Turning Park-and-Rides Into Housing
Let's put underutilized parking lots to use.
By Josh Feit
We (Ed: Actually, Erica) gladly paid $7 an hour on a recent Friday afternoon for a street parking spot behind Capitol Hill's Stoup Brewing. The reasonable fee is part of SDOT's data-driven demand management program, which puts an appropriate price on parking, recognizing—sort of like NYC's congestion pricing program—that popular destinations should be subsidized by the car-centric culture their urban density offsets. After all, density makes Capitol Hill's go-to clubs, bars, restaurants, and shops possible in the first place.
Applauding the high cost of parking was on point because the event we were attending was a happy hour thrown by Sightline Institute, where more than 50 people crowded in to celebrate, I kid you not, a parking reform bill. Sightline, which has become an incubator of green metropolis legislation in Olympia, helped draft the bill, which had just passed the state legislature the day before.
Demand management is well and good. But the Sightline bill takes the next step: It prevents cities from requiring too much parking in the first place. The bill, which was sponsored by urbanist rock star Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), caps parking mandates statewide. For example, the bill says cities can't require more than one parking space for every two units in new multifamily housing. Developers could still build more parking, but they'll no longer have to.
There were free stickers on the tables proclaiming, in the style of parking signs: "End Parking Mandates." And when Sightline's parking reform guru Catie Gould jumped up on a table with a handful of drink tickets to thank everyone for coming—identifying herself as "the one who wrote" SB 5184—the crowed feted her like she was Bernie or AOC behind the mic on the "Fighting Oligarchy" tour.
Certainly, three cheers for the parking caps; I grabbed one of the free stickers. But it's another bill that sets my war-on-cars heart aflutter. Where the Bateman/Sightline bill limits new parking, the one I'm giddy about actually nukes existing parking infrastructure—parking infrastructure that (unsurprisingly to those who have been predicting a transit future for years) is sitting largely empty.
According to King County Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer, only about 30 percent of the parking spaces in park-and-rides across the system are full on a typical day—and the most heavily used lots, at Northgate and on the Eastside, are only 60 to 70 percent full.
King County lobbied for a change in state law to allow for a different use at these properties: Affordable housing. Appropriately enough, the reform—which authorizes Metro to overhaul three pilot sites for now—came as an amendment to state Sen. Julia Reed's (D-36, Seattle) transit-oriented development bill, broader legislation that's about incentivizing affordable housing near transit hubs. (I wrote about Reed's bill and its innovative funded inclusionary zoning progam earlier this session.)
The un-pave paradise amendment, a friendly add from state Sen. Yasmin Trudeau (D-27, Tacoma), says WSDOT can select up to three park-and-ride facilities in King County so Metro can conduct a pilot affordable housing program that "releases [Metro from] any covenant imposed for highway purposes and replace it with a covenant requiring affordable housing." "Gaining this flexibility," Metro spokesman Switzer said, "would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service."
You don't have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist's version of turning swords into ploughshares.
Metro spokesman Switzer declined to specify which park-and-rides are being liberated, but the legislation specifies three large surface parking lots—each with between 300 and 1,000 parking spaces—in Kirkland, Shoreline, and South King County.
Go figure. Parking lots with 300 to 1,000 stalls are going underutilized. Props to King County Metro for turning those empty stalls into an opportunity for fulfilling the potential of transit infrastructure as a prompt to build affordable housing. Transit policy is land use policy. And King County needs more land use policy like this that authorizes affordable housing.
Josh@PubliCola.com
It would be appropriate to acknowledge that Metro is about to complete a sizeable low-income housing building on their Northgate parking lot next to the Link transit station.
It would be nice to see a halt to Sound Transit building parking garages next session. The existing ones are a sunk cost and we can't do anything but tear them down (would any actually be able to generate more revenue than the cost of collecting that revenue?), but maybe we can force transit agencies to spend money on more important things instead, like (checks notes) transit.