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"we should turn 10% of all current parking spaces into low-income housing" wasn't a proposal on the site. It was more of a demonstration that, if we could do that, we would satisfy the entire deficit of low-income renters that currently exists in LA. The actual policy proposals were at the end:

1. No universal parking minimums. Developers choose how much parking the market requires.

2. Parking Maximums in Transit Oriented Communities.

3. All new parking garages must be built with a flat floor and a high enough ceiling to allow future conversion into office, studio, or living space.

4. 20% of parking spaces must include EV charging, with the rest install ready.

5. Garages must include an equivalent number of bicycle/micro-mobility parking spaces.

I would say suggestions 2-5 get progressively worse, but suggestion 1 is really good and backed up by the data presented.

Suggestion 1 is terrible unless it's combined with a limited permit scheme for street parking. Otherwise you end up with a mess where everyone buys a car anyway, then ends up circling the block around and around hunting for a space.

Eventually people learn to not do that anymore, like many do in downtown areas today... Eventually they might reduce the amount of cars they have, because doing that is a pain in the ass. Or they pay for their parking spot vs. freeloading on 'free' parking.

I'm cool with that, maybe they'll learn not to buy a car anyway.

I do think that 1 would need to be tempered with some handicap minimum though.

Yeah, it should be coupled with a requirement to show that you can legally park if you want to register a car. And people moving into flats without a parking space should know that they can't have a car unless they also own a space to park it.

Is that pure speculation or based on data? Most of what I read says the data says otherwise: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/san-francisco-parking-space...

Eventually they will get tired of it and move to the suburbs

Suggestion 3 is particularly terrible, since the concrete skeleton of a parking garage is really poorly suited for conversion to housing. Utilities will require raised floors and drop ceilings even for arterial needs. The size of the building footprint is unreasonable for general residential division - leaving either large interior space vacuums (which can cause safety issues especially when lacking natural light) or units with no external wall (causing a different set of health issues and probably massive fire code violations). The material to be built on will be contaminated oil soaked concrete (the sort of material they truck out of former gas stations before any other kind of construction can commence). And, lastly, parking garages aren't structured to allow a structural wall free perimeter which means that temperature control within such a building would have to be entirely artificially done - so A/C and heat 24/7.

It is much more cost effective and environmentally friendly to tear down parking garages and replace them with new construction.

For 1 - sure yea, I sorta doubt developers are going to voluntarily go below 1 space/unit in any sort of world because the value of the property takes a steep dive - but removing any commercial unit parking requirements or higher requirements for larger residential units makes sense. I think 2 is great - assuming exceptions are made to support park & ride demand. 4... Eh, EV is going to need to solve this through market forces so I think we can entirely ignore this (though I would love to see a lot more EVs I think this is point is entirely tangential to the main discussion) Lastly for 5 - nope. Every building ever has managed to sort this out naturally without regulation... leave this up to the market.

I've worked in a converted parking garage office before, so it must be at least somewhat economical. It was kind of awkward; you could absolutely tell that it used to be a parking garage. but it was completely functional.

As an employer I'd have liability concerns about embedded gas fumes and long term health effects - but the arrangement of space does work better for office work - since large rooms without natural light are more common place and internal rooms (like conference rooms or staff rooms) wouldn't have locked doors between them and windows in case of a fire.

Almost all our European counterparts have #2. Most cities have parking maximums per building, and it helps limit the amount of vehicles people buy.

LA desperately needs for transit extensions.

Reviewing planning paperwork for the flat I now own in a medium-sized English city, you could see the history of this in the paperwork.

The first application to build this building (replacing a small family home on a relatively large plot) was rejected for having too few parking spaces. Policy at the time assumed housing needs space for cars, if you don't build space for cars they litter the streets so each home must have 1 space or more for larger homes.

But the last application (ie the one they actually built) was only accepted after reducing the number of spaces, because by then policy had changed to dissuade people from owning more cars. They'll park them on the street anyway (and they do) so giving them more spaces just encourages owning even more cars in a congested city.

What’s the rationale for parking maximums? If people are willing to pay for underground garage space, why not let them?

Let's say I'm building an office building, and roads in the local area can accept 300 more cars during rush hour before becoming unacceptably congested.

In this case, if the government authorises the construction of more than 300 parking spaces, unacceptable congestion will result.

The problem I see with #5 is that parking your bike outside in an unsecured area is a recipe for getting it stolen (in the US). Bike theft is rampant in America and thieves will steal anything that isn't locked to something immovable, and even then they'll steal parts off of it. Civilized countries don't have this problem, and people happily park their bikes outside, at transit stations, etc. all the time without worrying about this.

Here in DC, we have "bike lockers" at the Metro transit stations so you can park your bike there and take the train into the city. However, these lockers aren't cheap, and there aren't many of them, and they're completely enclosed so they take up a fair amount of space. By contrast, in Germany you'll find many hundreds of bikes just lined up and parked outside the S-bahn station, without people having to pay a hefty rental fee.

parking your bike outside in an unsecured area is a recipe for getting it stolen (in the US)

That´s everywhere. I was told that in Austria the only major petty theft is bike theft (in one of the most secure countries in the world).

I don´t even need to mention how prevalent it is in my country Uruguay (which tries to encourage bike use).

No, it isn't everywhere. Bike theft is extremely rare in Japan, and no one locks bikes to anything there.

Wow. Hats off to Japan then.

> Telling real estate developers to build low-income housing in areas where they could easily build high-income housing is, well, let's just say cities promise this all the time and developers never do it.

Where I currently live developers are required by law to build. Certain percentage of square meters of social housing for every square meter of higher class housing they build. When my house got build they had to build social housing right next to it.

If I understood it correctly, the city ties this to the building permits. So if you wanna build new stuff you need to show that your plans include these social and affordable flats as well.

A city should in my opinion regulate to maximize the happieness of it’s inhabitants and not it’s developers (to some degree these two overlap anyways).

Certainly you could also try to change things via the market, but unless your city has a lack of developers why should you?

I have heard that, in the long run, these kinds of legislation tend to really kick the housing affordability problem into turbo mode.

What ends up happening is that developers need to raise the rents on the non-subsidized units, because they're the ones that subsidize the subsidized ones. Which creates a constant upward pressure on housing prices that ends up squeezing everybody.

I'm not sure what the solution is, and I'm no economist, but it seems plausible. Looking at it from a 3,000 meter perspective, I would assume that, however well-intentioned San Francisco's housing policies were, we should probably expect that emulating them will yield the same outcomes that San Francisco is currently experiencing.

That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either. I would also suspect that emulating Detroit would also tend to lead to the sorts of outcomes that Detroit is currently experiencing.

> That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either.

This isn't something we do, it's something that falls out of a free real estate market. Money either finds itself and accumulates, making prices soar, or it flees the whole area throwing prices through the floor.

There is no magical world where the forces of supply and demand just happen to create income-diverse neighborhoods. We have to force that to happen if we want it.

Ultimately this, like every other problem resulting from income inequality, must be resolved by fixing the inequality, not by forcing people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.

That is something we do. Almost all cities, even very progressive ones, have a long history of redlining, which is still being dismantled today. The biases are racial and on income, which are strongly commingled from even heavier handed discrimination in the past.

The current separation of rich white and poor black/brown absolutely did not and does not fall out of a free market without consistent, long term, and deliberate racial action. Frankly, this is completely ignored by most neoliberal treatments of the housing issue.

The way San Francisco and Seattle run affordable housing is just tossing scrapes to the poor so businesses can retain cheap labor. They do nothing to maintain communities, just token diversity.

Sustainable affordability is achieved at the balance of supply and demand.

Supply can only be increased by building upward and outward: increase density near jobs, and invest in effective regional public transportation to mitigate "Manhattanization" (extreme density) or "Los Angeleization" (car commuting hell).

Demand grows from increased economic prospects, so can be managed with progressive taxes (ideally reinvested in transit/education/job training that equalize economic opportunities).

Subsidized housing makes sense as an interim solution, a buffer as the market adapts, but those subsidies are ultimately unsustainable (requiring prescient central planning).

How can they maintain communities exactly? I have seen many different definitions of that community to the point where I can't see a meangingful goal let alone an achieveable one. A bit like "ruining society" as a charge.

Minimizing emigration due to rapidly rising cost of living.

That is a fair enough goal - especially if done at a whole city level. A complicated balancing act but well so are a lot of things.

Build more housing. When an area gets overbuilt, units start going vacant, developers start going bankrupt, and vulture capitalists can swoop in, buy the properties for cheap, and rent them for cheap. Or if they don't, squatters move in and just start living in the abandoned buildings for free.

Ironically, this is the one outcome that is bad for both the city and the developer. The developer goes bankrupt, so obviously they and the bank don't like it. The city usually has a problem collecting tax revenue from bankrupt developers, and during the transition period between when the developer goes bankrupt and when another landlord buys the property, they face problems with crime and blight. It's good for enterprising bottom-feeders and for the city's poor, but neither one of them get a seat at the table. So here's a case where the incentives are directly aligned to let the people who make the decisions profit at the expense of the people who don't make the decisions.

That's only if you do it wrong. If you offer offsets in return for inclusionary zoning, it can work quite well. If you offer no offsets whatsoever like San Francisco, though, then the cost is borne by the community, not the developers: https://www.sightline.org/2016/11/29/inclusionary-zoning-the...

I don’t really know it exactly, but AFAIK there is a cost benefit involved for the developers. So it isn’t only additional work, but helps them tax wise.

Was a few years a go since I head to deal with this. However I want to emphasize the positive effects this kind of mixed living has on the social climate. The most mixed up city I ever lived in was Vienna (also due to their munipicial flats called “Gemeindebauwohnung”) and it really creates a better climate. People seem to be less afraid of each other and more in contact across culture and class barriers, it is harder to be in a bubble.

A negative example in Europe would be Paris — there you have strong segregation between different parts of the society. I have met Parisienne art students who never have been out of the city center and have no idea how it is there (except for what they heard about it).

Those low income housing requirements are counterproductive in many ways. You end up with low and high income housing, but those policies are terrible for those in the middle. Too "rich" to qualify for low income housing, but unable to afford market rate.

That's not due to inclusionary zoning [1], that's due to the "missing middle" of housing: https://www.sightline.org/2019/02/13/who-would-live-in-missi...

[1]: https://www.sightline.org/2016/11/29/inclusionary-zoning-the...

When I said high income I meant “above a certain threshold” and that threshold is certainly also affordable for the middle class, at least over here.

In my book these requirements work quite well, the developer I talked to also didn’t complain because there are some tax benefits so he has no incentive to make the flats more expensive.

> A city should in my opinion regulate to maximize the happieness of it’s inhabitants

Putting rich and poor people together maximize happiness?

Putting all poor people together certainly doesn’t.

Yes, it does. At least in my experience. The cities I lived in which had more mixup were certainly the ones with a better social climate, people talking with each other, helping each other, taking note of each other’s sorrows and doing sth. about it. On the other hand in a segregated city you have districts who get estranged of each other, or outright hate each other. The rich ones never leave their part of town because they are afraid and heard all kind of stories about these districts. And the poor ones go to work in a distric were people don’t even know they exists.

I wouldn't say it maximises happiness but it does serve to mitigate ghettoisation. In the UK they've done a good job of this, you'll often see council housing mixed into upmarket areas. Also all newly built developments are required by law to have 20% allocated as "affordable" and social housing.

I realize this is a tired trope, but I firmly believe it:

If California got rid of prop 13 and allowed by-right zoning, market forces absolutely would build what we want.

Market forces build things like Uber. Are we actually going to get public transit this way? I really doubt it.

No. Regulations have completely prevented anyone from ever building more public transit. One company, all they did was try to get a few more buses on the road, and they were shut down very swiftly.

Almost certainly that's completely unrelated to zoning and prop 13. I'm not saying all regulation is good but you can't just deregulate randomly and hope for a good outcome.

I mean...there already are private shuttles and buses throughout LA. Tour buses are a tourist staple and I can't imagine there's much regulation there. I can only assume the particular bus you're talking about broke some law that I most likely don't mind is in place.

Google's employee shuttles/buses are a decent example too.

yes. Imagine public shuttles using uber based technology. So the shuttles come pick you up and drop you off at your destination.

They can do transfers to other shuttles or other public transit on fixed routes to optimize the routes.

The govt would never come up with rideshare type algorithms.

https://crosscut.com/2019/08/seattles-microtransit-experimen...

Maybe just an exception to the rule, but still worth pointing out.

And none of that needs a change in regulations. That could all happen now save for those exact market forces. Haven't you just described Uber pool which already exists? Assuming our prayers will be answered by just deregulating things is silly.

Yeah because the single largest logistics system in the world knows nothing about transportation. You free market only people really are blind to reality. The US government is the single best move of people and goods on the planet. We literally run our military on logistics. Show me any real private industry that runs their transportation as efficiently as a government one with the limited resources and requirements for service that public does. You know how the private market makes money? They cut out the poor people and inefficient routes which public industry can't do because their mission is to actual serve the community instead of shareholders.

Who needs ride sharing if you have good public transport?

You go the far distance to a hub which has lots of parking space and switch to subway, tram, bus or foot traffic, or bikes, or the hip electric scooter. And disadvantaged or disabled people get better accessibility. Pity it is hard to retrofit into misdesigned cities.

See EU and how Uber is not making millions here. And taxis are relatively expensive.

Also check South Korea and how relatively cheap normal unsubsidized taxis essentially prevented Uber from getting a foothold...

It does not compete with owned cars at all.

Agree completely. Houston doesn’t have zoning. Houston also doesn’t have a housing affordability crisis. Houston also doesn’t have high developer fees or low income housing mandates. Houston also has a lot of parking. Weird. A city doing almost the exact opposite of what many “housing advocates” prescribe and they don’t have a housing problem.

Houston is also not squeezed at all geographically except for to the south-east by the Gulf. San Francisco on the other hand is constrained on 3 sides by water. Expanding across the Bay is possible but expensive because you have to provide bridges for all the people to get back into jobs in the city otherwise it's not SF housing it's just Oakland housing.

Houston is squeezed in geographically by flood plains and marshes - which developers merrily ignored and developed on. When a hurricane hit, surprise of all surprises, a bunch of houses in these areas were flooded. Thankfully a lack of regulations managed to not solve any traffic or density issues while all also making the city more vulnerable to disasters.

They /should/ have been squeezed, but flood plains and marshes aren't hard barriers to building like water (though you can do reclamation but that's also pretty expensive). They're places you shouldn't (or should be very careful about about) build in but they're not places you can't build in period.

Houston has parking minimums and other car-favored building regulations.

Houston is also the most egregious case of rampant urban sprawl on the planet.

You can't compare Texas with literally acres of open space surrounding their cities to real states with actual population densities. Texas literally brags about how big they are and how much land they have. Come talk to me when Texas has less than 20% of it's population as cows unlike the 40% it's at now.

Houston doesn't have official zoning. It does have land use regulations, including off-street parking mandates, which act like de facto zoning.

https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...

> Here’s the doozy: Houston mandates off-street parking for just about every form of development. This is probably the number one regulation holding back the city’s rapid densification and a major reason that car-dependence remains the norm. By requiring developers to build either parking deserts and garages, this policy encourages developers to bypass exciting infill and downtown opportunities in favor of developing in the suburbs where land is cheap.

Low income housing is the wrong solution to a simple problem. Zoning laws introduce too many restrictions to keep the market from running efficiently. This is why you see "housing crises" everywhere in the world right now. If the market could solve the problem, it would. The market can't solve it, so the problem persists and aristocrats get to keep watching their land values skyrocket and rent-seek another day.

Zoning isn't a cure-all. Housing is getting pretty expensive in Houston, one of the only large US cities with lax-to-non-existent zoning laws (and also high property taxes). Also, I think most people want some restrictions on what can be built where. I don't think many parents want strip clubs built next to preschools, and I don't think many people want a cement factory to be built across the street from a public park.

I also don't think many people want the zoning laws we have either. They just want to see their land value increase as fast as possible, but that's not really sustainable either.

I thought we might reach a tipping point as we reach a majority renter population. But Europe has been a majority renter society for a long time, and I would argue Europe's housing (to buy) is more unaffordable than US housing. Strangely, the price to earning on real estate makes 0 sense in Europe (even with respect to interest rates), and renting is somehow much more affordable in Europe (even though buying isn't).

> "Build more housing" is probably the answer to the homeless problem, but X needs to be fixed first.

There is always an X to be fixed first, and housing is never built.

Housing is built all the time, to serve the needs of the market it's built to serve.

Housing development is winding down in many places.

> From 2010 to 2015, San Mateo County added 72,800 jobs but only 3,844 homes: that's 19 jobs for every home

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-pe...

That's low enough that, as far as the market is concerned, it's effectively stopped.

Bring back street cars. Then not only will there be public transportation for everyone, there won’t be room for the cars anyway

Come to Toronto - they never left! (and have their own set of problems)

There was a cool documentary about the Toronto trolley and other cities trolley systems.

http://www.stephenlow.com/project/the-trolley/

Street cars lose against cars on the open road. I think they end up performing best on otherwise pedestrianized streets - assuming good attention is paid to safety design.

Why not keep the minimums and use the boring company to dig parking belowground? :)

Build all parking spaces underground and ban parking lots.

Absolutely this fetish for getting rid off street parking will just lead to third world traffic jams.

BTW I am a non car driver here

Seems like an inability to store private vehicles for free on public property would reduce cars and traffic.

Street parking doesn't need to be free.

It’s not ‘free’ it’s paid for by property taxes. Just because in certain areas it’s not worth it to actually enforce permits doesn’t mean the city won’t at the request of the homeowners or businesses.

Free here means free at point of use. I pay property taxes and don't own a car. You pay property taxes and do park a car. We both pay the same toward parking, therefore it makes sense to say parking is free.

Without alternatives it will simply reduce commerce in that area which, sure, will reduce traffic.

When these suggestions are made HN seems to forget people still need to live the time between when this pain is enforced and if/when a solution arises.

"Third world" traffic jams are what you get when you have enough population density. And for that, you don't have to go to this "third world" you speak of, look at NY.

While I don't agree with the GP, traffic in NYC is nothing like what it is describing (i.e., significantly better than the "third world").

I am not making a direct comparison. I am using NYC as a case for how population density affects traffic. That does not have much to do with a place being "third world". He/She could as well make points about better infrastructure instead of disparaging places as "third world" countries. The notion of bucketing countries is derogatory, and does not add to the argument.

And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world"

> I am not making a direct comparison. I am using NYC as a case for how population density affects traffic.

Yes, you are. You said:

> "Third world" traffic jams are what you get when you have enough population density.

then proceeded to throw out NYC as a non-"third world" example.

> He/She could as well make points about better infrastructure instead of disparaging places as "third world" countries. The notion of bucketing countries is derogatory, and does not add to the argument.

> And just to make my point further, OP's other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810496 makes it pretty clear they have every intention to stereotype countries as "third world"

Yes, it could have, and the use of "third world" as shorthand for "lacking proper transportation infrastructure" was unnecessary and somewhat derogatory. However, your initial response doesn't address that. It just puts the cause of traffic jams as population density, then compares NYC's density (and, implicitly, traffic), to the places being referenced.

I am not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that a lack of street parking is what causes traffic jams rather than a lack of sane traffic infrastructure or public transportation. But, it doesn't make sense from first principles, at least. Could you explain how you came to that conclusion?