How minimum parking requirements make housing more expensive
Lewis Lehe
UC Berkeley
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2018.1340
Keywords: economics, housing, parking
Abstract
A growing consensus argues that minimum parking requirements (MPRs) make housing more expensive. This paper examines two claims from this discussion: (1) that MPRs discourage the construction of small units; (2) that the costs of building required parking are "passed on" to buyers and renters in the form of higher prices and rents. However, the mechanisms behind these two effects have never been made explicit in the literature. This paper proposes, for each claim, a plausible mechanism relying on the specific choices of housing suppliers and consumers. We propose that MPRs discourage small units because they eliminate the most profitable floorspace/parking bundle to supply to relatively lower-income households. We propose that parking costs may be passed on by reducing the supply of housing on offer at a given price.Author Biography
Lewis Lehe, UC Berkeley
PhD holderReferences
Arnott, R. 1987. Economic theory and housing. In Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, volume 2, pp. 959–988. Elsevier. URL http://ideas.repec.org/h/eee/regchp/2-24.html.
Been, V., C. Brazill, J. Madar, and S. McDonnell. 2012. Searching for the right spot: Minimum parking requirements and housing affordability in New York City. Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, New York.
Bertha, B. A. 1964. Appendix A. In W. F. Smith, ed., The Low-rise speculative apartment. Berkeley, CA: Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, Institute of Urban and Regional Development.
Brown, A., V. Mukhija, and D. Shoup. 2017. Converting garages into housing. Journal of Planning Education and Research, p. 0739456X1774196. ISSN 0739-456X. doi: 10.1177/0739456X17741965. URL http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0739456X17741965.
Chapple, K., J. Wegmann, A. Nemirow, and C. Dentel-Post. 2012. Yes in my backyard: Mobilizing the market for secondary units. Technical report, Center for Community Innovation, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. URL http://eprints.cdlib.org/uc/item/6fz8j6gx{%}5Cnhttp://www.escholarship.org/help{_}copyright.html{#}reuse.
Deparle, J. 1993. San Diego sees too much of success in building hotels to house the poor. New York Times, pp. 1–5.
Franco, S. F. 2017. Downtown parking supply , work-trip mode choice and urban. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 101:107–122. doi: 10.1016/j.trb.2017.03.012.
Gabbe, C. J. 2015. Looking through the lens of size: Land use regulations and micro-apartments in San Francisco. Cityscape, 7(2):223–237.
Gabbe, C. J. and G. Pierce. 2017. Hidden costs and deadweight losses: Bundled parking and residential rents in the metropolitan United States. Housing Policy Debate, 27(2):217–229. ISSN 1051-1482. doi: 10.1080/10511482.2016.1205647. URL https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/ 10511482.2016.1205647.
Glaeser, E. and J. Gyourko. 2018. The economic implications of housing supply. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32(1):3–30. ISSN 0895-3309. doi: 10.1257/jep.32.1.3. URL https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jep.32.1.3.
Glaeser, E. L., J. Gyourko, and R. Saks. 2005. Why is Manhattan so expensive? Regulation and the rise in housing prices. The Journal of Law and Economics, 48(2):331–369. ISSN 0022-2186. doi: 10.1086/429979. URL https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/429979.
Hess, D. B. 2017. Repealing minimum parking requirements in Buffalo: New directions for land use and development. Journal of Urbanism, 10(4):442–467. ISSN 17549183. doi: 10.1080/17549175.2017.1310743. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2017.1310743.
Hinshaw, M. and B. Holan. 2011. Rooming house redux. Planning - American Planning Association, pp. 16–19. ISSN 00012610. URL https://www.planning.org/planning/2011/nov/roominghouse.htm.
Infranca, J. 2014. Housing changing households: Regulatory challenges for micro-units and accessory dwelling units. Stanford Law & Policy Review, 25(1):53–90. URL https://law.stanford.edu/publications/ housing-changing-households-regulatory-challenges-micro-units-accessory-dwelling-units/.
Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. 2018. How Mexico City became a leader in parking reform. URL https://www.itdp.org/mexico-city-became-leader-parking-reform/.
Jia, W. and M. Wachs. 1996. Parking requirements and housing affordability: Case study of San Francisco. Transportation Research Record, 1685:156–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.3141/1685-20. URL http://trrjournalonline.trb.org/doi/abs/10.3141/1685-20?journalCode=trr.
Joint Center for Housing Studies. 2017. The State of the Nation’s Housing 2017. Technical report, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. URL http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/jchs.harvard.edu/files/harvard{_}jchs{_}state{_}of{_}the{_}nations{_}housing{_}2017.pdf.
Jordan, T. 2017. Portland’s Housing Trends Prove the Math on Parking Requirements. URL https://marketurbanismreport.com/portlands-housing-trends-prove-math-parking-regulations/.
Levinson, D. and A. Odlyzko. 2008. Too expensive to meter: the influence of transaction costs in
transportation and communication. Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 366(1872):2033–46. ISSN 1364-503X. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2008.0022. URL http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18325870.
Lewis, R. K. 2016. How much space for parking? It’s a tough balancing act for builders and regulators. Washington Post.
London, J. and C. Williams-Derry. 2013. Who pays for parking? How the oversupply of parking undermines housing affordability. Technical Report December, Sightline Institute, Seattle. URL http://www.sightline.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/12/ Who-Pays-for-Parking-Sightline-Dec-2013.pdf.
Manville, M. 2013. Parking requirements and housing development. Journal of the American Planning Association, 79(1):49–66. ISSN 0194-4363. doi: 10.1080/01944363.2013.785346. URL http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944363.2013.785346{#}.VZWirBNViko.
Manville, M. 2017. Bundled parking and vehicle ownership: Evidence from the American Housing Survey. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 10(1):27–55.
Morlan, K. 2017. City’s long list of regulations prevents smaller, cheaper apartments. URL https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/land-use/citys-long-list-regulations-prevents-smaller-cheaper-apartments/.
Muth, R. 1969. Cities and housing the spatial pattern of urban residential land use. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226554136.
Quigley, J. M. and L. A. Rosenthal. 2005. The effects of land use regulation on the price of housing: What do we know? What can we learn? Cityscape, 8(1):69–137.
Schneider, J. A. 2018. An ordinance amending the zoning ordinance of the City of Urbana, Illinois. Technical report, City of Urbana, Community Development Services Department, Urbana.
Shoup, D. 2014. The High Cost of Minimum Parking Requirements. In S. Ison and C. Mulley, eds., Parking Issues and Policies (Transport and Sustainability, Volume 5), pp. 87–113. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-1-78350-919-5. doi: 10.1108/S2044-994120140000005011. URL http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/10.1108/S2044-994120140000005011.
SPUR. 2007. Affordable by design. URL http://www.spur.org/publications/spur-report/2007-11-20/affordable-design.
Thompson, C. 2016. No parking here. URL https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/01/future-parking-self-driving-cars/.
Trageser, C. 2015. Why micro-homes aren’t taking off in San Diego: City’ s parking rules make it difficult to build the tiny dwellings (KPBS).
Weinberger, R., J. Kaehny, and M. Rufo. 2010. U.S. parking policies: An overview of management strategies. Technical report, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.
White, T., C. Wilkins, and E. J. Pinto. 2016. Economical rental housing by design for communities that work.
