No Room for Parking

Rob Manning, reporting for OPB, discusses the Portland trend towards multi-family projects with no off-site parking:

One of those developers is Dave Mullens with the Urban Development Group. He opened the Irvington Garden in a close-in Northeast Portland neighborhood last year. It’s 50 units with no parking places.

“The cost of parking would make building this type of project on this location unaffordable,” Mullens says.

Mullens calls the difference “tremendous.”

“Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos,” he says.

…

Planners and developers say successful, no-parking projects have two things in common: frequent transit service, and a nice, walkable neighborhood.

Parking is an amenity and should be treated as such. Parking minimums required by most zoning ordinances obscure the fact that there is a cost associated with the parking. We should eliminate the minimums and let the market determine both the quantity and cost of parking. We might find that in some places, like Portland, we can decrease the cost of housing by almost 40%. That is a significant difference!