The Case for Parking Reform in Cleveland
An opportunity to get more out of our streets and neighborhoods
Parking minimums are ruining Cleveland. Well, it’s more like they ruined Cleveland 50 years ago, we just didn’t know it at the time. That’s how planning and specifically zoning laws typically work: it takes a while for them to kick in, changing the city and built environment slowly like a legal glacier scraping over the city, coming to rest on the present. In fact it probably felt like it was happening fast back then as the city was just coming out of the Hough riots of 1966, and the election of Carl Stokes as the first Black mayor of what was then a major American city. Suburbanization was rapidly advancing and as buildings emptied out demolishing them for parking would have made a lot of sense.
This post isn’t meant to be an indictment or an accusation. It is fundamentally a plea to Clevelanders to organize and choose to build a future that gives us more opportunities for space we enjoy or need. Space we have collectively allocated to cars could be a new business, someone’s home, or a neat outdoor gathering space. The future is created every day by these rules which perpetuate in part due to maintenance of this status quo. Changing these rules doesn’t require more staff, more funding, a new department, or some innovative new tool. We just need to ask. So I hope I can convince some of you to ask, and here is why.
What are Parking Minimums?
Off-Street Parking Requirements, also known as mandatory parking minimums, are rules written by cities that require private property owners to provide space for cars on private property, usually based on use. Think 1 parking space per apartment unit, or 1 parking space for every 500 square feet of store. While this sounds like a no-brainer in our modern world, forcing property owners to build parking is crazy. This article is full of history lessons, and why create content when someone else has done it already. Vox and Donald Shoup say it best:
This is the pitch: ditch these rules, and replace them with better rules for on-street parking. Can developers of housing still build parking? Sure. Grocery stores? Of course. Movie theaters? Why not. The goal isn’t to have no parking (at least not yet), but to stop requiring it. Imagine if we had a law that required you to buy grocery bags each time you walked into a grocery store. Brought your own bags? Too bad, you still have to buy them. Can’t afford to buy bags? Guess you’re skipping on some items you wanted or needed. It is crazy, and here are several reasons why we should stop doing it.
Driving Begets Parking
We of course need parking because parking is a symptom of driving, and that thread of history goes back so far it is hard to decide where to pick it up. I turn again to Vox’s excellent and concise history of how driving and highways changed US cities:
This video is great but it also belies a deeper truth: our auto-oriented lifestyles are almost entirely a direct result of a sustained, fervent campaign by automobile corporations and manufacturers to inure Americans to the idea that private corporations and Democracy are synonymous. Adam Curtis deftly describes this history starting in 1936 with the re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the affirmation of New Deal politics.
Automobiles are literally the vehicles for progress with corporations at the helm, forging American democracy. Futurama was a vision for the future of American cities built by General Motors, meant to create emotional attachments to products like our cars. World War 2 and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 sealed our fate, and as we became accustomed to roads and cities with cars, we also grew addicted at the same time.
A Harmful Addiction
Driving as a deadly addiction is a scary accurate analogy. The Federal Highway Act established the US government as the major pusher, funding 90% of State highway system costs. Our ancestors also push this, having made decisions in the past we still live with today. Driving is something we feel we have to do to get anywhere, and even getting a license for many is a rite of passage into adulthood and autonomy. Driving also kills us, about 35,000 Americans a year, and 74 people died in traffic crashes last year in Cleveland. We’re already over 18 in 2021. Driving poisons our air, as transportation is the largest single share of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, primarily “from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes. Over 90 percent of the fuel used for transportation is petroleum based, which includes primarily gasoline and diesel.” Over 91,000 air pollution related deaths occur each year, with auto exhaust being a major source of PM 2.5. Electrifying our truck fleets and personal autos is a good thing for the climate, but we’ve still engineered exercise out of our environment, and that’s killing us too. We can start to change this by advocating for policies that fit into a 15 minute city framework. This isn’t a perfect solution but the idea is: design places and rules that make movement just as convenient and safe for walking, biking, scooting, etc as it may already be for cars (more on this in a subsequent post).
Parking Minimums are Inequitable
It’s a simple fact of history that the programs employed to reshape our built environment after World War 2 and as a response to the rise of Progressive politics in the United States were inextricably racial in their impact and intent. James Baldwin called Urban Renewal negro removal after witnessing it in San Francisco. So if you ignore this, climate change, particulate damage, adult inactivity, traffic deaths, and the fact that our transportation system is a subsidized ponzi scheme built on the backs of our future generations, getting around in a car is pretty great. It’s also convenient if you can afford it.
1 in 4 Cleveland households lack access to an automobile, meaning this system is unreliable at best or completely out of reach at worst. Requiring parking forces us to transform Cleveland into a city that functionally excludes a quarter of our residents. This is wrong.
Car ownership is expensive. According to the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average vehicle costs over $9,000 to own and operate. Approximately $1,900 is related to gasoline and motor oil, and approximately $3,500 in other vehicle related costs. $9,000/year may be a manageable cost for the median US household (~$68,000/year), but Cleveland’s median household income is ~$30,000/year. For black households, its closer to ~$20,000/year. The maintenance costs alone of $3,500 account for a whopping 17.5% of annual income, leaving only $16,500 for food, housing, healthcare, etc. It is a simple, sad fact that a car-dominated transportation system leaves the least able of us behind. Transportation access is synonymous with freedom, and the policies in our cities should bend towards it. Saying yes to fewer cars is a small step we can take right now to do just that.
Building a City for Cars Makes Anything else Harder
Cars take up a lot of space. This image always makes the rounds on social media and in presentations, including Jarrett Walker’s.
Again I am summarizing what others before me have already said. Using this image Jarrett points out a geometrical fact. The amount of space taken up by cars in cities is not an opinion. The point of any moderately or very dense city is to fit lots of people in a finite amount of space in a way that allows them to still live meaningful, healthy, and fulfilling lives. Jarrett says this is one of the best arguments for transit on its own, and I think it’s also one of the best arguments to prioritize people over cars.
In planner-speak we can start this transition gradually. It’s not about dumping rules wholesale, but recognizing the harm they cause to all of us, and recognizing it isn’t the best investment anyway.
It doesn’t mean ban cars from a city like Cleveland. That is unreasonable right now. What this mental realignment does is create a value system and foundation for decision making that informs tradeoffs, and where we should ask leaders and decision makers to land when we have to choose between prioritizing space for cars or space for people, because cars just take up so much space. It really limits our options to do much else (except maybe downtown). This includes curb space (street parking vs. bike lanes), and the rules we require developers to work under (off-street parking minimums).
So what is the Ask?
Like I said earlier, we should ditch these rules in favor of ones that more closely align with our values and do a better job of producing the outcomes we want. This is an opportunity we can seize. If we want a safer, more sustainable city that is easier to get around on our feet, on a bike, in a wheelchair, etc., then we need start with some of the basic regulatory hurdles we put in our own way:
Eliminate mandatory off-street parking minimums. Cities like Buffalo have already done this and the world has not ended. It’s not that we can’t build any more off-street parking, the point is we should stop requiring it. A wholesale move like this is a good idea but we can dip our toe in by exempting smaller residential/commercial developments and by allowing alternative compliance by-right for developments that provide bicycle parking and ridesharing.
Better manage on-street parking. We should competitively price street parking so there are always some spaces available at any given time. The City’s current code is simple but antiquated, and doesn't provide for useful service.
The great thing about these two steps is we have all the skill and expertise we need to make these changes. What does not yet exist is the proper will and demand from us, Cleveland’s citizens. So much opportunity exists to create cheaper housing, to use space we’ve required to store cars to instead house people and families. We can make more space for people to live their lives, to plant trees, or open businesses. We can get serious about doing our part to build a more climate resilient city. All we need to do is ask for this future. We have to ask our councilpeople, we have to ask our neighbors, and we have to constantly ask ourselves if the way we do things are moving Cleveland forward, or holding it back. If we ask for these specific changes, I know Cleveland can deliver.
Is there any kind of discussion in place for this kind of change in Cleveland? I remember attending a few events in 2019 where Code Studio came in and did some work about rezoning Detroit & Lake Avenue, but haven't heard anything since. This is the second crack we've made at reforming our zoning code since 2010. Zoning seems to just be off the table in terms of political lifts, but this seems like a good step in the right direction. Thanks for the article.