If parking requirements are crowding out useful land-use and there's simultaneously too little parking then the root problem is car-oriented urban planning, and too little public transit.
I think few people would argue against allowing developers to build as much parking as they want - but I think many would be surprised to find that developers in urban areas don't generally want to build as much parking as is mandated by the zoning requirements, since they assess that many people don't arrive in cars, so the benefit parking provides is less than the cost of it.
To answer my own question, I think the externalities of insufficient parking space is something government could address. Like by allowing much stricter enforcement of parking prohibitions. Or just outright not allowing street side parking. Like governments don’t typically provide free houses to people, why should they give free house to personal vehicles? Why should my take dollars go to pay for storage of other people’s personal al property?
Isn't the clear implication you shouldn't own a car?
Similar story with my home towns community college, where they had a habit of building new buildings on what used to be parking lots but refused for years to build new lots and when asked by the student counsel to build a parking structure the college president refused to consider it. I suspect if he hadn't had a had a reserved parking spot less the 30 yards from his office door his tune might have been different.
if you stop right there, your statement is far more credible
Alternatively, Paris solved this problem by closing the nearby streets to cars, so the students can safely walk to school.
Double school bus spending, ban parental pickup or drop off, organize walking school buses for closer kids, give out free child transit passes... poof! The morning and afternoon traffic jams go away.
Have you never attended a school board meeting? Even if you had a hundred times more influence in this world and spent the rest of your life focused solely on this goal, I wouldn’t wager higher than 50/50 odds for actually implementing this in the typical school district, for more than a few weeks.
Your children will get a better education, in far fewer hours, without the commute, without suffering under the prison bitch culture of the public school social heirarchy.
If your child is even just slightly neuroatypical, sending them to public school is child abuse, and you are a bad person, full stop.
You are no different from the guy who drinks a fifth of whiskey and beats the shit out of his kids - you're just keeping your hands clean by outsourcing the beatings to the kids on the playground.
If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school.
I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was consistently the highlight of my day!
Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood, we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to school, understandably so.
But as a result of land use regulations.
Historically it has been common for a family-owned business to have a shop on the first floor and living space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then we prohibit this through land use and make everything worse.
Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I am curious on how common it truly was?
Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I agree with that. I am less open to believing that large percentages of families lived the way you are describing. Do you have numbers on it?
But the problem we have right now is that real estate costs are high, so many people would be willing to take the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who don't, by reducing duplication and effectively increasing supply.
"Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a trade off against something else. And even then there is no justification to prohibit it, because there is no need to prohibit someone from doing something they wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
And this is all begging the question that real estate costs are the reason for the child care costs. Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
As I don't think I've said it in this thread, I want to be clear that this is all very appealing to my sensibilities. I want to think a reliance on cars is a huge problem in our towns. I want to think that we can do better. I'm not sold by the case that is being made here, though. And it makes me sad to see shoddy reasoning used to prop up things I want to be the case.
Edit: And I'd still want to see numbers on how often people "lived upstairs" of their job. Unless you count "their job" as making their own clothing, which was rather common, I don't think the numbers work for it. Yes, you had some specific jobs that this happened for, smithing and the like; but many jobs have been service oriented for a long time. Such that this just wasn't a "common" as in "most people do it." It was "common" in "most people that owned a shop lived there." This can feel the same, but it is very different; as most people did not own a shop.
That's how they're used, but that doesn't mean that's optimal or that doing otherwise is "pointless". For example, a high school campus is typically suitable for any kind of school, and using the same building to hold college night classes would hardly be pointless.
> Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
Only if those costs are unrelated. You could lower staffing costs significantly by, for example, offering on-site living quarters for staff, but not if that's prohibited. Likewise, land use rules can constrain where you can put the facility, which in turn affects how much you have to pay staff, who may then have a longer commute and refuse the job unless you pay more.
> many jobs have been service oriented for a long time.
It's not obvious what that has to do with it. A nail salon, barber shop, veterinarian, etc. are all service jobs, but they're also all small business where the owner/family could benefit from living on the same property as the business.
I think the efforts to lower costs by being creative is worthwhile. I am personally skeptical of many initial ideas, but that is no reason not to explore them. And you are right that many of these things almost certainly interplay with each other. But, the more expensive the housing and general land use is in an area, the harder all of these tradeoffs will become.
Regarding the service jobs, many older service jobs were traveling services. You can't go to a roofer's to get your roof fixed. Nor did you historically go to the doctor's office. Since delivery vehicles were rather costly and large, it wasn't uncommon for most people to not go and buy things on the regular. Certainly you didn't load up the equivalent of a car's worth of groceries to bring home. Indeed, the milkman was a job. None of those services would have had you living where you work, as it were. And labor jobs, which were also very common, were definitely not performed at home. So, again, I'd be interested in the numbers.
Plus this way we don’t subsidize those who drive at the expense of those who don’t.
Busses.
The high school had a giant parking lot but it was completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist for permits.
Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that would get swamped with people parking all over the street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common.
Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note, I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the street like crazy.
In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe) many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop off and pickup hours.
I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school. It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's better for the children.
Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart and larger than public schools, but not by a very much. They are not totally independent though (no schools are, even the really private ones that don't receive any subsidies, like the French school around here, they still have to teach mostly the same things as the others).
The teachers at his daycare were paid about 30% of the living wage required to live in our town. They were all driving from at least an hour away for the opportunity to earn a non living wage. There is no way I could reasonably expect any of them to be concerned with my child’s well being when they could even afford their own lives.
There is zero evidence any city in America is even close to this point. We're still on the beneficial end of densification: marginal increases in density improve outcomes on practically every metric.
I'd like you to meet my neighbors (both above and below) from the last time I was unfortunate enough to have to live in an apartment.
Zero evidence noise pollution is an unavoidable consequence of density. Plenty of New York apartments have better acoustic isolation than the average suburban dwelling. (If anything, as buildings get higher the problem gets simpler.)
Case in point: the densest parts of Manhattan don't smell. (Minus trash days.) Neither do Paris, Tokyo or Seoul.
Hint: It did smell. Every spring and a few other times each summer.