Federal Zoning Bill Would Preempt Local Parking Mandates
reason.com
reason.com
Relevant to people commenting without reading. The idea here is to nudge cities away from car-dependence, and parking minimums are one of the worst culprits for embedding car dependence.
"A similar story has played out in Buffalo, New York, and in Seattle, Washington. Most new homes being built in both cities would have been illegal under their old, pre-reform rules."
One good way to increase housing supply is to make it not-illegal to build homes. This is great!
If you want to learn more about how parking minimums affect cities and towns, and the people living in them (or not living in them since it relates to housing), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking is a great read.
If we're going to start doing zoning codes on the federal level how about outlawing single family zoning? There's absolutely no reason one shouldn't be able to build up to a quad on any piece of land.
Ideally I could just buy one of the nearby undeveloped lots and use that for any additional parking needs. Except, the zoning and the lot restrictions prohibit that.
People will cling to NIMBYism til their last dying breath.
People still need a car in Seattle and building expensive luxury apartments without sufficient parking spaces for the residents just seems like a way to off-load the costs of the developers onto the surrounding neighborhoods. The apartments aren't any more affordable from what I could tell.
People don't necessarily need cars in NYC, Chicago, DC, SF, etc because a majority of the housing in those places was built before car oriented zoning became the norm in basically every major city. We have to start rolling that back, it's insane policy.
The problem is you just can't build public transit infra like the NYC subways these days. The costs have become astronomical.
The areas of Seattle where it’s difficult to park (like Capitol Hill and First Hill) also have a lot of older buildings. But brand new high rise and mid rise buildings typically have plenty of room for resident parking — it just costs like $200-$400/mo depending where you are. And often not available to guests.
Amazon buildings have lots of parking too, and it’s available for public use at times as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... is a fantastic thread discussing just how expensive it is to add parking to condos, and how it results in fewer homes getting built.
If that's the goal then this is exactly the wrong way to achieve it.
What you do instead is you start with a decent transport network and people gradually give up cars - most superfluous cars are second and third vehicles in the family and are there because there's no alternative.
If every household had just one car, the ownership rate would be less than 500 per 1000 people.
Personal anecdote: there's a town next to a hill about 30km from my place where I used to drive regularly - used to, because just 1.5km from my apartment there's now a train stop and a recently reopened line that goes every 1.5h.
Point-to-point the trip takes roughly as long, the tickets cost twice what I would spend on fuel to get there and you have to be punctual but I still pick the train because it's a nicer experience.
If someone tried to "nudge" people from driving there by reducing the number of parking spots, people would just not go there.
Bottom line is if you want to solve problems, solve them - not make them someone else's problems.
That said, this zoning bill seems constitutional, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35875405
Explain this. Feds aren't taking money from states, the federal income tax for example is in addition to state tax (if any). There is no federal sales tax.
Any serious consideration of the sovereign state died in the civil war (Texas constiution included).
So? That support is guaranteed to them by the constitution, and is the justification for federal taxes. Still taking the taxes, but discriminating how they distribute them based on constitutionally-protected state activity, is illegitimate and counter to the spirit (and I believe letter) of the constitution.
It's like an employer withholding part of your wage because he doesn't like your conduct outside of work, despite your contract not placing any limits on that behavior. And when you complain, he replies with "well you couldn't earn this much money on your own".
Or perhaps a better example is being denied Medicaid or police protection, because of some otherwise legal conduct.
When the federal government gets two-thirds of all tax revenue and use it as a cudgel to circumvent its prescribed limits, it's a mandate. "States can refuse the mandate and the money" is possible only when state and federal tax receipts are at similar levels.
"An originalist understanding of the Constitution would consider parking mandates a taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause protections, incorporated against state and local governments by the 14th Amendment. Congress would therefore be empowered to pass legislation to protect individuals' rights from these parking mandates."
It seems internally inconsistent to apply originalism to parking at all in the sense that there is no original thought on cars at the time of the drafting of the constitution simply because cars had not been invented yet.
See Bruen where a lack of laws regulating guns indicates public carry is a right rooted in historical tradition vs. Dobbs where a lack of laws regulating abortion before quickening does not. [1]
The conservative legal movement has turned constitutional interpretation into a shell game where choice of framing and selective use of historical examples can yield whatever result the justices already want.
All of that said, the argument is that parking minimums constitute a restriction on your property rights for public use without compensation and a similar argument could be made with things that did exist at the time such as carriages. Again see Bruen where Thomas "refutes" a weapon ban by arguing handguns are more analogous to daggers than to lances.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4187143
There is no taking, because the restriction is already voluntary, and in consideration of mutual benefit of like-zoned neighboring property being similarly restricted.
It's obviously evolved into something else, especially as seen by the public, but that philosophy remains the legal foundation for it.
Even if zoning changes require approval, only the property owner can determine the original zone, and only he can request changes.
Buying zoned property, knowing the extant restrictions, is essentially opting-in "voluntarily". It's the same reasoning for why "grandfather" exemptions exist (no original consent).
What this federal argument is actually for, possibly without realizing it, is a method/mechanism for contractural/ municipal/ jurisdictional succession and/or nullification.
Those are the terms that need to be thought of in context of this discussion.
I have no idea where you live, but I assure you that in many places the authority have jurisdiction can in fact just change the zoning of property you already own.
Local control of zoning leads to weird incentives where multiple bordering municipalities in the same metro area both want the other ones to upzone, bring in more people and business (lifting up the whole metro area) while they themselves stay downzoned. The result of this game of chicken is that nobody upzones.
CA and WA have had some recent wins with state-level zoning reform. It's unclear to me that it's needed at the Federal level -- state level seems like it should be enough in almost all cases.
This is also true in other countries. When a city grows everybody agrees that we need to expand the city and build new city districts. But it's always the other neighbouring municipalities who is better suited.
Dense places do not have the tools to correct the problem themselves due to the coordination problems mentioned in the parent comment. It's a pure game theory situation where nobody wants to act first.
One could imagine a more targeted law that only applied to municipalities within X distance of a Y population density municipality, so you try to sharp-shoot the satellite suburbs that want the benefits of big-city density without the costs. But such targeted laws are also pretty hard to get right.
Nobody wanting to act first doesn't mean they can't correct the problem. It means they don't. The federal government doesn't need to be involved in this.
It's too early to call this a win. In my personal experience, giving decision making power to those without intimate knowledge of an area generally leads to poor results. There is a total mismatch incentives. Local residents are heavily invested in their town and want to keep it nice. Non-local officials, however, have no ties to the community and are willing to damage communities to meet some political objectives. Two personal examples:
1. The state government constructed a bridge over a small creek by my condo on the outskirts of NYC. They performed a traffic study saying this would have no impact on traffic, but locals knew this to be a lie and no one wanted this completed. When there's no traffic, this bridge saves you 5 minutes from driving to the next crossing. Now that this crossing has been completed, it's basically become an additional lane of the highway during rush hour. It's extremely dangerous to walk around as frustrated motorists speed through red lights. If you need to run an errand with your car in the morning, you need to leave at least an hour for a trip that used to take 15 minutes.
2. In the town I live now, there are certain roads maintained by the county. You can tell which ones are which because crossing the county roads as a pedestrian is extremely dangerous. Multiple kids have been hit by cars this year. The county doesn't care and the town is powerless to change the county roads.
I really believe that it's important that locals have the power to influence their environment that impacts their day-to-day life.
Also, I hate how every issue in the U.S. is framed in a way that conveniently leaves out the capitalist class. Like yea, our housing issues are definitely caused by those damn NIMBYs who like their homes, not the investor class who owns 50 million housing units and are heavily subsidized by the federal government.
That's not really true. The various states are (and always have been) unitary states from a political governance perspective. As expressed in modern jurisprudence, the majority of states are Dillon Rule states: states where local governments are purely creatures of the state government, and whose powers (or even existence) can be expanded or abrogated at the sole pleasure of the state.
> and the federal government exists solely to pass laws that affect the entire country, about matters that the states can't handle themselves the way they want, and it's supposed to still be kept as minimal/small as possible.
This is somewhat more true, but it's still a pretty poor reflection. Recall that the US Constitution was not the first form of government the US had: it was a response to the issues with the Articles of Confederation, which had the "federal" government as much, much weaker. It's not even fair to call the US a federal government at that point; the notion of a federal state--two levels of government, each with their own, independent locus of power not derived from the pleasure of the other--was more or less created from scratch for the Constitution.
The Constitution does limit the powers of the federal government to, broadly speaking, two areas, with a third later being developed via amendments. These are international affairs (both in treaty making and military developments) and commercial regulation, with enforcement of civil rights later coming into play. Now, it's the case that things like the EPA or FDA aren't mentioned by the Constitution, but that kind of regulatory authority just didn't exist when it was written, and the existing grants of commercial regulation strongly suggest that it is intended for the federal government to have that regulatory authority to provide a single, integrated market among the several states of the union.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...
And the thing is, things still functions quite well. I'd argue that draconian parking restrictions are as much as a problem as lack of parking lots.
Did you read the article? This would only apply to a very small subset of buildings, and is itself designed to be a method to dissuade car ownership among the small slice of the population that is best positioned to adapt to it.
If people want cars, there are still ~82 million SFH existing housing units (+ whatever comes online over time) where that dream can be realized. That's not to say you can't still love your car, policy simply wouldn't cater to it.
Tangentially, think in systems.
[1] https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/average-monthly-ca...
[3] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2023/04/07/car-free-cities/
One of the things that amazes me about Tokyo is how many cars there are. For being the best public transportation system in the world.. people still have cars. To the point of installing parking lifts in their (tiny) homes!
If you can't convince even the Japanese to give up cars, your cause is lost. The best we seem to be able to do is to convince them to drive smaller K cars.
> and attracting productive members of society there
I agree that suddenly things are easier if you can exclude the poor, homeless, handicapped and so on. Unfortunately that's illegal, immoral and impractical.
> That's earned income that can go towards more productive uses for citizens (who choose to live a car free experience).
Except people overwhelming DO choose cars. This isn't because they've been hoodwinked into it.
> If people want cars, there are still ~82 million SFH existing housing units (+ whatever comes online over time) where that dream can be realized.
And those businesses who fail to provide parking will not attract customers. Apartments without parking will have trouble finding renters (or those renters will park nearby on roads or in parking lots).
People are not cattle. You can't just tweak their pen until they do what you want. They will dissassemble and modify it to accomodate their needs.
Tokyo has a similar number of cars per capita to NYC (~450) - which is still almost 50% less than the U.S. average (~830). The size of the cars also makes an enormous difference to safety (pedestrian and driver) as well as environmental and road maintenance costs.
> Except people overwhelming DO choose cars. This isn't because they've been hoodwinked into it.
From my perspective it's not "hoodwinked" so much as 70 years of car dependent infrastructure development and car companies practicing capitalism. Most Americans don't think twice about it. Maybe we would if we had a viable alternative... Ironically, developing for cars was supposed to make us more free, but now it's the only option in most of the US.
Notjustbikes has an interesting video about car size in America - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo TLDR: they're getting bigger, more expensive, and less safe, with little extra utility.
And Cuba has cars because...? Every country where people can afford cars, they buy them. If they can't afford them, they make a car they can afford.
Parent brought up people spending $700/mo to own a car. You can get a car much cheaper. Why do people buy nice cars? The person who hates mowing their lawn doesn't buy a fancy lawnmower. People buy nice cars because they like nice cars and want nice cars.
Personal vehicles solve a lot of problems that public transportation doesn't. If you only view cars as a way from point A to point B, you won't ever understand why cars are so critically important, desired and fought for.
If your entire city is designed for cars, and there are some buses that sit in traffic with everyone else, I'm not surprised that people buy cars. It doesn't mean that's what they want - it's just the only option.
In the end I think viable alternatives should be available. I think it's stupid to drive 15 miles into a city on the same 8 lane highway as everyone when 1 or 2 train tracks could meet the same demand and function (and a streetcar/subway/walk for the rest of the journey).
I do not think cars shouldn't exist. I think they're completely necessary for tons of people at the moment, but I think we should invest in other options that are working extremely well in other places.
They can't.
You are treating cars as a way to get from point A to point B. Trains and buses are ways to do that. If cars were just a way to go from your home to downtown, you can in fact replace them with a train.
Yet if you build even very nice, very expensive trains that run frequently.. a bunch of people will still use cars. The train does not replace the car.
A car is both a set of abstract things (freedom, status, privacy) and practical things (storage, functional space, a moddable thing).
Build all the trains you want. Have high quality protected cyclist lanes. Have functional bus programs.
None of those things will replace personal vehicles.
Unless you mean in an abstract sense, They do, and they have. By replacement I mean "if there were a train to get me to work, I would take it instead of driving". I don't feel as free or private in a train, but I am using one instead of a car, and I would call that a replacement.
I am treating cars as a way to get from point A to point B because this is what they are to most people, and it's exactly why many people would and do use viable alternatives as a replacement: because getting from point A to point B is a more valuable function in many cases than freedom, status, privacy, storage, functional space, and mods. Europeans do not have 830 cars per capita because they have other methods of transportation that are a replacement for cars. I feel like this goes without saying, but just because a car is more private than a train etc does not mean trains shouldn't exist, which has essentially been the development ideology in America for the past 70 years, and what I'm arguing should change.
Walkable cities and natural density curves have been around for 1000s of years, if anything car-centric society is the tweak not the other way around. This form of urban development (including cars) currently exists throughout Europe and is by most measures very successful so I'm not sure why people feel the need to consternate about it as if its never been tried.
This is like the most ridiculous example of unaffordability you could have cooked up. When I was young and poor, I bought a used 17-year old honda accord for $1000 and drove it around for nearly a decade. It worked fine. So yeah, a $700 car payment would have been absurd, but... I never subjected myself to that artificial constraint.
I don’t think any private developers are going to start throwing up commie blocks anytime soon.
Someone has to step in as the adult in the room and do what would be the right policy for the society level, even if it's unpopular or more accurately unviable and politically challenging to implement at an extremely local level. A state or Federal government is exactly the agent who should be doing that.