Anti-car and pro-developer in Berkeley

Zelda Bronstein in The Berkeley Daily Planet:

On January 26, the Berkeley council unanimously approved a “parking reform package” that drastically reduced the requirements for parking in most new housing projects. The lot was sold as a transformative twofer that would induce a “mode shift”—plannerese for getting people out of their cars and on to bikes, public transit, and their own two feet—thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time expedite affordable housing.

The item originated as a 2015 referral from Councilmember Lori Droste. On January 27, Droste tweeted: “It is a thrilling day for climate action and affordability in our city.”

That remains to be seen. What can be said with certainty right now is that it was a moderately thrilling day for housing developers. 

Onsite (off-street) parking is expensive to build. The council eliminated parking minimums in all new housing projects except in the H (Hills) and ES-R (Environmental Safety-Residential, i.e., wildfire) Districts and the enactment of provisional parking maximums in transit-rich areas of the city. Provisional, because a developer can ask for permission to exceed the maximums. 

As Droste put it: “We’re not banning parking, we’re just not requiring people to build parking if they don’t need it.” The operative term here is the antecedent of “they”: I take it to be “developers.” In other words, this is developer-driven policy.

It can also be said with certainty that January 26 was not a thrilling day for data-driven decision-making. The council approved the changes with scant evidence that they would get people to drive less and no evidence whatsoever that they would lower the cost of housing.

On January 27, Droste retweeted Berkeley Housing Advisory Commissioner and California Yimby staffer Darrell Owens’ statement that “[a] recent staff analysis found that nearly 50% of the existing off-street parking spots in housing projects around the city sit empty.” Droste commented: “that’s why we abolished parking requirements and imposed no more than half a building can have parking yesterday.”

That’s disputable. The staff analysis [see Attachment 4, agenda for Council Special Meeting, January 26 (continued from December 15, 2020), p. 175 of the council packet] was supposedly based on the Parking Utilization Study conducted by Nelson Nygaard Consulting Associates in October 2019. 

The study focused on multi-unit residential projects of ten or more units, most of them with unbundled parking (on-site but you have to pay for it). According to city staff, the study “showed that only 54% off street parking was occupied. It also showed that 60% of on-street parking spaces near surveyed buildings were occupied—suggesting that on-street parking ‘spillover’ was not a concern.”

That’s not what the study showed. In a February 3, 2021, memo to the Albany City Council, Albany Planning Commissioner Doug Donaldson accurately summarized the findings of the Berkeley study:

Albany’s parking standards for mixed-use projects call for 1 space for each unit. A recent study of multi-family residential parking in Berkeley indicates that this would be sufficient, but that removing the parking minimum would significantly increase the on-street parking demand. The study found that the average on- and off-street parking occupancy across 20 properties surveyed was 55% (53% off-street and 61% on-street—this on-street component is important because most of the properties have unbundled parking and many tenants choose not to pay for an off-street space). A search of DMV records indicated that .5 vehicles were registered per unit.

In an email, Donaldson observed to me that 

Nelson Nygaard did their surveys after midnight and monitored the parking on the streets around the buildings. At that hour there is no turnover and cars parked near the buildings are likely to be associated with those buildings. At least that has been my experience when monitoring 510 Centro in El Cerrito Plaza. Also, Nelson Nygaard had license plate info from RpP permits. That info gave them the addresses associated with each plate.

In short, the Berkeley study did find that on-street spillover parking was a concern, though given the empty spaces in the onsite parking, it’s hard to call this “spillover.” 

No evidence here that unbundling parking dissuades people from owning and driving cars.

The approval of the parking reform package was based on yet another data-challenged premise: the notion that if you reduce or just eliminate parking requirements in residential projects, housing will be less expensive—in other words, that developers’ savings will trickle down to tenants’ lower rents.

That notion elicited skepticism from Councilmember Susan Wengraf. “What mechanisms,” Wengraf asked, “do we have in place that would lower the cost of housing with lower parking requirements?”....