Advocating for More Affordable Housing in California
AB 1401 is a Practical Step to Making Housing more Affordable
Hey all,
I know it has been a little while since you have heard from me on this listserv, but I wanted you to be aware of some of the things going on at the state level regarding housing bills.
Housing Humans vs. Housing Cars
The housing crisis in our city is complex and multi-layered. No single policy will fix it. But there is reason to think that by taking a series of incremental steps, we can make an impact in community residents' lives.
One policy that contributes to the high cost of housing is that of parking requirements. Under current law, housing developers are required to accommodate a certain level of parking in their development, even if they think their residents will not fully value the parking. Research has shown parking requirements have many negative consequences: pollution, congestion, and making the development process more complex. But the most important impacts of parking requirements are on those on affordability:
Requiring new housing to include parking structures or lots means developers have to spend more money on construction and land. Shane Phillips cites the cost in urban areas to be over $50,000 per parking space. Most of the time, this gets passed along to renters in the form of higher rents. Higher rents make projects even more unaffordable for low-income and middle-class renters. While all new housing is going to be on the higher end of the price spectrum (unless it is subsidized). However, any given developer can make choices about who to target with housing development. Parking requirements create an incentive for developers to be targeted towards higher-income residents since they are more likely to own and use cars more often and be willing to pay more for parking.
The increased costs make it harder for subsidized, affordable housing to be built. San Diego ended its parking requirements near transit in 2019; it saw a five-fold increase in the housing built around its transit stops. This included 1564 subsidized affordable units created around transit, 1292 more than were created the year before. Many of those units were part of 100% affordable projects that were presumably made feasible because the developers could reduce the cost of providing parking.
Now to be clear: many developers will still choose to include parking in their developments even after this law passes. It does not ban parking (nor should it!) as a part of new housing. But it will hopefully allow more responsive decision making as to whether parking makes sense for a particular project, which will make housing broadly more affordable:
COVID has exposed the problems we have in our city with housing affordability and the way overcrowded apartments on the Eastside led to the needless deaths of many community members. We can and should take steps to make sure our housing market creates affordable enough units to ensure there is opportunity for our community.
There is a bill before the California Assembly, AB 1401, that would help end parking requirements for housing near transit: Many advocates think the bill could fail this week if there is not an effort to rally behind it. Please use this tool to send an email to your representative asking them to support AB 1401.
Feel free to reply to this message if you have any questions or thoughts! If you want to learn more, I recommend the work of Donald Shoup.
Until next week,
Thomas