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The Parking Minute

A minute of parking news and commentary

Tony Jordan

Parking Over Preschool

June 1, 2021 By Tony Jordan 2 Comments

The largest preschool in Portland, OR is getting evicted and it is ultimately because the school’s landlord, a church, prefers cars parking over kids playing.

Childswork Learning Center has steadily improved this parking lot into a wonderful playground.

In late 2018 a neighbor filed a complaint with the City of Portland saying the “church opens parking lot on Sundays but [Childswork] school does not and forces people to take up neighborhood street parking.” This complaint started a process that could easily have ended with happy kids on a playground for years to come, but because of America’s car dependency and the tax-exempt status of Churches in the USA, the preschool has to move.

St. Stephen Catholic Church opened in the Sunnyside Neighborhood in 1924. In 1957, plans were approved for St. Stephen’s School. At its peak enrollment, the school had around 400 students. Sometime in the early 2000s the elementary school closed and in 2005 Childswork Learning Center took over the facility.

Aerial photograph of St. Stephen School in 2004, with approximately 80 striped parking stalls.

When Childswork moved in, there was a patch of playground set amidst approximately 80 striped car storage stalls. Over the years, the preschool expanded the playground, covering about 30 parking stalls with bark chips, play structures, and happy children. The rest of the parking lot was sometimes used for cars, overflow parking for church events and neighborhood cleanups, but the primary use was a place for preschoolers to play and learn.

Aerial photograph of Childswork Learning Center in 2016 with much of the parking lot turned into a playground.

The 1956 permit for the school required that “one off-street parking space shall be provided for every 12 seats in any assembly hall or gymnasium constructed on the site.” There doesn’t seem to be a record of how many parking spaces were constructed initially, but after the city investigated the complaint, they told the Church a new conditional use permit was needed because changing the approved amount of parking spaces by more than 10 percent requires it. Though it wasn’t entirely clear how many spaces were “lost” to the playground, it was clearly more than 10 percent of the previously-approved situation.

Parking requirements in the 1956 permit for the St. Stephen School.

The church and school had a few options here. One option would be to completely remove the playground and make the surface parking available during business hours for the customers and employees of the preschool. Not only would this have greatly degraded the experience for the students, but the street next to the playground is a neighborhood greenway, a street designated for low stress trips by pedestrians and people on bikes. Adding pick-up and drop-off traffic to that street would create conflicts for bike commuters and having people able to drive onto the campus would make it unsafe to use the entire paved area for recess.

Another option would be to get the city to allow less parking. As part of a conditional use permit, a consultant can show fewer spaces are actually necessary for the pre-school and the church, sharing the same lot. Stormwater upgrades, landscaping, and striping would be installed, fees paid, and everyone would move on. The school pursued this approach, designing a layout that kept the playground in place and upgraded the paved area to have 42 car parking spaces. The city indicated such a plan was approvable. Alas, the church backed away from the plan after they realized that agreeing to it meant they could not easily replace the playground area with parking at any time, at least without going through another land use review. Once that decision was made, the church terminated Childswork’s lease five years early, forcing them to move.

Childswork Learning Center spent its own resources to develop a site plan to keep the playground and 42 car parking stalls, the church declined to submit the proposal to the city.

It’s possible St. Stephen Catholic Church will find a new tenant to run a school out of the building. If they do, they’ll have to remove the playground and open the parking lot or go through another conditional use process. It seems likely the school will be empty for some time, but given the Catholic Church doesn’t have to pay property taxes, there is little disincentive to bank the land.

An attorney for St. Stephens told the Willamette Week that “[t]he parish has other plans for the space more directly connected to its core ministry.” One can only assume this purpose would be to store the cars of some new wellspring of parishioners, but the number of Americans strongly identifying as Catholic has been on the decline for decades. Regular attendance at Catholic Mass has been in even steeper decline, particularly among younger people. Portland is, perhaps, the least religious city in the United States.

This wasn’t a typical parking battle. Often angry neighbors can push a city to force a business or builder to give more space to car storage. For many years, Portland has been heading in the opposite direction. Around the same time the complaint was being reviewed, another business in Portland appealed a denial of a conditional use permit with less parking to City Hall, and won. It is very likely the school could have demonstrated a need for zero off-street parking spaces, but the church would have lost the right to park cars on a playground.

Last year, Multnomah County voters approved taxes to provide universal preschool to children in the county. The city needs more preschools and fewer church parking lots.

Want to help make the world a better place and prevent this type of scenario? Join the Parking Reform Network!

Filed Under: News

Why cities should cut parking meter rates.

March 26, 2020 By Tony Jordan 1 Comment

Performance-based parking goes both ways, let your city’s first adjustment be a rate decrease.

Demand for central city parking is, most likely, at all-time lows in many cities due to COVID-19 concerns and stay-at-home orders. It’s too soon to tell how long this disruption will last, but if no one is going downtown, should cities be charging current rates for on-street parking?

Performance-based parking management means charging the right price based on demand. Cities that have been waffling on implementing performance-based parking policies because raising rates is unpopular should take advantage of the situation now and LOWER rates first, but only if they have a policy in place to increase them once demand picks up.

Photo by Dean Hergert on Unsplash

As an example, Portland, Oregon passed a performance-based parking management policy almost two years ago and has yet to make their first adjustments. Given the current state of affairs it is unlikely that any increases recommended by pre-Coronavirus occupancy data would be implemented any time soon. Meanwhile, someone who drives downtown for a pickup or delivery will pay $2.00/hour to park on the empty streets. Temporarily reducing rates to $1.00 wouldn’t be to increase demand, we’re not trying to attract new customers to downtown during the pandemic, but to affirm that data-driven rate policy isn’t a money grab, it’s common sense.

Unfortunately, Portland’s performance-based policy, like that of several other cities, is not nimble enough, rates are only supposed to be adjusted once a year, up or down by a maximum of $0.60. Now would be a good time to toss those timelines and restrictions out the window. Portland has waited years to make the first adjustment, based on extensive studies. If Portland had a shorter cycle for increasing or decreasing rates, it wouldn’t matter if the adjustment in one zone was off a little, it would get corrected easily. The benefit of quicker iteration is you don’t have to get it perfect the first time.

So cities should probably cut their rates now, all the data they need is to look out the window. If they have a performance-based policy already, they should adjust it to ensure that rates don’t stay low for a year, check in every month for a while! If a city doesn’t have a data-driven rate setting plan, they should set an end date for the rate cut (say 60 days) and get to work passing a dynamic pricing policy.

One more thing, dynamic pricing has been done in a number of cities already. There’s several flavors to choose from. Don’t waste time and money re-inventing the wheel. It’s more like ECON101 than rocket science. Just put it on the books, give people price relief now, and start turning your parking spaces into bus-only lanes.

Filed Under: COVID, Curb Space, Performance Based Management

Portland takes one more step toward zero parking requirements

March 2, 2020 By Tony Jordan 1 Comment

As of March 1st, every new high-density residential project in Portland has a path to ZERO parking requirements and the low-density requirements are on their last legs.

Portland’s parking requirement situation is a bit more complicated than other cities claiming to have no parking requirements. Near transit, defined as within 500 feet of frequent service bus lines or 1500 feet of a light rail station, zero parking has been required for buildings with 30 or fewer homes since 2013. Since 2017, remaining requirements were waived for larger projects near transit if they contained inclusionary affordable housing (IH) and IH is mandatory for projects with 20+ homes, setting the effective ratio for parking near transit at zero.

Parking lot with two cars

But for projects 501+ feet from a frequent service bus line, parking requirements remained. In mid-December, Portland City Council approved the Better Housing by Design project, which adopted form-based codes for multi-family residential zones. The proposal called for cutting remaining requirements in half, new apartment buildings that were deemed too far from transit would only have to build one parking space for every two homes. 

Advocates were able to organize and make the case that the transit-proximity requirement was more trouble than it was worth. Only a small percentage of multi-family or commercial zones were “too far” from transit and it was hard to defend the damage from the occasional project caught up in red tape because of it. Mayor Ted Wheeler agreed and proposed a successful amendment to waive parking requirements for any project that provides affordable housing. Every project has a path to zero parking in Portland city limits.

Sometime in April, City Council will vote on another zoning project, the Residential Infill Project (RIP). Expected to pass and go into effect in October, RIP will eliminate all parking requirements, citywide, for low-density residential zones. At that point, Portland will join the small, but growing, list of American cities with no required residential parking.

Filed Under: Parking Requirements

Developers should pay more to build parking

July 12, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Mexico City charges fees for excess parking supply and your city should too.

More car parking in our cities is an invitation for more cars and the congestion, pollution, and sprawl that those cars bring with them are a cost borne by everyone (whether they drive or not), particularly the poor and disenfranchised.

Each of these stalls is a threat to our environment.

Despite this reality, airport operators, development agencies, and many developers want to build large amounts of new structured parking, in the face of climate, housing, and traffic emergencies.

Reforms to parking requirements are becoming more common, but too often these reforms are structured as if building less parking is a bad thing for the neighborhood or city center. Developers who build little-to-no parking are required to provide bus passes, permanently affordable housing, additional street trees, or other supposed mitigations. Those are all critical things to provide, but not building parking, alone, makes housing cheaper and more abundant, fights climate change, and discourages driving to work.

When Mexico City eliminated minimum parking requirements citywide in 2017, they took things one step further and imposed a parking impact fee on developers who build lots of new parking. The city has relatively generous parking maximums (about 3 stalls per housing unit) but if a developer builds more than 1 stall per unit, they have to pay a fee:

  • For 50-75% of the maximum parking allowance, a developer pays approximately $4,000 per stall.
  • For 75-100% of the allowance, the fee is about $8,000 per stall.
  • Residential-only developments are allowed to build above the maximum, for an additional $12,000 per stall fee.

These fees are used to improve public transit in the city, but other good uses would be to fund public affordable housing or plant additional trees at developments where no parking is built.

Parking impact fees would be a smart way to discourage excess parking without restricting the freedom of developers, airports, and agencies that insist on building large amounts.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Impact Fees, Parking Maximums, Taxes

News: Car dependency, ride hailing, and the Fed hits a parking stumbling block!

July 9, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

A few months back, University of Iowa School of Law professor Greg Shill released a comprehensive paper titled “Should Law Subsidize Driving?” The paper explains, in infuriating detail, the many ways, some more obvious than others, that we;be built a society that essentially forces people to own and drive cars.

Photo of parking garage behind chain link fence.
Do cars give us freedom or just fence us in?

It’s a great work of scholarship and everyone should read it, but it’s over 90 pages long and most people aren’t in grad school! Fortunately, Professor Shill wrote a condensed version of the paper for The Atlantic and the result, ”Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It,” is a must read. Share it widely, share it often!

A Balanced View On TNCs

Uber and Lyft, often referred to as Transportation Network Carriers (TNCs) are controversial services with potentially dubious business models. But given the forced reliance on automobiles, TNCs provide options for people who can’t drive, and a way out of personal ownership for people who can.

A recent study from the University of Connecticut looked at aggregate data for TNC trips in New York City (from 2014-2107) and found “[r]ideshare trips starting in the outer boroughs have exploded, increasing to 56 percent of the market in neighborhoods that are typically home to minority and low-income households that do not own vehicles of their own.”

Professor Carol Atkinson-Palombo, the lead author, says the study may show unmet demand for transit and other services. Relying on these companies is problematic, according to Atkinson-Palombo, because “mobility is so important and you can’t be held to ransom….they’re not accountable to anybody and, at the end of the day, their remit is not to provide public transit. Their remit is to make profit.”

Sounds a lot like the pre-TNC status quo!

Ramp Halted in Minneapolis!

And now for some exciting parking news! Folks in Minneapolis have been organizing to oppose the Federal Reserve Bank’s plan to build an 800 stall parking garage (or ramp in the local parlance) on the bank of the Mississippi River. 

It sounds like the hearing was a great one, full of strange claims by the Fed and lots of good testimony and zingers. I can’t wait until it’s online. A write up by Wedge Live! tells the story with good context and details. 

In the end, the planning commission denied all the requests from the Fed. The proposal isn’t dead, but it’s certainly going back to the drawing board. 

Filed Under: Climate Change, Parking Garages, TNC

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  • Parking Over Preschool
  • Why cities should cut parking meter rates.
  • Portland takes one more step toward zero parking requirements
  • Developers should pay more to build parking
  • News: Car dependency, ride hailing, and the Fed hits a parking stumbling block!

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