Moving Foward | The end of parking minimums in Oregon makes room for creativity
At the start of 2023, Oregon embarked on the first experiment of its kind in modern U.S. history.
The state rolled back required parking minimums for new construction starting Jan. 3. This means developers have significantly more flexibility when it comes to the number of parking spaces they build with new housing projects.
While there are many potential benefits to cutting back these outdated and costly regulations, it is difficult to overstate how much this obscure rule change represents an unprecedented opportunity for Oregon to address its housing crisis.
Housing in the United States is often described as a game of musical chairs. From the biggest cities to small towns, America’s housing supply is not meeting demand, and more than half a million Americans are left in the cold.
At the same time, new construction since the Great Recession has transformed America’s downtowns. In Portland, this explosion looks like multi-family units sprouting along Southeast Division Street, North Williams Avenue, and in Slabtown, and is paradoxically paired with rising rents and displacement. At one point in 2019, Portland ranked third in the nation, behind only Seattle and Los Angeles, for the number of cranes hovering over our city.
So why are all these new buildings not enough to alleviate our need for housing? While there are many reasons, including zoning codes and permitting processes that choked out housing construction for decades, one problem is too often overlooked: car parking.
A quick walk around the apartment complexes that replaced the 30 construction cranes hovering over the city in 2019 will reveal most of them, from the Carson Apartments in Slabtown to the Portland Astoria in the financial district, are sitting on top of catacombs of parking space. In the case of the Canyons on North Williams Avenue, there is a 31-car garage hidden beneath only 70 housing units.
Building a parking space is expensive. Pre-pandemic, it cost $5,000-$10,000 to build a single stall on a flat, empty lot in the United States, while a space in a garage cost between $25,000-$50,000. A parking space in a multi-story parking lot is even more expensive. According to a 2012 study from the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, that will run you $55,000 (more than a decade ago), but the deeper you dig, the more expensive it gets. It is worth noting that all of the cash, labor, time and materials spent digging a big hole in the ground to house cars could otherwise go toward building housing for people.
It should be no surprise that renters foot a chunk of these costs. That same study found that an $800/month apartment without parking would cost $1,300/month to rent if it included underground parking due to development and construction costs.
Obviously, this is unfortunate for the person who ends up renting an apartment that could have been cheaper if the developer hadn’t included underground parking, but this also sends ripple effects across the rents of the rest of the neighborhood.
A well-established rule in transportation planning is that if you add lanes to a highway to address congestion, more drivers will show up to use those lanes (their taxes are paying for these open lanes, so why not use them?). Eventually, these new drivers make congestion just as bad as it was before, which leads to drivers demanding more lanes. This is known as “induced demand,” and it also applies to car parking.
The more parking we build into new apartments, the greater incentive residents will have to own a car (they are already paying for a parking space in their rent, so why not use it?). The more new residents bring a car with them as they move into the neighborhood, the greater the incentive for developers to build new parking to compete for these car-owning renters. Thus the cycle continues, with fewer housing units getting built at higher costs in order to meet the induced demand for parking.
More car spaces lead to more cars, which lead to more car spaces and so on, until a neighborhood where most people could walk or bike or use transit to get everywhere is overwhelmed by apartments that few longtime residents can afford, largely due to the bank vaults of car parking included in their price tag.
This is how Oregon’s old regime of mandated parking minimums ensured new apartment complexes took longer to build and were more expensive than they needed to be, exacerbating Portland’s housing crisis. But the ripple effect of building parking extends well beyond the cost of housing.
Why car-oriented density is bad density
Apart from raising the cost of living, making a neighborhood more unpleasant, unhealthy and dangerous to live in is a surefire strategy to guarantee that fewer people will want to live there. Cars can do all of those things to any neighborhood, but their negative impact is especially potent in neighborhoods designed for density.
Let’s start with air pollution. While tailpipe emissions are bad for our lungs and the planet, even electric cars fling unhealthy particulate matter down our sidewalks, across our parks and into our windows as streets wear down their tires. Local pollution from both tires and tailpipes causes higher rates of asthma among America’s children the closer they live to high-traffic streets.
Building a dense neighborhood that crams in as many cars as possible will lead to more cars driving around a neighborhood with a greater number of people than a typical low-density suburb, exposing more Americans to harmful pollution.
More cars mean traffic deaths. Despite the auto industry being heavily regulated relative to the gun industry, it wasn’t until 2020 that more American children died by gunfire than by car — and that was no small feat considering that the United States is facing its worst traffic violence epidemic in a generation. In 2022 Portland experienced 31 pedestrian deaths, more than any year since 1952. You will not find most dangerous intersections in Portland in the central city neighborhoods that were developed around transit and pedestrians, but in the neighborhoods east of 82nd Avenue, where neighborhoods were designed or retrofitted with wide streets and ample parking to encourage more driving.
More cars also mean a louder neighborhood. All cars are loud: that is the price you pay when moving a 1-ton machine down a street at 30 miles per hour, but the tall, hard-surfaced buildings in dense neighborhoods amplify that noise. This is not just unpleasant to listen to. Last year researchers at the American College of Cardiology found “people experiencing high levels of noise from cars, trains or planes were more likely to suffer a heart attack than people living in quieter areas.”
The future of affordability is also a future of livability
Portland needs housing, and the best way to meet our need is to build more multi-family units, including apartments, duplexes, quadplexes and granny flats. This means greater housing density, but it does not need to mean unlivable neighborhoods.
Multi-family housing is popular around the country and can be both affordable and comfortable to live in. The surest way to build these housing options in a way that ensures they will be expensive and uncomfortable is to try to pump them full of cars.
Not only will building car parking delay construction projects and make housing even less affordable, but if we continue to build a type of density that creates unpleasant, unhealthy and dangerous neighborhoods, residents will get the message that density itself is the source of these problems.
If the 20th century is anything to go on, some vocal residents (primarily wealthy homeowners with a lot of time on their hands) will try to stop projects that even hint at anything denser than a McMansion, making our housing crisis even worse. This might explain why, even as Oregon tries to move away from parking minimums towards a future where fewer people freeze to death on our streets, 14 local jurisdictions have filed a legal challenge to the state’s rollback.
We live in a system that is designed to favor cars at the expense of everything else, whether that is kids biking to school, an affordable apartment or breathable air. Unfortunately, a free market doesn’t mean a fast-acting one, but the end of parking minimums in Oregon means for the first time in a generation, we have the freedom to reimagine our relationship with cars. Let’s make the most of it.
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