Parking for Affordability

The Portland, Oregon Bureau of Planning and Sustainability produced an insightful report on the impact on-site parking has on affordability. The study assumes a 10,000 sf urban lot and looks at six different parking scenarios to determine what impact parking has on the viability and affordability the resulting project. The results are telling - a project with no parking is able to achieve the same return on investment at $800/month rental rates as a project with underground parking at $1300/month.

Parking isn’t free. The cheapest option, surface parking, comes with a significant opportunity cost in loss of developable land. Space wise the most efficient option, basement parking, comes at significant cost per space. These costs have to be recouped somehow. It’s logical that these costs will crop up in housing prices.

Although this is just one data point, it poses the question of how much our suburban experiment has increased our housing costs both directly and indirectly. Anecdotally, at some point in the past 100 years a single income household could achieve a comfortable middle class status. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Have the hidden costs of suburbia cost us our middle class?

Via Kent Lundberg