Posts about Excessive Parking

Martin wrote, "D.C., pre-war on cars. The place was motorist heaven."

This makes a real point. We've been hearing a lot about the "war on cars" lately as AAA, the car lobby organization, has been really pushing the theme hard in the press and outlets eager for controversy lap up the destructive rhetoric.

But let's not forget where we were. Not that long ago, much of DC had been shaped by a multi-decade "war on the city." Well-meaning urban renewal efforts tore out large swaths of the urban fabric to build things like the Southeast-Southwest Freeway and big parking lots, like the ones in the picture.

Southeast Freeway construction. Image from DDOT.

The 1958 zoning code that DC is currently trying to replace was a weapon in that war. Its author, Harold Lewis, wrote that the city's form was unable to adapt to a more car-oriented form and zoning must therefore compel it "for the salvation of the downtown area."

In 1950, the federal government decreed that places like Shaw, Southwest DC, and more were "obsolete" and had to be replaced with more car-oriented development patterns. The "obsolete" zones include the area in this picture; this was the result.

It's also worth remembering this era to understand the time when, as we discussed yesterday, very strong historic preservation protection was not only clearly necessary but absolutely urgent. The preservation plan quotes one resident saying "The next generation of preservation leaders is not there; where are the future activists?" Commenter drumz pointed out that there isn't really "an example in DC today of the same sort of large scale clearing that inspired the first preservation movement."

Nobody is trying to wage a war on cars. AAA is just pushing the idea because after their long and successful war on urban places, the trend is moving in the other direction. And anyone who lives in the Mount Vernon Triangle today instead of that 1992 wasteland is pretty glad it is.

Zoning is one of the least sexy parts of the planning process, filled with legal jargon and data tables that can make even the most passionate planner's eyes glaze over. However, it's also one of the most important tools we have to shape our communities.

While doing research for the Flower Theatre Project, I found out the current zoning code makes it hard, if not impossible to reopen the Flower Theatre simply because it requires more parking spaces than there are on the property today. Parking certainly isn't the only reason the theatre is closed, but it's a major impediment to revitalizing Long Branch and other commercial districts across the county.

Montgomery's zoning rewrite aims to make the current code simpler and easier to use. It seeks to preserve the things people like about the county while encouraging more of the things that people want, including a greater variety of housing choices, more places to eat, shop and hang out, and more ways to get around.

If that's not enough to convince you, fast forward to about 7 minutes in and you can hear me say "bidnesses." That wasn't intentional, but I talk fast when I get excited. And I'm about as excited as one can get about the zoning rewrite and the potential it has to make the county's neighborhoods better.

The Planning Board encourages residents to offer their thoughts on the zoning rewrite at a series of public hearings which began earlier this fall and will run through next week. If you'd like to learn more about the zoning rewrite, you can visit their website. You can also watch Montgomery Plans on County Cable Montgomery or on the show's website.

The developers plan to build 445 apartments with 74,000 square feet of retail space, including a grocery store, and 320 underground parking spaces.

Development of retail amenities is great, and helps reduce crime, increase pedestrian traffic while boosting tax revenues. But we have a right to know if developments would happen anyway before spending taxpayer dollars to subsidize them.

Thanks to a law passed last year, the CFO must assess whether individual developments actually need the tax break or loans to get financing to build the project. The Howard Town Center is the first tax abatement proposal that CFO Natwar Gandhi has unequivocally opposed on these grounds.

Gandhi identified these problems with the tax abatement:

• The project, in a redeveloping neighborhood, should be able to charge higher rents than the developer is claiming.
• The developer, who is setting aside 20% of units for affordable housing, should be able to secure financing through Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.
• The developer can save money by deferring the developer's fee, a common practice with developments that include affordable housing.

Greg LeRoy, director of subsidy watchdog Good Jobs First, says "There is a time and a place for development incentives, but the problem is that elected officials don't know when to take their foot off the gas." That certainly applies at this location, where earlier this year Harris Teeter signed a letter of intent for a development only 2 blocks away.

Between Columbia Heights and Shaw, 1,321 apartment units are under construction while another 797 units are expected to be completed in the next 3 years. The trend of development moving eastward along U street and northward through Shaw is likewise driving up housing values to between $450,000 and $700,000 for 2-bedroom condominiums, according to a Trulia search.

In addition to the objections the CFO raised, there is another glaring problem with the claim that $11 million is necessary for this development: The 320 parking spaces. Are the spaces really necessary 3 blocks from Shaw Metro? The developer could save a lot of money by cutting down on the number of underground floors.

The DC Council should reject this unnecessary tax abatement. Otherwise, it will further undermine public confidence in its ability to operate free of corporate influence.

OP originally proposed setting parking maximums along with eliminating many minimums in the zoning update, but has now shelved the idea. OP still argues maximums have merit, but says that it's too difficult to set the right numbers without more work, which it still might undertake after the current zoning update is complete.

Setting maximums right is not simple. If proposed maximums are too low, developer pushback may jeopardize their survival. If they're too high, the standards are essentially useless, and developers will continue to build all the parking that they want regardless of whether the District's roads can handle the traffic resulting from this "fertility drug."

Minimum parking requirements distort the marketplace. Nixing them would remove this distortion, but other market distortions and subsidies remain. For example, parking is a tax-exempt fringe benefit the government allows—and even encourages—employers to provide. If rules required users to pay for their own parking without passing its cost off to others, developers would have a strong incentive to "right size" parking instead of oversupply it.

OP has taken the first key step in discouraging parking oversupply by forbidding developers in Planned Unit Development (PUD) projects from building excess parking and then just leasing it to outside parties. An additional, even more effective strategy would be to forbid bundling parking costs with unrelated charges, such as including parking in the cost of a housing unit or an office lease. In those cases, the parking costs are masked from the user, or paid for entirely by someone other than the one making the choice to drive and park. When users pay directly for parking, they demand significantly less of it.

Legislation would ideally apply these policy changes to all parking throughout the District. However, the politics may be more manageable to start with the zoning code rewrite, whose rules will only apply to new development. There is also a good policy reason to take this approach. Parking is often oversupplied because there are very few limitations on its use. By constraining the use of new parking spaces, developers would build fewer of them.

How could this work? Rules could require unbundling parking. The details would vary between office, retail, or housing use. All parkers would pay directly for parking, or get money back for not parking, but the nature of the charges would differ by building type.

• In multi-unit housing structures, except where parking is physically connected to only one unit, the developer would make parking available at market rate separate from the cost of the housing.
  
• For office buildings, employers could provide a parking benefit, but then must also give employees the option to instead receive a transportation allowance (or "cash-out") of equivalent value. This could take the form of tax-free transit, vanpool, or bicycling benefits, for employees whose commutes make them legally eligible for such benefits, plus taxable cash. The total would equal or exceed the market value of the parking.
  
• In buildings with retail tenants and parking, tenants would have to adopt and enforce a policy to charge market rates for parking for their customers. Retailers could give customers small discounts from market parking rates, but not more than 25% of the hourly market value of the parking.

A building's certificate of occupancy would require the owner to adhere to the standards (which would also need to be publicly displayed), and the Zoning Administrator could strip the certificate for noncompliance.

There is precedent for regulating on-site transportation accommodations through zoning: DC enforces bicycle parking standards this way. By eliminating the benefits to developers of oversupplying parking, developers would become much more judicious about building in parking that may not be used and whose costs would only drag down the project's bottom line.

In this case, at least there was some independent analysis by the CFO, which raised some questions like predicting the break would take away from other hotels' revenue and therefore the taxes they pay. Even with the analysis, it's still unclear whether it's a good deal, but at least people have some numbers, which is often not the case.

At the very least, I hope the Council would ask for a Transportation Demand Management (TDM) plan, or a reduction in the number of parking spaces. The project has as more spaces than rooms, and Adams Morgan already has more cars driving around than space on streets. The neighborhood could use more foot traffic, but really doesn't need a lot of people just driving to the hotel only to then drive downtown for their meetings. The hotel needs to plan to have at least a large percentage of its visitors and employees use the many buses that serve the area.

Then there's the Southwest Waterfront deal, which Cheryl Cort wrote about yesterday. A developer promised to build some housing and some office on public land, and agreed to include some low- and moderate-income housing as part of the deal. Now, they want to take some of their office space and convert it to more housing, but without the affordability requirement.

They say that they can't afford to have the same affordable housing in the new portion, and that this change is the only way to get financing for the project. We can believe that it's harder to get financing now and perhaps they need some change, but how much of a change? At the very least, for example, DC could probably insist that the new housing contain some housing at 80% Area Median Income, which is still "workforce" housing for fairly well off families, rather than 100% AMI as the developer has suggested.

But how much negotiating room is there? This is public land, which means that DC ought to try to get the best deal it can. The problem is that we don't know what is the best deal or what's even relatively close. The developer is likely to push for more than they need, figuring they might as well try for a little more. On the other hand, if nothing gets built, it doesn't help DC at all. What's the right balance?

Third, the Union Station payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) will come back today. The Union Station Redevelopment Corporation theoretically owes taxes on the commercial activity happening on their land equivalent to what private properties would pay, but they aren't paying it. This bill would permanently excuse them from the tax in exchange for a much smaller payment.

USRC says that they are already spending lots of money that they wouldn't if they were private, like paying for elevators that get used by Amtrak and the Metro. As with the other two, though, the bigger problem is that we have little way of really evaluating how much of the break is reasonable given USRC's special circumstances, versus how much is just a request for special treatment that a for-profit organization thinks it can get out of elected officials.

The only Councilmembers who seem to know for sure how to vote are those with firm ideological attitudes toward tax breaks. Jack Evans, for example, seems so sure about the Union Station break, despite calling it "dead as a dog" last time, that he plans to introduce it as emergency legislation. There's no word on why there's suddenly an emergency on legislation that's been brewing for months.

Even the most well-meaning Councilmembers find themselves in a serious quandary when these votes come up. Do they push for more, risking that a project might then never materialize? Or do they give the developer what they want, knowing that there's a huge chance that developer will be patting their lobbyists on the back for pulling the wool over the Council's eyes and getting a big windfall out of the public till?

Advocates have called for a fuller analysis of the Waterfront tax break. As DCFPI has suggested, the Council should systematize the process for these breaks to require some analysis of each one and set an overall cap. Perhaps also it's worth requiring that some analysis be conducted afterward, to determine which ones actually paid off and which didn't. That could help watchdog groups create a sort of scorecard for long-serving Councilmembers about how much their tax breaks either added to or detracted from the District's overall fiscal health.

Some tax breaks make sense, while others don't. But right now, our leaders are flying blind, which isn't a good way to make decisions.