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Comment by marcusverus | Hacker News Reader

>While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it does mandate a minimum amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes.

This is an absolute necessity in Houston. It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.

Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful externalities for everyone on the vicinity, in a more pronounced way than any similarly sized US city.

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If your apartment building will not be attractive without two dedicated parking spots per bedroom, the government doesn’t have to say a thing: A builder will not want to make an unprofitable building with insufficient parking.

The trick here is that many of the rules are designed for maximum possible need, leading to a sea of lots that are never actually full. It’s silly to build all strip mallS with parking lots that will be comfortable in Black Friday if every store has a major holiday sales bias.

Building too much parking also has painful externalities, as walking, even from store to store, becomes problematic, and maintenance for those oversized lots is not free. It’s just that those externalities are legislated in as the status quo, so they are invisible unless you look somewhere else.

I'm from the UK, and have been to Houston several times for work. I can't think of Houston as a "city" - it has a small "downtown" area with some high-rise buildings, and a huge sprawl of strip malls, clusters of houses and disconnected gaited communities. As a European, it's very odd.

Developers are not dumb, they can figure out what kind of parking is needed for their building without the power of law.

> It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more you prioritize car use with requirements for large garages, large surface lots, and large, wide, high speed roads, the more you make transit and walking slower and less effective, and the more you drive people into cars.

Houston has very high parking requirements that are actually even higher than what you are describing; even for "micro-apartments", an apartment size characterized by ~2-300 sq ft total space that could probably only fit one person comfortably, the Houston code requires more than one parking space per unit. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/Req...

One market-based hint that the parking requirements are too high in most cities is that developers nearly always only build the minimum; if more was required you'd expect more people to go and above minimum requirements.

> Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful externalities for everyone on the vicinity,

Turning that around: a lack of public transport options creates painful externalities on new construction (mandatory large parking lots) and the city (must put in multiplane roads for every new block).

That is also the cause of the lack of good public transportation. You can't have good public transportation when there is so much space dedicated to parking

It's pretty hard to do good public transportation in a place like Houston. I've had forty-mile commutes in the past, and once you get that far out, you get that nasty superlinear expansion of area covered. The closest Houston could ever get is park-and-ride, i.e. re-locating the sea of asphalt, because buses are too dang slow. Not to mention walking is absolute misery due to weather from May to September.

What the parent comment is saying doesn't disagree with this statement, but rather that this is self-inflicted by the chicken-and-egg nature of "we need more parking". The requirement for parking is what causes Houston to consider 40+ mile commutes normal, because the need for parking physically pushes uses further away from each other, making transit and walking less attractive, driving people into cars, and thus requiring ever more parking.

Forget about the distant places, Houston has a few dense places where transit can get decent ridership. Get rid of parking minimums and developers can turn some parking lots into a building increasing density and in turn making transit work better. Focus where you can win, let the rest be. Even if the city grows faster than the transport network, transit is still winning. Slow and steady can win this race of the time span of decades.

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