to allow, for example, more housing near areas where people want to go to recreate and work. It’s one piece in a whole policy. I’ve often said, if you want to have a nice city, it’s like growing a garden. You don’t go throw vegetable seeds in the lawn; you have to remove the grass, rocks and weeds first. This policy is a very core level, removing rocks and weeds so that we can hopefully have places that we want.

Miller: I’ve often heard the fear of drivers taking side streets if highways are closed or tolled, that kind of neighborhood diversion. Does the same thing happen with parking? Do folks just go to smaller neighborhood streets if they can’t park in front of their residence or their favorite commercial area?

Jordan: Yeah, it’s called spillover parking. And it is the primary reason why these policies are unpopular. People don’t want these people parking in their neighborhood.

Miller: Don’t park in my backyard.

Jordan: Yeah. So I think this is a problem, but it’s a solvable problem, right?

Miller: How?

Jordan: Honestly … well, parking management. Cities own the curbs, they should mind their own business. If they’re minding their business and managing their curbs … that could be with permits that don’t allow consumers to park in a neighborhood if there’s a lot of residents that need the parking spaces. OK, have a permit that says you can’t park there. If there is some parking available, this is a great opportunity to let people from outside the community contribute to the community’s well being by paying for parking that can be invested in crosswalks and other things that those people need. So parking management, there’s a whole industry around it. It’s huge and cities can apply these policies and deal with the problem rather than making it worse by requiring arbitrary amounts of parking.

Miller: The permits to park in certain areas, residential areas, it does make me wonder to what extent one of the challenges you face is a sense of driver’s entitlement, that I’m a driver and it is my right to be able to park wherever I want, whenever I want, for as little money as I want.

Jordan: I think that’s true. I also don’t think it’s as unique as we think it is. People don’t like to pay for parking. I don’t like to pay for things either. Do you like to pay for coffee or a hamburger? If you can get it for free, you will.

Miller: Well, no, but do I like it? No, but I recognize that I’m not going to get a free hamburger and I do wonder if parking is different in some sense? If the driving mentality … and I’m a driver, not every day but frequently. And I feel like all of us can change a lot when we get behind the wheel, whether we like it or not.

Jordan: I think that’s a point well taken. Just like myself in 2010, most people have never … I’ve talked to many, many people across the country around this. I find that they don’t know how much it costs, they don’t know how much space it takes up, and they don’t know the impact it has on housing or even things like water quality. A lot of water runoff, heat islands, bread and butter environmental and quality of life issues are impacted negatively. I mean, traffic itself is induced by parking, right? I mean, if you build a new parking space, then you’re asking for someone to drive in and out on that, on your street every day. So if we wanna back ourselves out of some of these problems we have, this is an important way to start.

Miller: Just briefly, in the 40 seconds we have left, how big a shift have you seen since you started work on this?

Jordan: Tremendous. I think that, one, we’ve seen, just as you mentioned, the number of cities that have done these policies, the public awareness is huge. I mean, I’ve got an organization with over 750 members, people who are like me when I first learned about this 15 years ago. I was pretty alone. So it’s growing dramatically and I think we’re having great success.

Miller: Tony, thanks very much.

Jordan: Thank you.

Miller: Tony Jordan is the president of the Portland-based National Parking Reform Network.

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