Episode 03: Bundled Parking with Michael Manville

Shane Phillips 0:06
Hi there, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast. My name is Shane Phillips and I run the housing initiative for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and my co host is Dr. Michael Lens, Associate Professor of urban planning and public policy and Associate Faculty Director of the Lewis Center. On this podcast, we try to translate the arcane world of academia and peer-reviewed articles into something a little more accessible, and explore with our guests how their work might be translated into policy and practice to make cities more affordable and equitable.

Today, Dr. Lens and I are joined by our faculty colleague, Dr. Mike Manville, and we're talking about parking and land use. Thanks for joining us, Mike.

Michael Manville 0:58
Thanks for having me.

Shane Phillips 0:59
Last time, when we had Paavo on he said, I was a little too formal with my introduction so I'm keeping it loose here.

Michael Manville 1:05
Keep it loose. I just want to reiterate that I misunderstood and I did wear a zoom shirt.

Shane Phillips 1:12
Yep, just audio.

Michael Manville 1:14
I want the listener to picture me in a very professional attire.

Shane Phillips 1:17
Today, we'll be talking about a paper titled Parking Behavior, Bundled Parking and Travel Behavior in American cities, authored by Dr. Manville and Miriam Pinski, a doctoral student here at UCLA. But we're actually be touching on a few parking related papers that Mike has published over the years. And if I can start off this episode, by making it all about me, I actually came to the field of urban planning through an interest in transportation. But over the years, I've sort of gravitated more and more toward housing policy. And the line I give on why I made that shift is that it's hard to really get anything in our cities, right, including transportation, if you don't have the right land use and housing policy in place. And parking is a really interesting policy area, because it's transportation policy that's sort of mediated through land use policy. It's not cities or state governments that provide most parking, unlike roads, and trains, and buses, and so forth, it's developers. And in most places, our local governments do tell developers how much parking to build. Before we get into the details on what bundled and unbundled parking is and why that matters, Mike, could you just give us a general overview on what we know about parking and the impact that policies like minimum parking requirements have on cities and residents?

Michael Manville 2:38
Sure, yeah. I mean, I think it's sort of like what you said in that it occupies a very large but for a long time, kind of neglected space between transportation planning and land use planning, and Donald Shoup, who is our colleague, who is sort of the original guru of of parking studies

Shane Phillips 2:59
The Don if you will

Michael Manville 3:00
Yes, the Don of parking studies. He's always liked to say that the parking was neglected for so long, because each faction decided the other was the one responsible for thinking about it; the land use people thought it was a transportation problem, and the transportation people thought it was land use problem. And so for a long time, it went sort of unstudied, despite its very large impacts. And as you said, parking is sort of unique among transportation infrastructure for not being something the public provides. You know, like you said, the government builds roads, it builds trains, it provides buses, and parking is, especially off-street parking, is publicly mandated, but privately supplied. So when a developer goes to build something in virtually every part of every city in the country, there's a few exceptions we can talk about but they really are exceptions, one of the first things they have to do is figure out how they're going to fit the off street parking that's required. And so if you ever are in our home city of LA, or almost anywhere else, and you walk down the street past, the beginnings of an infill housing project, for instance, what you'll see more often than not, is a hole that is far too large for it to be able to explain the four storey building that's about to go above it, right? And what's happened is there's a parking requirement attached to that building. And so before you build up your four stories, maybe you have to dig down two stories or before you go up 10 stories you have to dig down six stories to provide the the parking that the zoning code says any housing unit has to come with and the same rules apply to commercial development and industrial development and so on. The zoning code is very clear that almost anything you build, you need to have a certain amount of parking along with it on the same site.

Shane Phillips 4:52
Right? Even a bar.

Michael Manville 4:55
Right even things that we think, you know, that maybe for the best if people aren't driving to, you need to have ample parking

Shane Phillips 5:03
Right.

Michael Manville 5:04
And this does two things. On the development side, it just makes it a lot harder to build a lot of things, right? Because the parking is either going to eat up a bunch of money if you have to go underground, or it's going to eat up a lot of space, if you want to, like try and keep it with a surface parking lot. And anyone who's ever wondered why we have so many strip malls, the answer is just that a strip mall is the easiest way to comply with three-space per 1000 square foot commercial parking requirement.

Shane Phillips 5:32
And the other answer is Proposition U, which someday we will talk about

Michael Manville 5:36
In LA will be Proposition U but as it turns out, strip malls do not exist only in LA

Correct, right?

That, you know, if you if you have this parcel of land, and you got to build, you want to build a store on it, but you also have to fit the parking, it just turns out that the best way to do that to minimize the amount of space that you would have for driveways or things like that is to just slap the parking in the front, and then make whatever you have leftover into the store. And I think that's a good example of how the parking requirement changes the city because what that does, is that that's the individually rational thing for the developer to do to comply with this requirement. What it adds up to when everyone is doing something like that is a city that collectively, all of us aren't that thrilled about. Almost no one that I'm aware of like loves strip malls, right? No one that I know really likes the fact that even in a walkable neighborhood of Los Angeles, every 50 feet, you have to keep your eyes open because there's a curb cut, because a car might come sliding out of a building as you're walking along. Because what it does is it makes it easier for you to access that building by car. And it makes it much more difficult to access it anywhere else. So now it's a if you were to walk to that strip mall, you're gonna be walking along the sidewalk that is unappealing because on one side you have the street and on the other side, you have a parking lot, and every few feet, there's going to be a driveway where someone might run you over. And then to get to the store, you have to walk through the parking lot, right, which is also not very attractive, and on a sunny day, it's very hot, and again, someone might back over you. And really the things that make streetscapes really nice in Manhattan or downtown Boston or things like that, which is that the building comes right up to the sidewalk, and you can see in the windows, and you're like, "Oh yeah, maybe I'll go in there". I mean, all of that is much less possible, and so we advertise instead with these big garrish signs that you can see from a car. And so it ends up dictating an automobile-friendly built environment, and that automobile-friendly built environment is also by extension an environment that's hostile to walking and bicycling and using public transportation. And so that's on the development side.

And then on the the transportation side, what you get is just a very quiet but large subsidy to driving in the sense that if you think about the components of a transportation system, you can usually break it down into three of them: there's the cost of your vehicles, right, that's like in this case, buying a car or paying for a bus fare or something, there's the cost of your routes, which are the roads, and then there's what are called "terminal costs" or the costs of storing the vehicle when it's not use. And what makes cars so much different from almost every other transportation system is that in order for us to get the full potential out of them, their terminal costs have to be enormous. And what I mean by that is that what made the car so appealing when it first came out, and what makes it still so appealing, is that unlike with a train or an airplane or whatever, you can just go wherever you want, whenever you want, right, you don't have to wait until a bunch of other people want to get on this vehicle and go from point A to point B, right, which is the nature of traveling by train or traveling by airplane. And the fact that you're constrained that way with trains and airplanes means that they actually don't have to keep their vehicles idle for very long. But what the car offered was like, I don't want to wait for when the trains coming. And I don't want to go just where these other people are going, I can get in my car and go wherever I want. But what that implies, though, is that whenever you get there, there has to be a place for you to leave the car. Right. And so the car had these enormous terminal costs compared to other forms of transportation. And that in and of itself isn't a bad thing. What becomes a bad thing is when the city government decides that drivers shouldn't have to pay for those, right? Because when you think about it, and this is a point that Don Shoup makes all the time, the typical car most of the time isn't moving, right? The biggest imposition it makes normally it's just taking up space while someone's off doing something else, and if drivers really had to pay for that imposition of space, we would all drive a lot less and we'd have fewer cars, and what a minimum parking requirement does to circle all the way back to this question you originally asked right is it takes that time. terminal cost of driving, right, which should be if you just think about it in the logical order of things that should be the last cost a driver pays at the end of their trip, and it turns it into a cost that a developer pays at the beginning of their project. It takes one of the largest costs of the transportation system and dumps it into the cost of housing, into the cost of developing commercial property and so forth. And so as a result, in a world where these laws are ubiquitous, development becomes a little more expensive, and driving is at least perceived as being much less expensive. Because your decision to drive doesn't affect your parking costs, because the parking buried in everything else,

Shane Phillips 10:43
Which is why we see people driving less often in the places where parking is most expensive.

Michael Manville 10:48
Absolutely, yeah.

Shane Phillips 10:49
And you know, a number that this just made me think of that I think it was some of our colleagues, including Juan Matute, who came up with this a few years ago, they tallied up all the parking spaces in LA County, and it came to about 19 million spaces, which is you know, two per person, something like three per driver, and at about 300-350 square feet per person, we're talking about 1000 square feet, I think this is only off street parking, per driver. And so we have the system where like, we talked about housing being a human right, but the only thing we actually mandate is parking whereas if we don't build housing, kind of no big deal. I would guess that we're probably providing more parking space per person in this county than we are living space at this point. You think we have 1000 square feet per person living space?

Michael Manville 11:40
I do not

Michael Lens 11:42
Like housing for cars is a human right? That what we're at.

Shane Phillips 11:46
We've achieved that, yes.

Michael Manville 11:48
Housing for cars as a human right, that's my new nonprofit.

Michael Lens 11:53
Going to interject with my non muffled sounds

Michael Manville 11:56
Yeah.

Michael Lens 11:58
You know, first of all, Mike Manville and Donald Shoup are kind of superhuman in their ability to create fascinating 10 minute monologues about parking. That was a bunch of stuff that I already knew, because I've spent 10 years with Donald Shoup, and I've spent multiple years with Michael Manville. And I'm just captivated staring at my screen listening to the guy talk about the parking stuff that I already knew, and I love. And I thought of an anecdote, which Mike is a sponsorship opportunity, Cost Plus Market on Westwood and Santa Monica is a fascinating case study for me. And for those who are running cost plus, please consider us in our in your sponsorship. And so I walk or run by this Cost Plus somewhat frequently, and you know, the parking is in the back, the entrance is off of Santa Monica, right like, and then on Santa Monica up to the sidewalk, they don't have windows where you could see into like what the wares are, because they don't expect that anyone's looking through the windows, but they have like a painting of stuff that they might have which is even weirder to me. I guess that's to catch the eye of the people driving by 40 miles an hour or stuck in traffic more likely.

Shane Phillips 13:25
It doesn't sound like like you're complimenting them right now, to be honest, I'm not sure they're gonna be interested in sponsoring

Michael Manville 13:36
But it's a great example, and you do see this throughout Los Angeles there's nothing strictly speaking in the parking requirement that says you have to have, you know, a completely hostile street facing architecture, because it just becomes the norm. All of the amenities, all the things that would appeal to you are instead from the parking lot, and it becomes very easy to neglect the street, and so you do and I think i simple tweaks can can fix this, I mean the the tweak that we will talk about most i think is getting rid of these minimum parking requirements. But city planning can also just say like, you know, you can't have a barren wall on the sidewalk, or you need to have a certain number of windows or you need to have an entrance or something like that. Because what happens is that when everybody sort of internalizes this norm that of course, no one is going to actually enter a shop from the street by foot. They just don't invest in that sort of infrastructure.

Shane Phillips 14:38
Right, and to give credit to the city of Los Angeles, I do think they're moving in that direction of not allowing these blank walls and that kind of thing. So let's get into the papers, and they're both about bundled parking, so probably makes sense to define that first. And I'm going to try out the definition here based on on what I read and you can let me know if this sounds correct. So a home has bundled parking if at least one parking space is included in the rent or if the home is owned, and there's parking included in the purchase price. And by your definition, the parking can be in a garage, or a carport, or any other off-street location as long as it's included in the rent or purchase price of the home. And then parking is unbundled if it's paid for separately from rent, or the purchase price. And that could actually mean that it's a space in the garage somewhere off site and cost you $100 a month or on-site for that matter, but it costs you something or it could just mean that there's no off street parking provided at all, is that fair definition?

Michael Manville 15:38
That's right. And I think in part that definition, is an artifact of the data we use that in this paper that we're primarily talking about. And in one of the earlier ones that is sort of the companion to it, the data set is the American housing survey, which is a very nice data set that tracks the condition of the American housing stock both across the US but also over time. And they, in a perfect world, you would be able to divide parking into three categories like you, you have parking and it comes with your house, your house payment, you have parking, but it doesn't come with your house payment, or you don't have parking at all. And unfortunately, the American Housing Survey runs those last two together.

Shane Phillips 16:21
Gotcha, okay. And I'll just give the name of that other paper because we are going to talk about some of the findings from it as well. This one's from 2017, and it's called Bundled Parking and Vehicle Ownership: Evidence from the American Housing Survey. And so from these two papers, I think there are two main takeaways first, from the earlier paper, is that households with bundled parking are more likely to own cars than households with unbundled parking, including no parking. And then second from this later paper, is that even when both types of households bundled or unbundled parking have cars, the ones with bundled parking, drive a lot more and use transit a lot less. Can you talk about why unbundling parking, affects car ownership and driving and transit use in that way? And give us a sense for sort of how big the impact is, what you found in these papers?

Michael Manville 17:11
Yeah, I mean, I think it's an extension of what I was mentioning earlier about sort of the shifting the costs some of the costs of owning a car away from the the driver or go away from the act of driving. So if you move into an apartment building, and the landlord says, "hey, you know, with your rent payment, you get a parking space in the basement". That is, you know, in a subtle but real way, that's very different from if you move into a similar apartment building, the landlord says, "look, we actually have no parking so you can you know, there's a place at the end of the street where you could rent the space, I think it's about $150 a month, or parking on the street, you know, it's kind of a hassle, but it's not too bad, right". And so for most people, that decision is not going you know that difference is not going to lead to a meaningful difference in car ownership. But at any given time, there's probably someone who is kind of on the margin of owning a car right, they don't have one, they're deciding if they're going to get one, or their old one is running down, and they were deciding if they want to replace it. And if you move into one of those places, that doesn't come with parking, and so for you to store your car is going to be either a visible extra expense, or a potential hassle. Because you're always gonna find street parking. That's a condition where you might just say, you know, what, you know, weighing all the other things going on, I actually don't need this car right. Another way to look at this is that having the bundled parking, which full disclosure I have bundled parking right now, my apartment comes with a space in my basement. And what that does, to me is it reduces, as an economist would say, it reduces the opportunity cost of owning a car, right? Because if I decide not to own my car, my rent doesn't go down. Because the cost of that parking space is just in my rent. Whereas if I had bundled parking, unbundled parking, excuse me, and I paid an extra $200 a month for my parking space. At some point, I might say, you know what I don't really use this car that much, I could just save $200 a month and put it towards something else. So without that incentive, I will just continue to unthinkingly own a car. And if I had that incentive, I might choose to get rid of it. So that's, that's the ownership component. The second thing, which is what Miriam and I studied was, let's say I have my car and it's in my bumdled parking spot in the basement, but my neighbor across the way in the same building, doesn't have parking in my building. And so she parks on the street, you could reasonably expect in a neighborhood like mine in West Hollywood, that I'll drive more than she will and that she'll use the bus more than I will because whenever I go out in my car, one thing I know is that when I get back home, it's not gonna be a problem for me to park. For my neighbor, she'll go out to the same place maybe when she gets home, maybe she'll luck out and find the street spot. But this is West Hollywood, maybe she'll have to drive around the block a few times, she's left to park two blocks away, and that makes that trip less convenient. It also makes her next trip less convenient, right? Because if she has to park two blocks away, that means when she goes out again, she's gonna walk back. And so what Miriam and I hypothesized was that even controlling for car ownership, I might you know, a person who has unbundled parking might drive less. Mike Lens has his hand up, which our viewers....

Michael Lens 20:38
I was just, I was just stating that I would like to jump in whenever Manville's done with these amazing thoughts. So here's my question. Dr. Manville, why do you want to make it so hard on your neighbor to park? What's wrong with human right to parking?

Michael Manville 20:57
So I think that the there's two things that go on, right, I don't want to make it hard for my neighbor to park. But I do want to make sure that when people park, they pay for their own parking. And when people don't park, they don't pay for other people's parking right. So what I mean by that is that, if my neighbor wants a parking space, you know, there should be a way for her to get one. But the the way that we do it now is that there are many people who live in buildings, they come with bundled parking, and they don't have a car, those people needlessly pay for parking, they don't want or use. And then we have a situation where someone like my hypothetical neighbor, might like to park and would benefit from being able to rent a space somewhere, perhaps. And that, you know, this is, this is another thing that we don't talk about as much in the paper, the potential for that sort of market is suppressed by the fact that so many buildings have their own parking, right, that it doesn't make sense for someone to rent out parking spaces in in a neighborhood where every building that gets built comes with its own sort of underground parking. And then of course, there's just the fact that, you know, there are real costs associated with excessive automobility. Right, that one of the biggest predictors of driving is again, you know, your ease of parking at the end. And so if we want to get some sort of handle on our driving issues, one way to do so is to sort of make the costs and benefits of parking more transparent.

Michael Lens 22:44
So we're misallocating space, because, we're not getting people to like pay for what they're actually using by bundling it into the price of housing. And then of course, there's this tricky issue where excessive driving might be a bad thing for the planet, our ability to get around via other means, etc.

Michael Manville 23:10
Yeah, I mean, one, maybe one way to put this more succinctly would just be if you look at the goals of almost any city planning agency, it especially in places like LA or up and down the coast, I mean, you'll see some language to the effect of "we want to embrace sustainability and have people drive less, use transit more, and we want to make housing more affordable". And because bundling is basically a product of these minimum parking requirements, what it does is the opposite, right? It makes housing more expensive and driving less expensive, and transit less appealing. And so I think that, in some ways, when we studied bundling, it's not that we have some big problem with a landlord saying, "Oh, you know what, I'm gonna, I just think everybody who wants to move into this building is going to want parking anyways, and so I'm gonna buckle" right, that's perfectly fine judgment to make. But that judgment alone would not explain why over 90% of the housing units in the country have bundled parking, right that the main reason over 90% of the housing is in the country have bundled parking is that the zoning laws often force developers to oversupply parking right, and it would be very hard to sell it on its own with with with so much parking attached to every building.

Michael Lens 24:29
Right? Do we know why minimum parking requirements became such a widespread zoning tool and mandate?

Michael Manville 24:37
Yeah, I mean, they were the easiest way, or the the seemingly easiest way to solve a problem that arose as more and more people started to buy cars, which was competition for curb parking, right. So if you look at you know, if you imagine one of the older neighborhoods in LA that was already developed at the time that people started to just buy more and more automobiles. What those folks started to notice was that the spaces on their curbs started to fill up. Right. And because everyone treats the street in front of their house is kind of their private property. This was an outrage. So if you were just looking at this from the perspective of a, you know, omniscient central planner, the obvious thing to do would say be said, Oh, well, this is valuable public space, that is now becoming more in demand. And so you know, it's been nice that up to this point, we've been able to give it away for free, but those days are over. So now we're gonna start charging for it. That now is not what happened, not what happened. And so of planners and governments everywhere, they decided to protect their incumbent residents, and push costs on the newcomers. And so they solved quote, unquote, the problem of congested street parking by saying that anything new that was built, his price of entry would be to build enough off street parking, so that it wouldn't congest the curb. And of course, this didn't work, the curb still gets congested. But now we have off street parking requirements everywhere.

Shane Phillips 26:09
All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump ahead a little bit here, since we started talking about the cost of this and pricing and so forth. I think there are already some policies in parts of the country, maybe even in parts of the city of LA, that require unbundling, or I think we're kind of moving in that direction. But I've never been entirely clear on exactly how those work. So like, looking at this from the perspective of a developer, say you have a single space in a garage that costs like $40,000 to build. So the developer needs to charge about $200 a month just to break even on that, right. But most people in most places are not actually willing to pay that much. They think that's too much to pay for parking, even though they're paying for it right now bundled into their rent. So you build this building, you have the minimum parking requirements, you have to unbundle the cost, and you're charging $200 per space. And so the rents in the units are actually lower, you might attract a whole bunch of people who don't have cars and don't want that parking space. So they're paying less, and the developer is making no revenue on their garage, it seems like you're you forced them into this impossible situation where you're just, you're forcing them to attract people who don't want parking space, but you're still requiring them to build the parking space. And so they get no revenue for it. So how do we get out of that trap? Or have we already successfully done so somewhere? And I just don't know, you know, the success stories that have happened already?

Michael Manville 27:40
Yeah. So those are great questions. There's a lot there. And before I answer that, she realized I didn't fully answer your last question, which is just like, what did we find when we look at this? Because the finding sort of determines what we may want to...

Shane Phillips 27:52
Yeah, we could start. So we'll just start and say like, you know, what was the scale of the impact? How different were the outcomes for people who had bundled versus unbundled parking and the amount of driving that they do and the amount of transit that they use.

Michael Manville 28:07
So taken together, the impact of bundled parking is pretty substantial. And I'm gonna not quite remember the exact proportions here. But basically, households that had a bundle parking were about 60%, I think less likely to be carless than households that had unbundled parking. And then there's very noticeable differences once you control for a bunch of other things, like, you know, are you going to central city and stuff like that; what kind of neighborhood you're in, and the propensity to use transit. And there is, you know, we have kind of rough proxies for the amount of drivings so like how much you spend on gasoline and things like that. But the short version of this, and I encourage anyone to look at the paper for the more detailed stuff with some of the caveats is that most of the impact you see, comes from this subtle encouragement toward vehicle ownership right? That's the big one. But that, you know, and this is what Miriam and I found, is that even controlling for vehicle ownership, you do notice this difference in travel behavior, and that seems to be a product of the hassle of, you know, finding parking if you don't have it at home right? So we just noticed that people who have bundled parking, they're less likely to ride the bus less likely to ride a subway or a light rail, not less likely to ride commuter rail, which makes sense because commuter rail is often a park and ride situation. And also that they spend more on gasoline. And there was one other finding that I wanted to highlight. I don't remember what it is, but I'll come back to it. But so it really is, it does seem to have a causal effect on travel behavior. And, you know, we can talk more about how I know or why I think it's a causal effect, I guess. I don't know it is. But to your question about how you would go about unbundling? And I think this is an important point, you know, we studied bundled parking in part because the data let us see it. And we do see that the bundle parking has what I think from a society's perspective are adverse effects. The solution to this is not to mandate unbundled because if you mandate unbundling and continue to require the parking supply to continuously rise with all development, you are undermining the market that would sort of exist in an unbundled state right? So to go back to the example you gave, yeah, if my landlord right now, just like was hit with a law saying he had to unbundle all the parking, well, the first thing he could do was go to everybody who's currently rent, you know, has a parking space for him and say, like, "hey, can I sell you this for, you know, Eve and Steve, you know, I'll take 200 off the rent and add 200 year parking". And if that works out, that's great. But if it doesn't, now he's in a pickle, because who is he going to rent it to?

Shane Phillips 31:06
Right

Michael Manville 31:06
Right across the street has their own parking, the building next door has their own parking, up and down the street, everybody's got a parking space. And so even if there is someone, and there are people on my street who just are parking on the street right now, and were willing to rent a space, do they want to rent a space underneath someone else's building? And if they do, how do we enable them to get in and out of my building to the satisfaction of the insurance company right, even like because they're not like a leaseholder there? And so it's not that these problems are insoluble, but they're a giant headache. And as long as parking is kind of everywhere, they're not a headache that's worth anyone's time. Now, if parking is scarce, right, then it becomes worthwhile to figure out a way for you to start selling it separate from a residence or separate from your business. And so where we see unbundled parking work, are places where it develops organically because there's just not much parking, right? Like if you're a person who owns a building that happens to have a decent-sized parking lot, in a neighborhood where there really isn't a lot of parking already, maybe they're just a lot of historic buildings or something, chances are, the city doesn't have to come tell you to unbundle that parking. Like if you just need some cash, you can look around and be like, I bet I could rent these spaces right? And, you know, we can all probably think of examples where that happens. But if you're in a neighborhood where every building has parking attached to it, or worse yet has parking underneath it, then just passing a law that says suddenly, this has to be sold separately, at best won't change anything. and at worst is going to suddenly leave developers or property owners carrying the bag for a bunch of stuff that, you know, wouldn't exist if the city hadn't ordered into existence anyway.

Shane Phillips 33:03
And going back to the sort of skepticism that that Lens shared earlier about who this impacts and everything, it seems like, and this is just with parking generally, like we have a transition problem. All of us here are pretty convinced that you know, getting rid of parking minimums would be a good thing. But there's still a lot of opponents of this, and parking availability is often one of the first things that comes up when people oppose a project, or they're very opposed to lowering the amount of parking that's provided. And we can point to work like the work you've done that shows that parking actually increases the odds of new residents owning cars, and how much they drive. And that's especially true when the cost is bundled into the rent or purchase price. But it's also I think, likely that if you build an apartment with limited or no parking, that you'll probably have more cars than parking spaces, and some of those cars will end up parked on the street. And I would say it's probably more true in LA than many other dense metro areas. And so getting back to this transition issue, we can see a future where car ownership isn't so essential in many parts of the city. But that's not really the reality now. And so, in the meantime, as we grow, we're also likely to be adding more cars. And we've seen that over the past decades. That probably means more congestion, fewer available parking spaces on the street, what I've always struggled with, like I see the vision, I see that future where you have the choice to get around without a car and it's convenient and great. But we're not there now and it sort of feels like on the way to getting there things are actually getting worse. Is that how you see things or do you see kind of a different path for getting to that point?

Michael Manville 34:50
I mean, look, I'm a planner and so you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs and if tens of thousands of people have to suffer in the church.

Shane Phillips 35:02
Okay, Amazon

Michael Manville 35:03
No, I mean, I disagree. And I think the key thing to keep in mind here is that minimum parking requirements do a lot of harm. They bias a lot of decision decisions in the wrong direction. And they allow us to avoid the real source of a lot of our transportation problems, which is the mispricing of public space right? Which is to say that we don't, we give away literally the street space. You know, I live in West Hollywood, if I did not have an underground parking space, I can go to City Hall, I can get a permit. That permit would let me park my car which cost what I bought it, $20,000, on the street, for free? That's a terrible system right? I mean, just imagine, like, if I'd spent $20,000 on anything else, you know, 110 inch TV screen, if I donated it to Oxfam, if I'd given it to a shelter on Skid Row, what would West Hollywood give me - nothing! But if I buy a damn car, they'll let me use 200 square feet of their incredibly valuable real estate for nothing. If you want to know, like, what's at the heart of our transportation problem, it's the fact that we've forgotten, conveniently, that all that lands that is our street and our parking spaces, that public land is actually real estate, and incredibly valuable. And in most cities, it is the largest single source of real estate, you know, 20%, of the land area of Los Angeles, more probably in West Hollywood, and we don't want to confront the fact that we have created a terrible mass by trying to allocate it in any way except the way we allocate virtually all other land, which is through pricing. And one way we continue to dodge that problem is by just saying, "well, you know, whoever builds anything in our community has to it has to just make space, so that we don't change the status quo, what's happening on our streets." And that being said, so one obvious thing that we have to do is that we have to take seriously the management of our street space. And I think that if we did that, we would find as, as has often been the case, right, when we have used prices for goods that are in high demand in time when we previously did not, that that mess that seemed terribly insoluble, actually start to solve themselves right? And I actually the I'll put in a plug that I just put out a report, throught ITS, just sort of using as the extended analogy that this period of time in the 1970s, where the US and its wisdom put price controls on gasoline, right? And the result was that for a period of like, you know, three years, you couldn't get gas. There were lines, they were like seven-hour long lines to get gas, right? And people were just like, "My God, like, what could we possibly do? Like, how will this ever resolve?" New York Times was like the situation will never go back to normal. And then they just removed the price controls. And I can get gas. And so it's so one, you can just manage the street and no one's going to be happy about that. But it's not actually.... that's not going to involve sort of like terrible suffering on anyone's part. And the other thing to remember is that when you remove a minimum parking requirement, I think there's a tendency in some people's minds to digest that as a ban on parking right? But all you're doing when you're removing a mandate, that's not the same as enacting a ban right? All you're saying, you're not telling a developer you can't build any parking. And so any developer, as long as you think, and this is a weak assumption that developers want to make money, then the developer is going to look around at Los Angeles and say, this area where I'm building isn't quite ready for a building with absolutely no parking. But it's great that I have some flexibility about how I solve that problem right? Rather than having to build a giant podium of parking under my building, maybe I can put 20 spaces on the ground floor, and maybe I can figure out a way to leave some space down the street. And maybe some other stuff, I can, you know, I can work out and maybe there are some units I can sell without parking, because some people really are willing to fill a unit like that. And that's gonna allow me to offer different types of products, at different price points, and it's gonna give me lots of flexibility.

Shane Phillips 39:30
How do you feel about... I kind of had mixed feelings about these kinds of proposals, but as I said, I think when you build those kinds of projects, if you build less parking, if you're not like really overbuilding, there's a chance that at different times, to some extent you'll have people parking on the street and so, you know, neighbors concerns about curb parking availability will probably, you know, be borne out to some extent. Do you think it's reasonable to say like, you know, "we're going to establish a street parking permit system, and these new buildings are only going to be permitted so many so that they can't monopolize the street". It's not entirely fair necessarily, but like, is it worth it if it solves the politics problem?

Michael Manville 40:16
So yeah, I mean, those sorts of proposals, which I think, you know, there's also some debate about, you know, when you get into the details of them, how legal they actually are in California. But the appeal of those, the appeal of the permit district and things like that, lies entirely in can you move away from the most damaging part of this system, which is these minimum parking requirements that really drive up housing costs and drive up development costs. You know, the residential permits, if you just step back and look at it again, and don't wear the goggles that we've all put on for the last 30 years, when the neighbor walks out and says, "these new people are going to take up the street space", like the only really appropriate response from the city is "that space ain't yours, it's ours" right? You've had a great ride parking for free on that space with no competition but like, all great rides come to an end. Like, thank you for pointing out that this is getting very crowded, as it turns out, we need some revenue, we're gonna slap a price on that. Now, no city council member in their right mind is ever going to say that, and so a nice midway point, maybe it's to say there's going to be some sort of permitting. But I would love to see the permits cost more. And I'd also, you know, there's parts of me, that also would like to see them in neighborhoods that are very busy. I'd like to see them explode, by which I mean, you assign a permit to a resident, when that resident moves out, that permit goes away right? And the reason for that is, if you do that, then you don't harm any incumbents, right? Like, if you had a reserved parking space, you know, you're not, your city hasn't come take it away. But you will start to establish the system where whenever someone moves in, they don't move in with the presumption of a free parking space. So maybe you set up the system, and you just distribute a bunch of permits. But then when someone moves out, and you'd have to, you know, manage this carefully so people didn't sort of you didn't end up with a secondary market in permits or something, maybe they'd be a new color.

Shane Phillips 42:23
I think I've seen that proposed, you're really get to like economist brain when you get to that level where they're basically proposing to issue these permits, but also to allow people to auction them off. So like, you know, incumbent property owners can make a profit off of, a bit like bacon benefit, even though it's not their property to benefit from actually, but again, basically to pay them off to support more housing in the area.

Michael Manville 42:53
Right. I mean, there is a large literature and I do have a sort of going back to your point, I have a very modest contribution to it, I have a paper called 'Transition Costs and Transportation Reform', which deals with this, that you do have to buy your way, with any subsidy system that you want to get rid of, you have to buy your way up right, but people do not happily relinquish their subsidies. And so some form of... there's very interesting proposals and that all of us should give more thought to of ways of devising permit systems that will slowly contract over time, that either offers the kind of arbitrage opportunities you mentioned, Shane, or that are foolproof against them because, you know, if someone tried to sell off their old permit that was yellow, but the second general permits are bright blue, then it'll be easy for enforcement officer to be like, you know what, you're busted. But yeah, I think that in the real world, you can't snap your fingers and just end this.

Shane Phillips 43:52
Do you have... you know, have you seen any examples or cases that you've you feel like I've done this well? I mean, when we're talking about solutions here, is it really, I mean, it sounds like the first and most important thing is just eliminating, or at the very least, reducing parking minimums. What's like the second thing?

Michael Manville 44:15
I think if, you know, reducing or removing the parking minimums and removing is really the preferred thing here, that's what gives the most flexibility. I think it's just having some form of better street management. I think it's very hard to reduce the parking requirements or remove them if the street is totally unmanaged then, you know, you run the risk of a lot of spillover onto the street. And so when downtown LA did the adaptive reuse ordinance and allowed a lot of buildings to go in with little to no parking, you know, as sort of a last notice saving grace of that. It's just how hard it is to park on the Street in downtown LA. The streets are mostly metered from eight to eight, and then they clean those streets almost every night. So there's really no overnight parking. And so that regulated street, that well-regulated street allowed a deregulated housing supply. And so I do think you need to pair the removal, the rolling back the minimum and this is classic sort of Shoop wisdom, I don't mean to be claiming this for myself, you need to pair the removal of the minimums with something that lets you start regulating the street better. And I don't think it's impossible. But I think that right now there's no appeal to it for elected officials, right? Like most of the beneficiaries are people who don't live in these neighborhoods yet. I mean, it's much the same as almost anything that would enable more housing, right? You have a bunch of incumbents who think the way things are is fine, and they're your voters, and a bunch of people who would benefit who they're invisible even to themselves right now.

Shane Phillips 45:52
Right

Michael Lens 45:52
Well, this all sounds well and good Professor Manville. But when you talk about eliminating subsidies, I start to worry about the regressive effects or redistributed effects. Don't poor people need free parking?

Michael Manville 46:11
No, I don't think so. I would go further, I know low-income people need money, right, because they have a hard time affording a lot of things. But I don't think, and I think a lot of research into social policy backs me up on this. And it is not a good way to help low-income people. Let me rephrase that; holding down the prices of some goods is not a good way to help low income people right? Like I think the food stamp program is a very successful program that should be more generous, but it's very successful. I think it works a lot better than a program that would just put comprehensive price controls on food, right, or say that all food had to be free. And I think that same logic holds for parking, we just to say that there are some people have a hard time paying for parking, I would much rather find a way to help them pay for parking, than to say that, because of that, all the parking throughout our city has to be free. And I think for parking, the case is even more powerful. Because, you know, most driving and most trips are done by people who are not low income and done by people who are affluent, right? And so, so most goods and services related to automobiles, are consumed by higher income people. And so holding down the price of a good that is used disproportionately by high income people is not just an ineffective way to help low income people, but it's an incredibly self serving way to help low income people. Right, so I think one of the great problems we have in cities, or just in the US in general, is that we pay a lot of lip service to helping low income people, but we don't pay a lot of money right? That we're very comfortable mandating this and that, like this price can't go up, or you have to provide this or, you know, when someone builds a house, they have to build an affordable unit with it. And that's all well and good but if you look at the scale of the problem, and you look at the source of the problem, what we really need if we think this is important is to like dump a bunch of money into it. And again, I think that as long as we continue with, maybe this is too strong but the fiction, that we can just solve this through regulations. I mean, we're never going to get serious about actually helping people with low incomes.

Shane Phillips 48:29
Hmm. I have just one last question because I know we're running out of time here. Were there any questions that these papers, this research, didn't resolve for you that came up as a result of it that you kind of want to follow up going forward?

Michael Manville 48:44
Yeah, you know, think, um, the the second paper with Miriam, I mean, we mentioned it, unfortunately, there's only kind of a weak proxy for how much you actually drive, you know, we're able to establish very clearly that, you know, if you have this level of parking, and you own a car, you're definitely gonna ride transit less. But it would be nice to get a better sort of pairing between sort of that parking presence and like a real measure of how many miles you drive here and stuff like that....

Shane Phillips 49:14
And in the paper, you you basically just did like a proxy.

Michael Manville 49:18
Yeah, it was gasoline expenditure which is not perfect, you know, because we don't know what kind of car they have.

Shane Phillips 49:26
How much gas costs?

Michael Manville 49:28
Yeah, all that stuff. So that was a little bit tougher. So I would like to revisit that. I really do think and I think Miriam would say the same that the real contribution of that paper is much more of the transit result, and we present that the gasoline resolve more is like kind of food for thought and an area for future research.

Shane Phillips 49:47
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Manville.

Michael Manville 49:50
Thanks for having me.

Shane Phillips 49:51
And I'll see you in a meeting like tomorrow or something probably. All right. Take care. That is a wrap on this episode of the UCLA Housing Voice podcast with your thoughtful, eloquent and charming guests and co-hosts. As always, any papers or materials that we referenced during the interview can be found in the show notes. And we always include our own notes used to prepare for the interviews on the website lewis.ucla.edu. You can keep up with us on Facebook and Twitter at UCLA Lewis Center, and you can follow me on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips and Mike Lens at mc_lens. We would be endlessly appreciative if you rate it and review the show on whatever platform you use to listen and if you share the podcast with your friends. Thanks again for listening. Bye

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