Parking Is More Than Regulation, It’s Cultural

Developers are pushing for updates to the city’s parking regulations, but even if the the industry could convince the city to reduce parking requirements, car usage is cultural in Los Angeles. Without adequate parking on multifamily projects, developers may find challenges leasing units upon completion. In the interim decade or decades before cars become obsolete, replaced by either an efficient public transit system or driverless cars, developers will need to find a stepping stone between expensive subterranean parking or bulky surface area parking and no parking at all.

“People are welcoming a denser lifestyle in this city,” Simon M. Aftalion, development director at Markwood Enterprises, tells GlobeSt.com. “Developers are seeing that shift, and they are revisiting how to park these sites. Even if we can incentivize the city’s planning department to require less parking, you still need to consider how you will lease those units in a city where most people have a car. “It is definitely a slow dance towards trying to figure out how to park in a non-traditional way.”

Markwood is implementing automated and semi-automated parking in its developments as an alternative. Aftalion says that these systems are both space and cost effective for new construction, and expects the company will never go back to standard parking options. “I don’t think that we have looked at a potential acquisition without thinking about some form of automated parking,” he says. “For ground-up development, I don’t think that we are going to do traditional parking again ever because it doesn’t make sense.” Despite Markwood’s success and recommendation, the firm finds many developers are hesitant to adopt automated systems. “Developers are apprehensive, and they are concerned that tenants won’t be comfortable with it. I personally think that people are going to be more comfortable with it,” says Aftalion.

Some developers have built flexible parking structures that can be incorporated as usable square footage into a project with easy conversions. Aftalion sees similar benefits with automated parking systems. “The fully automated system is looked at as storage with a pallet that the car sits on, what is stopping us from making that same pallet into a storage container?,” he adds. “We can lease that space to a tenant as storage, if tenants begin opting out of owning a car. That can provide an alternative means of cash flow down the line when people don’t need cars anymore. It provides flexibility and reliability.”

Automated parking may not be an option for every project or every developer, but developers should be thinking about viable options to accommodate both parking requirements and the parking needs of L.A. residents. “For the next 10 years, you are going to have tenants that are going to have cars,” says Aftalion. “You are going to have to provide parking for those tenants. Implementing these in-between measures will help to chip away at the investment that we are putting into parking and it is shrinking the space we are dedicating to parking. If our parking structures continue to grow, that is a problem.”