Common Garage Parking in Practice, Part III: On-street Problems

Norwalk, Connecticut was facing parking problems. Although it had recently built a 775-car parking garage to serve its popular South Norwalk (SoNo) district, a formerly derelict collection of 19th century warehouse, commercial and factory buildings now revived as a bar, restaurant and shopping district, complaints continued to pour in from visitors and proprietors that the area lacked sufficient parking.

To a disinterested observer, these complaints might have seemed odd: the modest row of shopfronts along Washington and Wall Streets were surrounded by off-street parking and had ample on-street parking as well, and the blog Livable Norwalk confirmed that the SoNo area in fact did have an ample supply of parking in the vicinity:
 

From Livable Norwalk: public parking in blue, private in orange.

In spite of the purported lack of parking, the new garage (located a five minute walk from the heart of the area) was a target of particular ire from local restaurant owners, who complained that it was too far away for customers. Several attempts have been made to explain the lack of use of the new multi-million dollar garage in spite of persistent griping about insufficient parking, including:

• A pricing structure that would give Donald Shoup nightmares. Norwalk charges dramatically more for its garage spaces than for on-street spaces, even though the on-street spaces are scarcer and more convenient. Moreover, the city makes on-street parking free during high demand hours (after 6 p.m. for most streets), while only discounting garage parking. In response to this situation, the city recently hiked prices at its garages while leaving metered spaces unchanged.
• A poor pedestrian experience. One blogger posted videos to show the allegedly poor quality of the short walk from the garage to the center of the restaurant area, despite the fact that the garage incorporates a retail and office liner around most of its perimeter.
  
• An excessively long walk. This is the claim of SoNo merchants and visitors alike regarding the five-minute walk from the garage to Washington Street, although for certain attractions (such as the Maritime museum and a few restaurants) the garage does represent the closest parking option. On-street parking is very limited in the immediate vicinity of the garage.

All of these explanations must play some role here, but one that is unmentioned is, I think, perhaps the most important of all: the presence of on-street parking itself.  Consider the nearby Stamford Town Center, a typical enclosed mall which is reached solely by paid garage parking. A typical visitor will need to walk about three to five minutes to reach a randomly-chosen store from the garage, and possibly as many as seven minutes to reach certain parts of the anchor stores. Yet there's rarely if ever been any complaint raised, so far as I'm aware, that parking is too far from the mall's stores, that that there isn't enough of it, or that the walk through the dim garage is too unpleasant.  

Glance again at the map above, showing the commercial thoroughfare of Washington Street running east to west at the center of the frame. Occupying the entire southern half of the southern block, outlined in blue, is the 265-space Haviland Street parking deck. To the north is the 775-car Maritime Garage. Washington Street itself offers only 22 spaces, in comparison to the over 1,000 public garage spaces in close proximity, plus many hundreds more in public and private surface lots. Although these spaces only supply a tiny fraction of the total, by their conspicuousness they play an outsized role, inducing many motorists to circle the block several times in hopes of winning the parking lottery, rather than simply proceeding to one of the garages.

From a performance parking perspective, one could suggest charging for these spaces at the market-clearing rate, but taking a contextual view of Norwalk's parking policies, that may almost be beside the point. The very existence of the parking spaces, regardless of their cost, exacts a psychological toll on would-be garage parkers by making their walk seem long relative to where, in theory, they might have parked. As long as the spaces exist, garage parking will always be seen as a second-best option. At the mall, by contrast, where the option of parking in front of one's desired destination is completely unavailable, shoppers are indifferent to longer walks and seem to endure them without much complaint.

From the perspective of the merchants, often the biggest boosters of underpriced on-street parking, this apparent drawback of on-street parking is in fact seen as its very benefit. Since shoppers are believed to be tempted by abundant free parking in other shopping areas, the retention of very cheap or free and convenient parking may be seen as essential to create the illusion, for motorists, of the same commodity found in suburban shopping centers (this sentiment is captured well in this article).

That this commodity is not available to 95% of peak-hour visitors regardless of how it is priced is irrelevant, given the same factors at play (that is, the theoretical possibility of a cheap, convenient spot is presumed to carry disproportionate weight in the mind of the potential shopper: the goal is luring them in, rather than actually providing them with the commodity sought).

How to reconcile all of these competing views, which have produced a parking policy that is at war with itself, pitting alluring on-street parking against the city's own garage parking, and cheap, scarce spaces against abundant, expensive spaces – a situation hardly unique to Norwalk? Well, there are several potential options apart from adjusting the pricing structure:

• Convert the parking lane to sidewalk space. Although New Urbanists generally oppose the elimination of on-street parking, this is generally in the context of effective street widenings, in which the lane is turned over to through traffic rather than pedestrian use. Repurposing street parking for non-automobile uses (a favorite intervention of tactical urbanists, those deconstructivists of the autocentric paradigm), on the other hand, ought to be seen as a positive intervention.  Spanish cities frequently incorporate shared-space streets with through-traffic lanes, and with parking prohibited through use of trees and bollards (see at right, from Barcelona).  There is no reason such an approach could not be used on a much wider street, leaving ample room for sidewalk dining.
• Total pedestrianization. Another option frequently derided on the basis of several conspicuous failures in the 1970s, pedestrian malls have actually enjoyed tremendous success in dozens of American cities (non-American examples are too numerous to mention). Limited vehicular access for deliveries during certain hours would preserve functionality without unduly detracting from quality of life.
• Unconventional approaches to parking re-use. In a recent post, Matt Yglesias suggested that one way to deal with residents' fears of spillover parking generated by new development might be to eliminate residential parking permits and deed on-street parking spaces over the adjacent homeowners. Given that merchants would more likely than not be strongly opposed to either of the previous suggestions (but not always -- see an example of Minneapolis restaurants supporting a sidewalk expansion into street parking here), the same approach could be used in a commercial context. Establishments would be free to use the on-street space for their own parking, for some other use, or could simply sell the rights to the space to another merchant. 

In a new development, at least, one would hope that these knotty, politically divisive issues could be dealt with in a comprehensive, consistent and economically rational manner, yet at the planned Waypointe mixed-use development north of SoNo, renderings and promotional videos appear to show on-street parking despite the presence of a 1025-space parking garage (incorporated Texas doughnut-style).  Even if no such parking is actually part of the formal plan, the ample width of the carriageways implies, and will likely result, in their eventual presence.


Related posts:
Common Garage Parking, In Practice
Common Garage Parking, In Practice: Part II
 

Common Garage Parking, In Practice: Part II

An article in a recent issue of the New York Times, spotlighting Charlotte in covering the trend toward less driving among younger Americans, opened with the following paragraph:

"Dan Mauney keeps misplacing his car. Mr. Mauney, 42, lives in an apartment tower in this city’s Uptown neighborhood, a pedestrian-friendly quarter with new office buildings, sparkling museums and ambitious restaurants. He so seldom needs to drive that when he does go to retrieve his car in his building’s garage, he said, 'I always forget where I parked it.'"

Although Mauney may have little "need" to drive his car, need does not always align with behavior when it comes to transportation choice. When one's car is steps away from the front door, its use, relative to need, is likely to be high, even where other options are available. By contrast, where the car is kept in a remote storage facility, out of sight and immediate access, it is likely that use of the car more closely coincides with genuine need. In Mauney's case, that need turns out to be surprisingly low.

Mauney's building may be a high-rise, but a similar common garage parking approach has effectively been adopted among new apartment buildings of the type seen here, in an example from Dallas:

This is of course the notorious "Texas Doughnut," a mid-rise residential liner wrapped around interior structured parking.  The product of on-site parking requirements and building codes which permit cheaper wood framing for lower-rise buildings, these structures have proliferated throughout the Sunbelt, though they can be found, with less frequency, outside that geographic range. To the extent these cities are experiencing urbanization near their centers (hello, Dallas), this is the form that urbanism frequently takes, for better or worse.

Despite the prominence of the parking facilities and the transportation mode choices that suggests, note that many residents are required to walk non-trivial distances to reach their vehicles. In some cases, as in the example from Houston below, the walk may actually exceed three minutes for some residents (Google maps shows no parking of any kind, underground or otherwise, associated with the apartments to the NE, NW or SW):

In debates about parking in urban areas, pricing and availability tend to garner the majority of the attention, with proximity only a secondary concern (although many complaints about these first two issues implicitly involve proximity). Similarly, attempts to reduce reliance on the car through parking reform have tended to focus on eliminating or reducing parking maximums or establishing a market pricing mechanism for parking spaces, rather than considering the location of the vehicle itself.

It should be common sense, though, that in an otherwise reasonably walkable area with some transit options, the further the car is from one's residence, the less use that car is likely to receive, since transportation is above all a matter of immediate convenience. Given that the "five minute walk" is generally accepted as a key walkability measure, having the car three minutes away inevitably helps shift the advantage toward walking. Other ways in which this modest time advantage could be magnified to privilege non-car modes could include:

• Keeping cars in a centralized and fairly distant garage, as in the case of Vauban, but allowing bikes to be stored on-street or in another convenient location. 
• Exploiting the limited access to parking garages by closing off certain streets to through traffic, but allowing permeability for cyclists and pedestrians. 
• Prohibiting or greatly limiting on-street parking on surrounding streets, thereby reducing the perception of convenient parking while making the streets more hospitable to other modes of travel.
• Reducing speed limits by law and through design features, including lane narrowing, textured paving, shared space, etc. 

Although these design elements are all consistent with the seemingly car-oriented Texas doughnut, they have rarely been put into practice. Rather, even where transit is present, the whole is often less than the sum of its parts: buildings are set back and present blank faces to the sidewalk, streets are engineered for vehicles, and the overall impression can be one of isolated and gated enclaves rather than a neighborhood (Dallas again, from Streetview):

For a city to make a system like this work, an entirely new approach toward both parking policy and thoroughfare design would be necessary. Rather than managing on-street parking, as with parking benefit districts, cities would need to arrange for coordinating off-street parking, something which many cities have neglected (for instance, Norman Garrick and Chris McCahill have found that a city like New Haven, CT, does not even have a count of its available parking supply, even though off-street requirements for individual buildings are typically micromanaged to an absurd degree -- truly a case of failing to see the forest for the trees), and which is not necessarily resolved simply by abolishing parking minimums. The "fee in-lieu of parking" model is one promising approach, although it is often undermined by the continuing presence of on-street parking, which encourages endless cruising for temptingly convenient spaces rather than use of public garages built with the collected fees.

With the common garage parking model emerging in these Sunbelt developments, however, something similar is taking place though the independent actions of developers, and residents seeking to live a life somewhat less tied to the car are apparently finding it there.

Related posts:
Common Garage Parking, In Practice

Homeownership, Unemployment and Economic Growth: Looking at the Trends

A new study* that has been receiving attention in the media claims that rises in the homeownership rate in U.S. states are correlated with subsequent sharp rises in unemployment in those states, and advances some provocative explanations to account for the correlation, including the conjecture that homeowners are more prone to support restrictive zoning that impedes business formation. The authors also find evidence that high homeownership is associated with lower labor mobility and long commutes (a point which contrasts with Randal O'Toole's argument, which I have mentioned before, that high homeownership is a product of high labor mobility).

As sympathetic as I am to arguments about the economic downsides of homeownership, I was a bit surprised by these findings, knowing that the largest increases in the homeownership rate during the period the authors examined, 1950-2010, occurred in the southern states, and that these states, I believed, also experienced the most rapid economic growth during that same period.  The study does not examine or even mention state income, so I decided to chart income growth in 49 states (excluding Alaska) and Washington D.C.

I have posted the full results here, but below is shown the top and bottom ten performing states over the 1950-2010 period, using household median income (figures are in 2010 dollars):

This is about what one might expect -- the Southern states, starting from a very low baseline, did very well during these six decades, while the rust belt states stagnated. Since we are talking about housing, though, what happens if we take into account the change in housing values, using these values to estimate the cost of housing in each state?

Discounting incomes by the cost of housing (based on the annualized expense of a 30-year mortgage at 6% interest, with 20% down**) gives the following results:

The Southern states again dominate the best performing list, with Maryland dropping out (note that Mississippi was the only state of all 50 examined where housing grew more affordable during the period examined relative to income).  Due to tremendous increases in housing prices, however, several states have moved far down the list, including New York and California.  Oregon and Montana are unusual in that housing prices increased substantially despite poor wage growth.

Finally, I correlated all the information I compiled plus the change in homeownership rates over 1950-2010 (showing correlation coefficients):

The chart shows that increases in income are strongly associated with increases in homeownership.  This compares to the weaker correlation found in the study between unemployment and homeownership over the same period (an R squared value of .108 as compared to .280: see Figure 2 on page 17). More surprising is the relatively low correlation between change in income and change in housing value: of the top ten states for housing cost growth, only two (Maryland and Virginia) were also on the list for top income growth.  For comparison, although North Dakota, Utah and California each experienced income growth of 88%, home prices rose 189%, 294% and 483% respectively. 

I didn't plot unemployment change over this period, as I'm not sure that such a volatile statistic is all that useful when measured at only two points in time. In any event, even a casual glance at unemployment rates during the recession shows that states that had the lowest levels of homeownership experienced some of the highest unemployment levels (notably California, Oregon, Nevada and New York), and have also had some of the highest levels of domestic outmigration, perhaps due to the very high housing costs that have suppressed homeownership rates in the first place.

Although none of this alters the patterns carefully discerned by the authors, I think it does at least point to the complexity of the homeownership phenomenon, which is affected by numerous economic, demographic and political factors, and which benefits from being studied in the broadest possible context so as to avoid placing too much importance on any particular correlation.


*David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, Does High Home-Ownership Impair the Labor Market?
*Rates were of course lower than this in 2010, but 6% is a rough long-term average for the past two decades, and in any event mortgage rates were comparable in 1950 (4.5%) and 2010 (4.7%).

Was the Rise of Car Ownership Responsible for the Midcentury Homeownership Boom in the US?

It's common to hear from certain quarters that not only did the advent of mass motoring in the mid-20th century lead to a change in the types of homes Americans lived in, but that it brought about increased rates of homeownership as well.  This increase is typically presented as being one of the major benefits of mass automobile ownership.  Randal O'Toole, writing in 2006, makes the claim more boldly than most:

"Homeownership rates have increased by nearly 50 percent, from less than 48 percent in 1930 to nearly 69 percent today. This was almost entirely due to the increased mobility that automobiles offered to blue collar workers."

The point is often grudgingly conceded by sprawl opponents, or else goes unmentioned (The Geography of Nowhere, for instance, does not mention homeownership rates once in its 275 pages, nor does Suburban Nation). If the mobility provided by the automobile did lead to high rates of land consumption for residential uses, at least in doing so it brought down the cost of land accessible to job centers, allowing city workers to enjoy property ownership where once they had been in thrall to urban landlords, right?

The picture, looked at a bit more closely, isn't quite so clear.  The 1890 Census, the first census in which questions about ownership and renting were asked, showed a homeownership rate of 47.8% (homeownership had apparently been declining since at least 1870, however).  In spite of the arrival of the affordable automobile in 1908, the rate continued to decline through 1920. By 1930, following 20 years of explosive growth in household car ownership, it had only regained its 1890 heights of 47.8%.  The first great wave of car-buying, representing one-half of the total increase in household car ownership down to the present day, was accompanied by very little change in the homeownership rate (note that the electric streetcar boom, starting in the late 1880s, was similarly not accompanied by a rise in homeownership).

Based on Census data and car registration statistics.

Although car ownership dipped in the early Depression years, a resurgence after 1933 drove it to new highs by 1940.  In spite of unprecedented government intervention to spur the housing market in the 1930s, however, including the arrival of revolutionary forms of mortgage financing, homeownership declined to 43.6% in 1940.

The most curious piece of the puzzle, however, is the period from 1940-1945. During those years, the homeownership rate increased by around 10 percentage points, representing almost 50 percent of the entire increase from 1940 to 2012.  The timing of this increase is oddly overlooked in much of the economics literature on American homeownership trends (O'Toole himself tells the audience in a CATO presentation from last year, at the 15:22 mark, that the increase in homeownership occurred "after World War Two").

It goes without saying that these were years of exceptionally low car use: although the absolute number of cars did drop substantially, gas rationing reduced automobile mobility to levels not seen since the mid-1920s, if not earlier.  This seemingly inexplicable rapid rise has not received much direct attention in the literature, but one 2012 paper finds that one probable explanation was the wartime imposition of rent controls, which "stimulat[ed] the withdrawal of structures from the rental market for sale to owner-occupiers at uncontrolled prices."

The study also contains an implied suggestion that, counterintuitively, it may have been the very reduction in wartime use and availability of cars that helped spur the ownership increase. Although the study notes that "due to restrictions on the purchase of many goods, much of consumers' income had no outlet other than savings" -- savings which were put toward down payments on homes -- one of the primary savings must have come from reduced spending on new automobiles and associated goods and services.

Of course, homeownership did continue to rise after 1945, but at a slower rate.  Notably, the price of homes did not decline during this period, as might be predicted by the automobile-based theory, but instead after a brief postwar dip continued to climb through the mid-1950s, according to Case-Shiller data.  Prices did begin a very gradual decline in the late 1950s, but by then the rise in homeownership was slowing, and increases after 1960 (at which time the interstate system was less than a quarter complete) were very modest. In fact, as of early 2012, the US homeownership rate was estimated to be close to that of 1965.

Case-Shiller home price data, adapted from original NYT graphic.

Rather than being a benefit of cars, the postwar portion of the increase is generally attributed to a combination of 1) the increasing prevalence of FHA and VA mortgages, which by the early 1950s were approaching 50% of the mortgage market, 2) rising real incomes; and 3) demographic changes.

Although some studies have estimated that increasing car ownership was responsible for as much as 60% of the form of the suburban growth that occurred after 1945, this is not to be confused with homeownership. After all, countries with large shares of multifamily housing, such as Spain and Italy, may have very high homeownership rates (78% for both), while Germany and Denmark, where densities are lower and single-family detached housing is more common, have very low rates (42% and 51%).  These differences appear to be due to government policy toward housing rather than to transportation mode (Spain and Denmark, for instance, have a nearly identical modal split). 

Now, I do think O'Toole ought to agree with at least some of this: he admits in his talk that varying homeownership rates from country to country are due to government policy (at 4:16), and has lately criticized smart growth policies for inflating prices (a topic I plan to get to in an upcoming post). If one's concern is not actually homeownership per se, but rather living in detached single-family residences on large lots (a favorite theme of Joel Kotkin), or perhaps if one believes that ownership of a single-family detached home is the only true form of ownership, then the car does take on greater significance. 

More Townhouse Parking Approaches, From the Comments

I'm fortunate on this blog to have commenters who not only are willing to share their wealth of knowledge on the topics I post about, but who frequently include links to streetview images of their own choosing which, due to the limitations of Blogger's commenting system, can't be easily displayed there.  Many of these examples are so interesting and relevant that I often want to feature them in a post of their own. I've finally gotten around to doing that here, using some of the examples submitted in response to last Friday's post on townhouses and parking (I may add to this list as time allows).

Nicolas Derome, who has a series of posts at the Strong Towns Network exploring the urban form of Toronto and Montreal that I recommend checking out, contributed examples of contemporary attempts to integrate townhouses and parking from both of those cities:

Nicolas notes that in the above Toronto example, since the streets are private, widths of only 20 feet, rather than 25 or 30 feet, are permitted.  The technique of recessing garage doors while emphasizing pedestrian entrances is presumably intended to mitigate the visual effect of the garages: is it an improvement?

From Alai comes this example of parking subtly integrated into Craftsman-style San Francisco rowhouses.  I agree with Alai that this is a better result than the example I showed from the Sunset neighborhood, and in fact many San Francisco townhouses of the first half of the 20th century did make creative efforts to incorporate garages elegantly and unobtrusively:

Another example from Nicolas shows a parking approach taken in Montreal, where a narrow driveway is used to access below grade parking, which is then decked over to provide a spacious patio area.  This is very similar to one of the townhouse parking approaches described by Nathan Lewis (see Solution Three), and requires no more than the excavation of a basement-sized area:

Finally, another example from Nicolas featuring Alcorn Avenue, not far from Toronto's central business district.  The street appears to have a mix of rowhouses from throughout the 20th century, including several from the 1980s with front-loading parking.  The overall result is very successful though, due in part to the narrowness of the street, in part to the effective use of limited greenery, but more than anything to what Marc describes in the comments as "organic variation - [where] each house and door [is] designed by a different person." This variation, Marc notes, communicates a human presence even where garages are present and noticeable.

This sort of variation was also cited as a sign of urban health by Jane Jacobs, of course, whose own home was located within walking distance of Alcorn Street.  As she wrote, "a successful city district becomes a kind of ever-normal granary as far as construction is concerned. Some of the old buildings, year by year, are replaced by new ones – or rehabilitated to a degree equivalent to replacement. Over the years there is, therefore, constantly a mixture of buildings of many ages and types." When redeveloped piecemeal, rather than at once, each new building adds to the texture of the street, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Thanks again, everyone, for all the interesting comments.