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Comment by timerol | Hacker News Reader

"we should turn 10% of all current parking spaces into low-income housing" wasn't a proposal on the site. It was more of a demonstration that, if we could do that, we would satisfy the entire deficit of low-income renters that currently exists in LA. The actual policy proposals were at the end:

1. No universal parking minimums. Developers choose how much parking the market requires.

2. Parking Maximums in Transit Oriented Communities.

3. All new parking garages must be built with a flat floor and a high enough ceiling to allow future conversion into office, studio, or living space.

4. 20% of parking spaces must include EV charging, with the rest install ready.

5. Garages must include an equivalent number of bicycle/micro-mobility parking spaces.

I would say suggestions 2-5 get progressively worse, but suggestion 1 is really good and backed up by the data presented.

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Suggestion 3 is particularly terrible, since the concrete skeleton of a parking garage is really poorly suited for conversion to housing. Utilities will require raised floors and drop ceilings even for arterial needs. The size of the building footprint is unreasonable for general residential division - leaving either large interior space vacuums (which can cause safety issues especially when lacking natural light) or units with no external wall (causing a different set of health issues and probably massive fire code violations). The material to be built on will be contaminated oil soaked concrete (the sort of material they truck out of former gas stations before any other kind of construction can commence). And, lastly, parking garages aren't structured to allow a structural wall free perimeter which means that temperature control within such a building would have to be entirely artificially done - so A/C and heat 24/7.

It is much more cost effective and environmentally friendly to tear down parking garages and replace them with new construction.

For 1 - sure yea, I sorta doubt developers are going to voluntarily go below 1 space/unit in any sort of world because the value of the property takes a steep dive - but removing any commercial unit parking requirements or higher requirements for larger residential units makes sense. I think 2 is great - assuming exceptions are made to support park & ride demand. 4... Eh, EV is going to need to solve this through market forces so I think we can entirely ignore this (though I would love to see a lot more EVs I think this is point is entirely tangential to the main discussion) Lastly for 5 - nope. Every building ever has managed to sort this out naturally without regulation... leave this up to the market.

I've worked in a converted parking garage office before, so it must be at least somewhat economical. It was kind of awkward; you could absolutely tell that it used to be a parking garage. but it was completely functional.

As an employer I'd have liability concerns about embedded gas fumes and long term health effects - but the arrangement of space does work better for office work - since large rooms without natural light are more common place and internal rooms (like conference rooms or staff rooms) wouldn't have locked doors between them and windows in case of a fire.

Almost all our European counterparts have #2. Most cities have parking maximums per building, and it helps limit the amount of vehicles people buy.

LA desperately needs for transit extensions.

Reviewing planning paperwork for the flat I now own in a medium-sized English city, you could see the history of this in the paperwork.

The first application to build this building (replacing a small family home on a relatively large plot) was rejected for having too few parking spaces. Policy at the time assumed housing needs space for cars, if you don't build space for cars they litter the streets so each home must have 1 space or more for larger homes.

But the last application (ie the one they actually built) was only accepted after reducing the number of spaces, because by then policy had changed to dissuade people from owning more cars. They'll park them on the street anyway (and they do) so giving them more spaces just encourages owning even more cars in a congested city.

The problem I see with #5 is that parking your bike outside in an unsecured area is a recipe for getting it stolen (in the US). Bike theft is rampant in America and thieves will steal anything that isn't locked to something immovable, and even then they'll steal parts off of it. Civilized countries don't have this problem, and people happily park their bikes outside, at transit stations, etc. all the time without worrying about this.

Here in DC, we have "bike lockers" at the Metro transit stations so you can park your bike there and take the train into the city. However, these lockers aren't cheap, and there aren't many of them, and they're completely enclosed so they take up a fair amount of space. By contrast, in Germany you'll find many hundreds of bikes just lined up and parked outside the S-bahn station, without people having to pay a hefty rental fee.

parking your bike outside in an unsecured area is a recipe for getting it stolen (in the US)

That´s everywhere. I was told that in Austria the only major petty theft is bike theft (in one of the most secure countries in the world).

I don´t even need to mention how prevalent it is in my country Uruguay (which tries to encourage bike use).

No, it isn't everywhere. Bike theft is extremely rare in Japan, and no one locks bikes to anything there.

Wow. Hats off to Japan then.

What’s the rationale for parking maximums? If people are willing to pay for underground garage space, why not let them?

Let's say I'm building an office building, and roads in the local area can accept 300 more cars during rush hour before becoming unacceptably congested.

In this case, if the government authorises the construction of more than 300 parking spaces, unacceptable congestion will result.

Suggestion 1 is terrible unless it's combined with a limited permit scheme for street parking. Otherwise you end up with a mess where everyone buys a car anyway, then ends up circling the block around and around hunting for a space.

Eventually people learn to not do that anymore, like many do in downtown areas today... Eventually they might reduce the amount of cars they have, because doing that is a pain in the ass. Or they pay for their parking spot vs. freeloading on 'free' parking.

I'm cool with that, maybe they'll learn not to buy a car anyway.

I do think that 1 would need to be tempered with some handicap minimum though.

Yeah, it should be coupled with a requirement to show that you can legally park if you want to register a car. And people moving into flats without a parking space should know that they can't have a car unless they also own a space to park it.

Is that pure speculation or based on data? Most of what I read says the data says otherwise: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/san-francisco-parking-space...

Eventually they will get tired of it and move to the suburbs

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