San José abolishes parking minimums!
I moved to San José five years ago. I moved to Alum Rock with my aunt and her family to be exact. At the time I also worked as a cafeteria worker and got home at around 3pm which was perfect because there was plenty of street parking in front of my aunt’s house as most people didn’t get off work until 5pm. This also meant I could not drive my car after 3pm otherwise I would risk having to park my car near the cemetery and walk 2-3 blocks depending where I found a parking spot. You could tell there were more people living in the neighborhood than it was originally intended for by the amount of cars parked creatively in the streets and driveways.
Although parking space in my neighborhood is a hot commodity, I am delighted that last week, City Council voted unanimously to eliminate parking minimum requirements in most areas of the city for new developments joining Sacramento, Berkeley, Emeryville, Alameda and San Diego as California cities that have implemented some form of eliminating parking policy minimums. This policy would also incentivize alternative modes of transportation, like biking and public transit. Something that here at SVBC, we fully support and are excited about. My family is not so much, at least not yet.
What does this mean for a car centric city like San José and more specifically for communities like the east side where my family lives? A few things.
Eliminating parking minimums does not mean that the already existing parking will be taken away. (My aunt’s neighborhood parking situation will remain the same.) Instead, this new policy will remove mandates on developments to have an arbitrary, antiquated amount of parking that ends up sitting unused. They’ll bring into balance the number of parking spots with other ways of getting around. To be clear, this doesn’t mean developers won’t provide parking. It means the city won’t dictate a minimum amount of parking a developer must build, instead allowing a project’s parking to be right-sized according to the context.
Currently, San José requires 1.7 parking spaces for every two-bedroom home in multi-dwelling residential buildings, and retail stores often must provide one parking space per 200 square feet dedicated to sales. Constructing a single parking space in San José costs between $30,000 to $100,000 depending on location and design! That is a lot of cement, money and space that is being used to accommodate vehicles and not people. By not requiring multi-dwelling residential buildings to have the 1.7 parking spaces for every two-bedroom home, the cost of building housing significantly goes down and the cost of a parking spot is not added to your rent especially if one doesn’t own a car (For example, UC researchers Gabbe & Pierce found that nationwide, bundling the cost of a single garage space into rents “adds about 17 percent to a unit’s rent.”)
Removing parking minimums is a key component in achieving the City’s climate goals but alone is not enough; Travel Demand Management (TDM) is an important complementing component to the removal of parking minimums. TDM can provide or incentivize convenient amenities and viable, affordable transportation options like transit subsidies and bike share programs. They can also include infrastructure improvements such as making new street connections, bicycle and micro mobility network improvements, trails, or other walking network improvements. Adding TDM measures will help create a paradigm shift where we are no longer dependent on cars as our primary source of transportation. These expanding options will encourage new residents and employees to reduce driving to work or around the neighborhood. They’ll cut down on the traffic San Joséans already experience, as well as hopefully the traffic deaths.
This new policy will allow San José to re-envision how we plan for, and accommodate, more housing and better transportation while also reducing our climate impact, creating a healthier environment for all especially the most vulnerable of San José residents.
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Thanks to all of you who wrote letters, made public comments in support of this decision on June 14th. For next steps, we’ll need you again for getting the final ordinance passed later this year to abolish San José's minimum parking mandates. Stay tuned!
SVBC is a part of a larger collaborative effort which includes organizations like Greenbelt Alliance, Transform, Housing Action Coalition, Yimby Action, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Silicon Valley @Home, Catalyze SV and more all working toward making San José more affordable, more sustainable, and works toward healthy ways of getting around using public transit, scooters or bicycles.