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repo_code t1_itsertx wrote

Reply to comment by Candid- in Cambridge completely eliminated parking minimums yesterday!! by RealBurhanAzeem

Developers are still allowed to build parking. They are not required to.

In most of America, it's illegal to build a building without parking and market it to people without cars. That will now be legal in Cambridge.

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fps81 t1_ituqbsv wrote

Hilarious watching progressives use free market capitalism as the answer to a question about what will happen when a government protection is lifted.

Parking is stigmatized. Developers will not build affordable parking for those who need or want it, now that they don’t have to. They will charge $1000/month for the handful of garage spaces in a building and everyone else will have to fight for on street parking.

Yes, people living a certain lifestyle can make it in Cambridge without a car. But for those who can’t afford to Uber everywhere or for those who enjoy driving or the outdoors, the free market is not going to help them.

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ik1nky t1_itva8us wrote

Car free households are overwhelmingly lower income. The higher your income, the more likely you are to own more cars and drive them more.

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fps81 t1_itvdrds wrote

I think you'd be really hard pressed to find a working class person who can live and work car free. Public transit only goes to really high end businesses that can afford the expensive boston/cambridge office space, and doesn't run at all for people doing shift work. People who work at building sites, do in-home work (cleaning, trades, etc.), or who work in warehouses will need a car.

Traveling outside the city without a car is also basically impossible, so you have to live your life inside Boston and Cambridge, or pay thousands of dollars in rental fees to use a rental car when you want to leave.

The people I know who are car free in Cambridge are overwhelmingly high income and spend a lot more on transportation than I do.

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Candid- t1_itt2sxd wrote

There are very good reasons why it is illegal almost everywhere else. It isn’t to protect developers, it is to protect citizens from destructively selfish developer practices. I am not sure why we think we are smarter than everywhere else by making legal what they have all learned, painfully, should stay illegal.

This feels very shady. Real estate developers and landlords in Cambridge got a windfall today and I don’t think it will turn into lower housing prices or fewer cars. I do think a few connected developers will get a few more millions of dollars from properties they couldn’t develop before.

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holycow958 t1_ittg362 wrote

Parking requirements were created throughout the US as a form of racial segregation after the supreme court outlawed racially based restrictive covenants. Everything else is not smarter for keeping them.

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Candid- t1_ittkz8w wrote

I think you could argue they are a form of wealth segregation. I disagree and I think it is more of an attempt to maintain current community ratios for existing residence/voters rather than cater to a group of hypothetical non-residents or vocal want-to-be residents … but I can see an argument for it being deliberate wealth segregation.

You don’t have to play the race card every time. Not everything is about race.

Really, though, I think those regulations are all about preventing predatory developer practices that negatively affect current residents in ways that will last for decades after the developers have taken their profits and moved on.

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IntelligentCicada363 t1_itujyjf wrote

Given that these parking minimums add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of each unit built in the city, how could you possibly argue that it is anything but wealth segregation?

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Candid- t1_itwo3tl wrote

Adding residential property without parking, to a city where 2/3rds of the households have vehicles, is about disrupting the lifestyle and convenience of the majority of the residents in the city, wealthy or not.

Owning a car is not about wealth. It is about lifestyle needs and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that low income people are more likely to require a car than wealthy people.

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IntelligentCicada363 t1_ity34qz wrote

Then the conclusion is that the lifestyle and convenience provided by the city for the past 60 years, based largely on a population that was 30% smaller than it is today, is not sustainable and must change, and is changing, as the city grows.

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Candid- t1_itz8baa wrote

Agreed. This is an interesting step 1. Now further steps need of be taken to ensure this doesn’t result in a ton of new high prices development without actually solving the real problems.

When Boston passed a similar law, the made it only apply to low income housing. I would have liked that better since it drove the right focus.

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Canahedo t1_itvenz7 wrote

>You don’t have to play the race card every time. Not everything is about race.

You're correct that not everything is about race, but this is America, a lot of things really are about race.

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RevolutionaryGlass0 t1_itwuuei wrote

Plenty of nice places in other countries don't have parking minimums and the citizens aren't asking for more "protection from selfish developers", at least when it comes to parking.

They're unnecessary and waste space that could instead be used to combat the housing crisis, or could be a shop, or literally anything else.

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Candid- t1_itwyid9 wrote

There are three recommended steps to solve this problem:

Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers. Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.

Claiming success after just the first one is potentially problematic…

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RevolutionaryGlass0 t1_itwywmb wrote

I agree with that, removing parking is just the first step, it's important the council then uses the extra money and space wisely.

>Claiming success after just the first one is potentially problematic…

But when it comes to this, the US has had problems with urban planning in most places for decades, Cambridge is the first in the state to remove parking minimums. It's understandable people are celebrating progress.

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