LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

If you want faster buses, evict the cars from the bus travel lanes.

We should be pushing people to get rid of their cars instead of keeping them.

If I was a builder, my incentives are closely aligned with the city - build something that appeals to buyers. If I build a fancy apartment building where everyone owns cars but I provide no parking, well those aren’t going to be very desirable.

Although it's increased purchases of garbage bags, which use more plastic in the end because they're thicker.

Hacker news loves to talk about solutions to zoning problems that only benefit people who don't live there.

My monies will no longer benefit these businesses, and if enough people stay away, they will eventually have to shut down. Storefronts will be boarded up, meanwhile, somewhere next to an interstate, another Amazon Warehouse grows.

This trend has already started, especially in small-to mid-sized European cities (large ones seem to hang on a bit longer, mostly because their public transit systems were heavily updated in the late 20th century). But even in Berlin, or Munich, or Paris I start noticing storefront rot - increasingly more shops, often specialized ones (which served as focal points for customers from afar who might then use that day to do secondary purchases) go out of business.

In the end, you will have very dense city centers filled with large-brand stores, next to major traffic hubs, and slums around it. Cities will lose their one major advantage: the desirability of living there.

Possibly in an ideal world, but not in this one (or certainly not on any timescale that I'd regard as acceptable - human lifetimes, and working lifetimes especially, aren't that long in the grand scheme of things and I'm already at least half way through on both fronts).

Having been both dirt poor and relatively affluent more than once, and growing up poor, I'm not really sure buses do an adequate job for elderly or poorer people either: they just use them because there are no other options. And in that context I'm deeply uncomfortable with any initiative that makes them less accessible for the elderly, infirm, or those with low income.

Then why are you commenting?

The parent of your post was correct in saying "required", as in legally required for that zoning.

After you subtract the required parking spots, setbacks, sidewalks, driveways then what you're left with is a few super-expensive townhouses in most of LA or the project gets cancelled.

If I am a strawberry seller and my cost to buy strawberries goes down, I can pass those savings onto the consumer or not. But my competitors will all be making the same choice, so absent collusion, if I don't lower my prices, but my competitors do, then obviously they'll take my business.

In other words, profit margins are determined by how competitive a market is, not the cost of production.

If this change goes through, I imagine that profit margins for LA developers will remain similar to whatever they are now.

My old unit in the DC area had something like $80,000 in parking attached to it. That could have been ground floor units or retail instead. The units would have been cheaper had the parking minimums not been there. In bigger buildings that put parking underground, those units can be very expensive to build.

There is no "minimum air conditioning" requirement where I live, but pretty much every building I walk into has it. My apartment, like most apartments I've seen, also has it.

Turns out that people don't need the government to tell them what they want. People like AC, so most buildings have AC. Not particularly remarkable, but most apartments in my area also come with refrigerators, stoves, ovens, sinks, showers, and dishwashers, all sans-minimum-appliance requirement.

To me, a minimum parking requirement seems as weirdly dystopian as requiring ACs or dishwashers. Most people like those things, so most buildings will have them, but it shouldn't be illegal to decide you don't need an AC or dishwasher.

Sure we can. Those regulations are not always binding. Buildings are built with parking capacity in excess of minimums all the time.

>Requiring excessive parking will artificially and needlessly raises prices, true. But I would also be at least somewhat concerned that without sufficient regulation short term thinking on the part of builders might result in less parking than would be generally desirable.

Why? What's the market failure? For that matter, why is there a "general desire" for the quantity of at-home parking I individually consume?

>I'm not at all convinced that urban planning should be done by market forces alone.

That's a strawman — removing parking requirements is a far cry from "market forces alone" doing urban planning. (It is, however, a great example of how non-market forces can create worse, environmentally inefficient, undesirable outcomes by submitting what should be private choices to mob rule.)

DTLA is extremely walk/bike/train/bus friendly, most long term residents I knew did not own cars.

2. I'm not sure what census blocks you are including in your definition?

For a very long time, LA was also very famously anti-pedestrian, both in laws and enforcement. It's trying to change for sure, but I would not say it's there yet.

This is out of date. There's a lot more to do downtown these days.

You can go to a hockey game or a basketball game in DTLA, and you're near stadiums for baseball, football and soccer. If you'd rather see a symphony than a game of sportsball you can listen to the LA phil at Disney Hall (and if the architecture of Disney Hall is more modern than you prefer, there's plenty of older buildings worth checking out).

There's a bunch of museums if you're into that kind of thing. On the grungier side, there's Santee Alley and the fashion district if you want to get that "third world bazaar" experience without having to travel.

You can get food from dozens of different cultures, even without visiting enclaves like Chinatown or Little Tokyo.

Objectively false. The homeless camps are in Skidrow and near City Hall.

It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.

There are nearly a dozen museums in DTLA including 2 world-famous art museums, an opera, 4 operational Broadway-style theaters that are still regularly in use, around a dozen smaller performance theaters, more than 200 restaurants including one of the world's busiest/most profitable restaurants, 3 bowling alleys, 3 karaoke bars, more than a dozen nightclubs, 3 arcades, 3 higher-ed schools (not including USC, which is technically outside of downtown in its own neighborhood), more than a dozen parks, around a dozen breweries, 2 large movie theaters (including one used to premier a number of Hollywood movies), events every weekend in the summer. Oh, and the food-cart phenomenon got its start in DTLA at the corner of 9th and Hope, where some of today's most famous restaurateurs got their start slinging fusion tacos to FIDM students.

If anything, there's too much stuff jammed into DTLA compared to the rest of the city.