this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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I would love to end parking minimums everywhere. Where I live there are a large number of churches and universities which all have large parking lots. This means these streets need to be taken care of but can't get any city taxes for so the rest of us residents have to pay taxes to maintain them. I have no problems with universities which more than make it up with people and events. Churches are fine but with the parking minimums it means there are massive parking lots that only get close to full a few hours a week. That is the largest waste of them all.
Parking minimums seems like something that people think they need but once removed won't affect day to day.
Or maybe people need those parking minimums until they have alternatives.
For example, all that church parking. If they didn’t have it, does the congregation have reasonable other ways to get there? Is there sufficient street parking? Is the neighborhood ok with a flood of cars overwhelming the streets every Sunday?
I live in a small city built out a couple decades ago that clearly shows both. There are quite a few churches near the town center without parking. Their congregations are mostly walking distance or can park on the street. We also have more suburban churches with huge parking lots, whose congregations have no option but to drive, there’s no street parking and the neighbors don’t want them flooding the neighborhoods every week.
So the question is how to get those suburban churches to be more like those downtown churches? I don’t think it’s as simple as removing the parking minimums so more buildings can squish into smaller areas. That’s one characteristic of denser areas, but I don’t see how it’s a defining feature
Having some way to get places other than a car, is a more useful feature to focus on
Edit after getting the article to load … in this case the minimum is 1/2 parking spot per unit. That not much. I guess they’re focusing on it being next to a subway so people have transportation options. Maybe it’s just my personal experience, but this is a place where more parking can be good. I used to live in a major city and enjoyed all the benefits of transit and walking: highly recommended! However I was never able to shake the occasional need for a car or even just the anxiety about a car, and eventually moved out to the ‘burbs. If I had a good place to park a car and leave it, I might still be living downtown using transit for almost everything. However partly due to this “all or nothing” approach, I now drive everywhere. How is that a win for anyone? I totally agree with reducing parking minimums for retail or businesses where people have options, but trying to build places to live that don’t provide what people need is counter-productive. Give me a city apartment with a place I can leave my car while I need a car or think I do, and over time if I can get away without a car I’ll carve money by getting rid of it
Edit - fuck. centuries ago. The point was my town was built pre-cars, which is important to this topic.
Removing parking minimums from new construction is a great method to slowly remove parking as a need to happen. This gives a great quick turn solution with a longer legs since only "needed" parking will be added as the surplus decreases.
I do feel that reduce car use requires both removing of incentives to drive (like free unlimited parked as an assumption) as well as adding other transit options. I know personally that if I know parking is going to be bad I start considering all my options since driving is such a default option. We need it both ways. Especially since adding more transit options are not going to be built unless people use them. People will use them if they have to which brings pressure to make more and better options. This works best when the people who need to use them are affluent and powerful. We need both
That's what we're gradually do over here in Norway, new apartment complexes does not even have 1 parking place per apartment, you have to buy one for about 40-60k usd if you want one
There's no requirements for guest parking either, which can be a pain. But basically everyone who wants to park needs to pay for it.
They also removed free street parking. People are whining that it will kill the towns, because people can't park in town for free, but not happened yet
Its fine to have free parking where there is space. There are less and less space so people might have to pay for parking but it should have people focus on none car options.
A good way can be to keep the same amount of mandated parking minimum but allows that up to x% (30%, 50%, 90% ?) of this parking can be replaced with secured bike parking (with precise specification on what is a secured bike parking, the same way as there is specifications for a car parking spot width, length ...).
This way this gives a choice, either the shop owner decide to ~save a fuckton of money on land and construction cost~ be environmentaly friendly and build bike parking instead of car parking spot, or he can still spend money on a huge parking lot if he is really against bike.
~ be sensitive to the environment and build bike parking
Bike parking is good for everyone. Also super easy to do
It's probably a fair point to mention that smaller cities and towns have wildly different parking needs than NYC, where the majority of residents don't own a car. The existence of parking minimums in a place like New York is just bonkers. (Thanks, Robert Moses!)
I still expect plenty of parking to be built after any city repeals parking minimums, it just isn't an excessive amount, and the city and developers soon start arriving at a natural equilibrium (compared to an inflated floor) of what is actually required, depending on what kind of business or residence it is, where it is located, etc.
The big factor about parking is how much it adds to housing costs. The Government Accountability Office did a report in 2018 that estimated that parking requirements added $50,000.00 to every housing unit sold. Obviously, some parking will probably be needed, but just reducing the amount has the effect of an immediate per-unit cost reduction for a given multi-family project. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-637.pdf
Yeah, sorry for the brain fart: centuries ago. I was trying to make the distinction of my city being built out mostly before cars, and it’s fairly old for the US.
Despite having a small population for a city, this means it’s structured more like we think of for major cities. It has a nice walkable center with transit options including a train station and plenty of higher density housing. There are no “stroads”.
We’re part of a regional transit network centered on the nearby major city. The change I have most hope for is a state zoning mandate that every community served by transit must allow higher density housing “as of right” near the transit. If a vpdeveloper wants to build a large apartment block within half a mile of transit, it can’t be a variance or special request, but starts with the assumption that it’s allowed. We’ll see how this plays out over the long run though
We’ve generally been fairly pro-housing, but city council has tried to slow that down over the last ten years ago so infrastructure can catch up. We finished a cycle of replacing all our elementary schools and one of the middle schools, and just spent an incredibly huge amount on a huge high school campus, so that removes the argument about crowded schools
Raze the whole suburbia to the ground and rebuild it with proper pedestrian, bike and public transportation, mixed zoning in mind. There is no saving or improving it, it is just too far gone.