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Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

> Pearl was cut from 18 apartments to 10 and its approval required an underground garage with 53 parking spots.

How did it ever get here? Requiring more than 2 parking spots per apartment is insane.... especially for "affordable housing".

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> How did it ever get here? Requiring more than 2 parking spots per apartment is insane.... especially for "affordable housing".

People who live near new property developments don't want to end up with their streets completely full of parked cars from residents and guests of the new building.

I can't say it's unreasonable for the existing residents to feel that way. I lived in a neighborhood where that happened, and parking got so bad it was difficult for people to visit me.

That kind of parking situation is the kind of thing that people are willing to deal with in NYC, not the suburbs. So they pass laws to require parking spaces. This particular example is extreme though.

The government shouldn't be in the business of providing free car storage for residents, anyway. Free street parking is the problem here, not the completely inevitable demand for that underpriced service.

I think the original design as implied in the article was that the garage was to be a paid garage for the community and the fees from it would help to repay some of the grants to build the housing. It was not "you need 5 parking spots per unit plus 3 for building management".

This seems to be a trend for medium density construction projects now. In our rapidly-gentrifying suburban city, new buildings above a certain height are only approved if they include public parking spaces, regardless if it's residential, commercial, or mixed use.

I can't speak for other cities, but when I used to live and work in SLC the addition of lots of new underground parking helped bring the downtown back to life.

It's like you guys didn't even read TFA.

The proposed building site is an existing public parking lot. The underground parking lot isn't just for the residents, it has to replace the public parking capacity it's occupying as well:

  Residents and the public would pay for parking in an underground garage,
  which would help finance the project, as would rent from a small grocery store.

> Residents and the public would pay for parking in an underground garage, which would help finance the project, as would rent from a small grocery store.

Mixed use is gonna need a lot more parking.

> After a year of negotiations with the city, Hitzke agreed to shrink the Pearl to 10 apartments and make it free for the public to park in the 53-space garage.

Unclear if the grocery store is still there at this point, but now it's a free public garage, not just residents.

This isn't a story of parking minimums, this is a story of a small town being picky about the type of development permitted.

Low-income families often pack many people into a small apartment, so it's not unrealistic for one apartment to need 3 parking spots for two working parents and a working child, just as an example.

I lived in a household like that growing up

You can look at this in a couple of ways:

Forcing poor people to pay for parking makes their housing more expensive and is part of what is causing huge problems in California. When I lived in Austria, my wife and I lived in a place with no parking included, by choice. We found a public place about a kilometer away that was free. Kind of a hassle, but it was a good compromise for our finances back then.

The government choosing parking minimums is a huge market distortion and antithetical to the freedom of the market to provide a diversity of solutions. There are boatloads of houses in the US with huge 3 car garages. Give people the freedom to live with zero parking!

One thing you'll find about US culture: Even the most stringent, freedom-loving, anti-government types will fully embrace draconian and byzantine laws provided they're issued at the local level. If you want Laissez-faire at the local level without a cabin in the woods you must eschew local government and live in an unincorporated part of a county (and then move in a few years once that gets swallowed up by a growing metro area).

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I did the census in 2010 and this was something I saw a lot in lower income neighborhoods -- easily 8+ people in 2-3 bedroom apartments.

They got to get to work, school, etc. And in the US you need a car, cuz public transit sucks, ergo, multiple parking spaces.

A dumb law, perhaps, but the parent comment isn't wrong.

OR decent mass transit. But forget that in California.

Uh, is there any state with decent mass transit in the USA? Some of the cities have "passable" mass transit, but they're an exception imo. Nothing comes close to take-your-pick medium sized town in take-your-pick European country.

Is NYC mass transit not considered decent? The subway always seemed pretty reasonable to me. Admittedly, that's a city, not a state, but states vary wildly.

I'd say it's not too bad, but it's rapidly falling to pieces, and personally I haven't seen the kind of action I think necessary to ensure it functions at all 50 years from now, shit, let alone 20.

And that's a huge chunk of the US population, but still, it's one city. What of Los Angeles, with its buses stuck in permanent traffic, or its subway with, what, 15 stops? What of Houston, with a light rail that travels about the speed of a car but waits at every intersection, and serves something like 10% of the city? What about getting from one city in the US to another?

Sure, it's a big country. Sure, it industrialized the car. Sure. But still.

That's totally fair. As a rule, the US's mass transit system is a garbage fire. However, I consider NYC's to be reasonably good, specifically in response to

> Some of the cities have "passable" mass transit

GP was talking about states rather than cities though

>is there any state with decent mass transit in the USA?

Half the transit in the US is New York City alone.

Now, I'll grant it's only very specific corridors, but the densest parts of California do have passable mass transit. The majority of Californians don't have access to this, but the most crowded parts do.

Mass transit exists but it's really bad -- e.g. Muni and BART and Caltrain in the San Francisco area. Constant delays, mechanical failures, and overcrowding.

Now that Coronavirus and social distancing are the new normal, I expect some of those transit systems to lose funding and perhaps even shut down.

I'm a huge fan of public transit and I'd love to see good transit systems exist in California, but I have no hope that it will happen.

BART! I used it once just to see how it went. A cross between a cattle car and a shipping container. Unbearably noisy and dirty. Reminded me of the public transit in Gotham when Bruce Wayne returned.

I used to take Caltrain to work. The best way to find out about the frequent service outages and accidents was not from Caltrain, but from stranded passengers complaining on Twitter.

Caltrain doesn't really communicate, their delay estimates are as reliable as the progress bar on Windows 3.1, and the stations are unstaffed. It's a total joke from top to bottom.

I used to spend a lot of money on Uber to get home when Caltrain let me down.

3 is still reasonable. They went to 5.3 parking spots per apartment.

By reducing number of apartments from 18 to 10 - I assume that by this time the garage had already been built so downsizing it was not possible.

Also, I've just noticed: why on earth would they build affordable housing next to the beach? Is this some twisted take on equality, that poor people also deserve view at the ocean? If "affordable housing" competes for the same land as luxury residences it will end up just as expensive.

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