Parking And Affordable Housing

Wenyu Jia and Martin Wachs

Housing affordability and parking availability are two of the most vexing problems in the nation’s largest cities. In San Francisco, internationally known for its ambience, most working people find it almost impossible to find a house, condo, or apartment at an affordable price. Finding a parking space is nearly as difficult. Many houses are situated on very narrow lots, and frequent curb cuts for driveways reduce on-street parking.

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Traditional Shopping Centers

Ruth L. Steiner

The New Urbanist goal to create pedestrian-friendly transit villages is hard to criticize. Transit villages promise reduced traffic congestion and heightened quality of life. Their formula is simple: Create clusters of houses, shops, jobs, and social services amidst neighborhoods where transit riders and pedestrians outnumber drivers.

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Cashing in On Curb Parking

Donald Shoup

Whether you're driving to work, to a doctor's appointment, or to a dinner with a friend, you don't want to reach your destination and then circle the neighborhood for 40 minutes looking for a parking space. You want even less to compete with dozens of other cars looking for that same vacant space, while dodging double-parked cars and listening to honking and cursing.

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Cashing Out Employer-Paid Parking

Donald Shoup

Employer-paid parking is an invitation to drive to work alone. Thus, it increases traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption. To deal with problems created by employer-paid parking, I propose a minor technical change in the Internal Revenue Code. The proposal is that employers who subsidize employee parking should be required to offer employees the option to take a taxable cash travel allowance equal to the fair market value of the parking subsidy. Case studies and a statistical model suggest that offering employees the option to cash out their parking subsidies could reduce solo driving to work by 20 percent, reduce automobile travel to work by 76 billion miles per year, save 4.5 billion gallons of gasoline per year, eliminate 40 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, and increase tax revenues by $1.2 billion per year. These objectives would be accomplished by offering commuters the option to take taxable cash in lieu of a free parking space.

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