There was a much talked about article in last week's Houston Chronicle in which the Chron's editorial board, ever anxious to promote the Smart Growth agenda, highlighted the hinderance of City of Houston parking regulations in promoting the advance of a pedestrian friendly city. Funny isn't it how a group of people who want to promote the massive reorganization of an entire city are having their agenda being hindered by... regulations?
As for who is talking about this article, there are references by Anne and Kevin at Bloghouston, Christof Spieler at the Citizens Transportation Coalition, by Sedosi, a Chronicle Blogger and by Tory Gattis at Houston Strategies. Much to Tory's credit, he mentions that the CVS pharmacy in Midtown has been much maligned. Yes it has. It has been beaten up publicly by architect Dan Burnam, Councilmember Peter Brown, and indirectly in the September 2006 issue of 002 Magazine. I know people heap a ton of abuse on their spouses, friends, children, business associates, their underlings at their jobs, not to mention at their political opponents, but I never imagined a mere pharmacy store would take so much crap! I wonder if the pro - pedestrial friendly / Smart Growth crowd would have gotten so upset if it had been a single mom and pop pharmacy store which would have located in Midtown Houston and not a chain brand like CVS?
But I digress. We are here to talk about parking aren't we? Well, all of the above bloggers have made comments and insights which are good and dandy, but the best insight was made - ironically - by my otherwise opponent Christof who writes:
"But why should we care? Because parking is never free. Parking comes at a very real cost to the building owner: aside from the cost of paving, there’s the cost of the land: Midtown property goes for $50 a square foot, so that’s almost $20,000 a parking spot.
Parking comes at a cost to the city, too. Every parking spot is a bit of land that can’t be occupied by a store or a restaurant. It’s land we build streets and utlities for but don’t get any sales tax revenue from."
Mr. Spieler even goes on to observe, in effect, that there are areas of town where there are mismatches in parking demand verses supply, such as in the Rice Village. Nearly all the bloggers above mention the problems of the mandates of city ordainances, which stipulate how much parking will be provided etc. Yes, our parking ordainances are the closest we come to imposing a zoning ordainance on land uses in Houston.
However what everyone seems to miss is that we should be getting the free market involved. What? The free market? Are you crazy Mr. Mighty Wizard? What does the free market have anything to do with this? .
Well gentle readers, I am glad you asked that question. Herr Spieler is right - TANSTAAFL is in effect. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I for one am one of the few Houstonians who pay out of pocket for my work parking. You see I work for VLICA, a very large oil and gas company located in downtown Houston. Most people who have lived in Houston for any time are aware that if you go to downtown you have to pay for parking. I have paid $40 per month to park at my company's landlord provided parking garage. The real cost for parking is $80 per month, but VLICA pays for half of my parking fee. Now that I think about it, what really is happening is that I do pay the full parking fee. It just so happens that VLICA doesn't pay me the other $40 per month but gives it to the landlord instead.
Now, what is interesting is that I too have read the City of Houston's parking ordainances. These mandates in most cases are linked to how much square footage is occupied by the building in question, though there are MANDATES and variances based on how the land is put to use. Several years ago, I remember reading an article in The Economist where the City of Chicago issued their last major overhaul of their zoning ordainances in 1957. At that time, the City of Chicago mandated that each single family house have at least one parking space for an automobile. Little did the central planners know back in the 1950's that automobile ownership is strongly positively correlated with incomes and that many homes would become two car households!What tends to happen is that builders and developers, when confronted with mandates to provide minimal levels of parking spaces, build to specified code. In other words, they provide the minimal levels of parking spaces needed to satisfy the powers that be and that's it, not one parking space more. So the Economist article went on to say that since the early 1990's, there are areas in Chicago where there are shortages of parking spots because home builders provided - you guessed it - one parking space for each house they built in parts of the city. Hence the shortage of parking space.
I have a powerful suspicion that Houston and Chicago are not the only cities which have these kinds of problems. I have observed enough of politics to know that urban planners, urban engineers, and urban politicos are a fairly incestuous bunch. They have their associations, meetings and conferences, and so forth. I have a powerful suspicion that there are planning books which are being followed, or that there are a bunch of copycatters which simply adopt similar rules which were promuglated elsewhere. In other words, someone in City A decided that there needed to be X amount of parking based on building square footage, ergo this was adopted as a kind of planning standard by planners elsewhere. If a city was extremely lucky, then it got planners which might have learned something from failed guesses made by planners elsewhere and therefore effectively overplanned for the amount of parking that would be necessary which would avoid the competition for parking spots throughout an urban district or area.
Anyone who has ever thought one wink about command and control economies should be starting to see where problems are going to erupt when you try to regulate parking and land use. What we have here are binding minimums in the amount of parking space which is to be provided to the public, but as Herr Spieler notes, there are often times where all this parking is not often used. I can testify to this. At my VLICA parking garage, a six story monster, it is normal for the highest floor to be empty of cars. It is also free of oil spots on the parking pavement.
A real solution to this would be to start having people pay out of pocket for all of their parking. Yes gentle readers, you read this correctly. ALL PARKING WOULD BE PAID FOR OUT OF POCKET! What I am proposing is that the parking issue be solved by the pricing mechanism and not by planning ordainances or dictates. That would include parking for you home, your schooling, your entertainment venues, and for your workplace. That would go a long way to correctly matching the true demand for parking with supply. What we have in effect abandoned, and have abandoned on a massive scale, is the concept of spontaneous order in favor of massive levels of command and control central planning. And that should make you Smart Growth types out there who have been chanting endlessly that Houston MUST plan for growth a moment to pause and think that if the mere subject of parking has turned out this way, then what will all of your massive plans for urban redevelopment turn out like?
Now I can hear plenty of uproar already coming over this idea. But before you roar too hard, you might want to think that this might modestly increase the use of other forms of transportation such as biking to work, walking, using buses and so forth, as a way of getting around. It is hard to say because it is hard to quantify how much we really subsidize parking for autos. That is because we pay for parking through increased costs for goods marketed by businesses (which have to pay for their parking lots), through potentially higher tax rates because land isn't being used as productively, etc.
I will leave everyone with a story about parking and urban form. When I was an Economics student at the University of Houston, one of my professors asked us in class one day what would be the effect of having students pay for parking access via an auction. As many of you Houstonians know, the UH University Park (with an enrollment of 32,000 or so students) often has a parking problem (why?) during the morning and midday hours despite the massive parking lots dotting and surrounding the entire campus. The simple answer would be that the closest parking spaces would be the most costly because they would be bid up to the highest price, while the ones furthest away would be the cheapest. Nearly everyone except for yours truly shouted down the idea at once. I loved it because I was working a job making $35,000 per year at that time and would have loved outbidding nearly everyone else because I had gotten tired of walking 15 minutes to my classes in late morning with a satchel of books in hand. I would have loved to pay $200 or more per semester to have cut that dreary walk down to five minutes or less, but I couldn't do it because thousands of 19 year olds who had nothing better to do (and who would never in a million years wanted to put parking spots up for auction) had beaten me to the good spots merely because they had signed up for 8:00am classes and I had to drag my ass in several hours later and get the leftovers. You might want to remember that story the next time you are planning to open a hip urban wine bar in Midtown Houston and want all of your patrons to walk to your establishment.
And so it was. But it is getting very late and I have to get up tomorrow to slave another day away at VLICA. Still, this should leave you with some food for thought.
Ciao for now
TMW
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at September 19, 2006 01:50 AM