Former TPR Editor Mott Smith Argues Against One-Size-Fits-All City Parking Requirements

Onsite Parking Requirements Versus Neighborhood Potential

Picture Sunland-Tujunga: a beautiful valley nestled among green hillsides, with a diverse population whose ethnic backgrounds, incomes, and spending power evoke a smaller Pasadena or Burbank.

It is perhaps surprising that a resident of this north L.A. neighborhood must drive no less than 20 minutes to Glendale, Pasadena or Burbank just to be able to do some shopping on foot in a pleasant commercial district.

The reason, not surprisingly, is parking. But it's not the parking problem you might expect. Sunland-Tujunga's teetering commercial core on Commerce Avenue has scores of diagonal spaces worthy of envy by any Larchmont Village aspirant, and drivers have no problem finding a parking place any time of day or night. But entrepreneurs aiming to turn an empty lot into a mixed-use project or open a charming café in a now-vacant storefront will have a hell of time. City regulators review project applications in Sunland-Tujunga, as they do across the city, with a set of one-size-fits-all parking regulations that almost seem designed with sprawl as the objective.

Onsite parking requirements-currently under attack by UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup and the Victoria Transportation Institute among others-have, for now at least, sealed the fate of older communities like Sunland-Tujunga. They have made it practically illegal to introduce pedestrian-oriented uses that don't resemble the convenience retail or auto repair shops that have come to characterize commercial boulevards throughout the city.

And this problem is not at all unique to this part of town. It impacts every old main street in Los Angeles. In Eagle Rock, another L.A. neighborhood, local activists have struggled for twenty years to restore, protect and enhance the neighborhood's historic pedestrian character using traditional public tools. But despite specific plans and façade improvement programs, they have met with only limited success. They have indeed slowed the growth of the mini-malls and other pedestrian-unfriendly businesses that dot Colorado Boulevard, their main street. But despite glimmers of hope, they have yet to seal the deal on their real goal: creating a cohesive, vibrant pedestrian-oriented district in the middle of town.

The solution is not, as many have suggested, to eliminate parking from our playbooks. Most people in the region still drive for most trips. So to create parking-free zones in today's Los Angeles would be tantamount to creating people-free zones.

Rather, we suggest approaching parking as a neighborhood essential rather than an ad-hoc "mitigation" for the impact of individual projects. With good urban design and effective zoning mechanisms in place, community parking can be more effective even than a transit station in creating the incentives to develop pedestrian-oriented uses in a neighborhood.

Good examples of this principal in practice are appearing across the nation and even locally, where Pasadena and Santa Monica stand out. These models demonstrate how investment in community parking (combined with good neighborhood planning, of course) can activate the economic potential of smaller properties and create very real incentives for mixed-use, pedestrian-scaled projects.

Before we dive into this concept further, let's look how current parking practices dash any older commercial district's hope of becoming a destination for shoppers, diners, workers and other users if it isn't already one.

Café or Medical Storage?

Most properties in older commercial areas are effectively doomed as long as parking requirements must be fulfilled onsite. Let's consider the future of a hypothetical, run-of-the-mill parcel on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock. Chances are it has about 7,500 square foot of land area with a 5,000 square foot building on it. Typical tenants there might include a convenience store, a contractor's office and a medical supply company using a storefront for storage. Workers in the building share the six parking spaces at the back, and the shops come right up to the lot line on Colorado. It's a perfect spot for new cafes, boutiques and/or other more pedestrian-oriented retail.

Now, if the building's owner applied to the City for a change-of-use permit to convert 1,500 sq. ft. of retail space to a restaurant, he or she would be required to show where the additional fifteen required onsite parking spaces would be located. In order to make room for those spaces onsite, he or she would have to demolish the existing building and pave over 70 percent of the total land area. The size of the replacement structure he or she would be allowed to build? A paltry 2,250 square feet-less than half the original size.

That owner clearly faces an unenviable choice: give up hope of developing his or her property, demolish a perfectly good street-retail building in exchange for a suburban-style shack on an asphalt island, or hope to win an exemption from City's requirements.

A drive down Colorado Boulevard reveals how this dilemma has played out for numerous actual property owners. Some older street-retail buildings are barely holding on, others have been replaced by fast-food establishments, and a few with visionary and tenacious owners and/or tenants have won exemptions from City parking requirements to open trendy cafes and bistros, often after contentious multiyear ordeals.

Things are even graver in Sunland-Tujunga, where the median lot on Commerce Avenue is less than 3,500 sq. ft.-too small for any new use that serves customers and has to fulfill its parking requirements onsite.

In both areas and in much of the city, property owners and the neighborhoods are stuck in this 1950s-era development rut.

What's a Community to Do?

Stakeholders in neighborhoods like these have already tried many ways of stemming decline and creating more walkability. They have established streetscape and façade improvement programs to help buildings lucky enough to have been spared the axe so far. They have produced specific plans that ban mini-malls and convenience retail.

And while some good has come of these efforts as a whole, the bans on auto-oriented development have caused nearly all development activity to stop where they have been put in place. Onsite parking rules have made neighborhood-scaled pedestrian development infeasible for most older commercial properties. And when you add bans on non-pedestrian uses, the door is shut on the only economic option that would have otherwise remained.

When activity grinds to a halt like this, redevelopment can be seductive. Redevelopment is unquestionably an important tool for revitalization, but when it is used to assemble super-sized parcels so that established developers can build larger projects with self-contained parking, it can be counterproductive. The large-scale projects that characterize many redevelopment areas can solve the onsite-parking problem, but at substantial cost to neighborhood character. They work by handing over a big enough chunk of the community to a private developer that he or she can amortize the cost of parking over a whole district-the model of a shopping mall. While this can stimulate development, it also transforms what was once a diverse community of owners and businesses into the asset of a single owner. And thus a very important part of the community's value-the established social and entrepreneurial networks that have been built up over years-is lost.

Interestingly, seven out of ten property owners surveyed on Commerce Avenue said they would be interested in developing mixed-use projects on their lots as long as they could secure parking off-site. A community parking system would remove a major roadblock to neighborhood-friendly development on Commerce Avenue without removing the people who make up the community.

To Work, Community Parking Must be Coupled with Entitlement Mechanisms

Many neighborhoods already have quite a bit of public parking in place but have seen little improvement to the pedestrian realm. In these areas, a critical step too often missed is to translate the community's parking capacity into development rights that builders and/or businesses can access through a predictable, over-the-counter process.

Developers and business owners in Old Town Pasadena, for example, can buy shares of "parking credits" from the City's public garages in order to satisfy requirements and secure project approvals. The fees generated through this process can help offset the cost of existing parking facilities and/or fund future projects. Without a doubt, this system has played a critical role in the success of Old Town's revitalization into a pedestrian-oriented shopping district.

But in Los Angeles, owners and developers do not yet have this option. They can apply for parking waivers, but the process is long and unpredictable, and, moreover, it doesn't provide them with a way to invest in community parking that benefits their properties as well as the overall quality of life in the neighborhood. The waiver process buys them out of their current requirements, but since most customers for most businesses still need a place to stash their cars, getting out of parking requirements isn't enough to change an owner's decision factors in how to use his or her property. There needs to be a better strategy for parking visitors at the neighborhood level throughout Los Angeles that supports property owners and community objectives at the same time.

Los Angeles Takes the Lead

It is exciting to see that increasingly sophisticated communities and visionary leaders throughout Los Angeles are positioning the city for a change that could set a national example for reclaiming older commercial neighborhoods.

In response to work initiated by the Eagle Rock Community Preservation and Revitalization Corporation, City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa last month introduced a Council Motion to establish the City's first Community Parking Pilot Project. The goal of this initiative is to ease the way for businesses wanting to locate in the Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan area and to increase the pedestrian-orientation of the street. In the coming months, the Planning Department and the Department of Transportation will be working closely with the community and Civic Enterprise Associates to design a strategy for using community parking to provide project entitlements more easily for neighborhood-scaled uses that are consistent with the community's vision for itself.

Sunland-Tujunga's Councilmember, Wendy Greuel has worked closely with the Neighborhood Council in its "Vision 2020" process to define the area's future as an open-space rich, more livable community with a denser mixed-use center. A community parking program will be essential to fueling the re-emergence of Commerce Avenue as the core of a sub-region that is becoming more cohesive, more walkable, and healthier by design.

Parking Supports TODs

The hope of the Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is that when enough people ride transit, developers will build pedestrian-oriented projects simply because transit riders become pedestrians the moment they leave the train station or the bus stop. As walkable communities get built around transit, more people will give up their cars. And so on.

We've seen how parking provided at the community level, when linked to development rights through an accessible mechanism, gives owners a strong economic incentive to build pedestrian-friendly uses on their properties. The example of Old Town Pasadena shows how a community, made more pedestrian-friendly by parking, needs no alteration to serve visitors arriving by rail.

Why should we wait for the completion of L.A.'s rail system to start redesigning neighborhoods everywhere? By expanding the use of community parking in Los Angeles we can begin creating a more pedestrian-friendly world right now. Imagine an L.A. where undervalued commercial districts become reinvigorated with the entrepreneurial energy of all the in-place owners. And imagine a world where we can lay the groundwork for a transit-friendly future by accommodating the car today.