LOS ANGELES—With the inevitable adoption of driverless cars and new technology like ride sharing services and companies like Envoy, developers have been calling for cities to reduce parking requirements on new developments. Now, research from UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate shows that low-income renters are also negatively impacted by the parking requirements. Many apartment parking garage fees are bundled into rental rates, and carless drivers pay more than $400 million annually in parking fees. Many carless renters are also low-income, making the financial burden significant. To find our more, we sat down with C.J. Gabbe, Assistant Professor in Santa Clara University's Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, to discuss the research.

GlobeSt.com: What was the impetus to look at parking impacts on low-income renters specifically?

C.J. Gabbe: Greg Pierce, my co-author and I, have been looking at parking policy in various cities, particularly in California, and we had been interested in looking nationally at the supply of parking as it related to housing. We were also interested in carless households. We really started exploring the national data to understand what was going on better, and it really hit us that carless renters often had much lower incomes than the average renter living in housing that has a garage that they are indirectly paying for.

GlobeSt.com: What are the solutions for carless renters?

Gabbe: Cities could reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements. As a developer, you maybe able to build an apartment complex without needing to provide the amount of parking required today. In general in the US, we have very antiquated parking standards, and often times they are decades old. Our approach is all about giving people options. Renters should have the option to rent or buy an apartment or condo that does or does not include parking. The crux of our policy recommendation is giving people more choices and more flexibility.

GlobeSt.com: How does changing technology fit in, like driverless cars and shared ride services?

Gabbe: That wasn't part of this research, but that is something that is on our radar. We are trying to understand the future technology scenarios and how they may require very different parking standards than we have today. From the perspective of this paper, I think planners and policy makers are talking about people paying for parking whether they need it or not, and we found the carless renter a good example of just that. You can't imagine a better example of someone paying for something that they are not using than someone paying for a garage that doesn't have a car. We are really working backwards from the equity aspect of carless renters, and the technology question in the future is going to be about how we can better tailor parking to resident's needs.

GlobeSt.com: Is the idea that if carless renters do not have to pay for bundled parking, that money will be recycled into the economy in other ways?

Gabbe: Yes. We think that if given a choice, carless renters and others that may consume less parking may choose to send more on housing attributes or move to a different neighborhood. They may choose to spend money on different things or they may choose to save it. We think that giving people the choice around how they spend their money is important.

GlobeSt.com: Are cities beginning to change their parking requirements?

Gabbe: There has been. It is very slowly picking up steam in the US, and a lot of US cities, it is happening on a neighborhood plan basis or stationary plan basis. The systematic reforms have been slow with a few exceptions. Cities like San Francisco and Portland have made some significant parking changes, but cities like Los Angeles have been slower to adopt these changes. It has been more on a neighborhood-to-neighborhood basis rather than something that is being broadly applied. I am optimistic that cities are moving in the direction of providing more possibilities.

GlobeSt.com: What was the impetus to look at parking impacts on low-income renters specifically?

GlobeSt.com: What are the solutions for carless renters?

GlobeSt.com: How does changing technology fit in, like driverless cars and shared ride services?

GlobeSt.com: Is the idea that if carless renters do not have to pay for bundled parking, that money will be recycled into the economy in other ways?

GlobeSt.com: Are cities beginning to change their parking requirements?

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Calls Mount For Decreased Parking Requirements

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