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Comment by cstejerean | Hacker News Reader

I've been to visit friends in neighborhoods in Seattle where they put up apartment buildings with no parking, and what happened is street parking turned into a shit show for blocks around as people parked in fire lanes or blocked driveways.

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.

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I haven’t experienced this for new (and even old) luxury high rises in Seattle. The reason street parking is a shitshow is because private developers charge huge amounts of money for their parking garage. New high rises have huge amounts of below ground parking. 7 floors in one brand new building which comes to mind!! Like $50/night for public parking too — people are obviously going to try to find the free street parking instead.

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.

This is a great argument for making street parking more expensive - it really should cost more than the garage, since it's the most conveniently placed. A parking benefit district can capture that revenue to improve the area.

you're describing the exact chicken and egg problem that we need to take the first steps on with "people still need a car in Seattle". That's only true because Seattle forced buildings and roads to be car oriented for decades, reforms like this are meant to reverse that because the environmental costs are catastrophic.

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.

Of the places you listed NYC is arguably the only one where people truly don't need cars because the public transit is just so good. I lived in Chicago for 9 years, pretty much everyone I knew had a car. Certainly true for anyone with a family. And that's probably the next best public transit in the US after NYC for a large metro.

The problem is you just can't build public transit infra like the NYC subways these days. The costs have become astronomical.

In terms of offloading costs, the surrounding neighbourhoods are arguably offloading the cost of their free/cheap street parking on to people moving to the city.

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.

Obligatory NJB Plug: "Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

I spoke with a house finding agent today to find us a place in Utrecht this summer.

Well it doesn't work if crime is allowed. Those people are breaking the law. Why are they allowed to store their private property on public land? Can I just plop a hot tub down on the street?

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