The city council in Austin, Texas recently proposed something that could seem like political Kryptonite: getting rid of parking minimums.
Those are the rules that dictate how much off-street parking developers must provide — as in, a certain number of spaces for every apartment and business.
Around the country, cities are throwing out their own parking requirements – hoping to end up with less parking, more affordable housing, better transit, and walkable neighborhoods.
I think in some ways this will further separate the urban from the rural. Basically everyone I know works hard to avoid businesses in cities that don’t have easy parking when you have to drive in 30 miles or more to get to them. But then again, maybe for much larger cities it works, at the cost of there being different shopping and eating locations for people who live in the city within walking distance and those who need to drive. Not sure how much the “social mixing” actually helps cohesion given existing rural / urban divides, but I can see this leading to people who basically are even more in 2 completely different countries. Of course, IDK how you fix this - NYC has park and ride set up, but the vast majority of third tier cities do not, or run one bus (that no one who can possibly avoid it wants to ride) twice a day, one in and one out.
I am excited to see how these cities change in the coming decades. Hopefully this helps us get better cities!
Will the use this newfound space to make the lives of the citizens or the lives of the corporations better?
I know where my bets are, on average.
Cities are trash now, this will only make them worse because corporations are stupid. The new process will look like this:
- Buy plot of land.
- Build business without adequate parking.
- People park on the street, which will remain mysteriously legal but exacerbate the same disasters street parking already causes.
- Even with that, parking is insufficient. Business goes belly-up, causing urban blight.
- New investor goes to Step 1.
