Let's build houses for people, not cars
I hold no love for parking minimums, and would love to see them abolished, but proposals like &quot;we should turn 10% of all current parking spaces into low-income housing&quot; just make me roll eyes.<p>That&#x27;s not an actionable proposal, the closest that gets to an actionable proposal is to demolish existing parking structures and either put public housing projects on top of them or incentivize real estate developers to build actual low-income housing.<p>Telling real estate developers to build low-income housing in areas where they could easily build high-income housing is, well, let&#x27;s just say cities promise this all the time and developers never do it.<p>&quot;Build more housing&quot; is probably the answer to the homeless problem, but the ownership issue needs to be fixed first. The author made all these cute graphics of studio apartments superimposed on parking spaces. Cool, I like density, my condo is 650 sqft, like 3 or 4 spaces without egress.<p>Are we talking about literally taking parking from existing owners and building housing on the bare pads? Are we talking about building vertically on top of them and leaving the space underneath for cars? I&#x27;m not saying these are bad ideas. But can we fully bake them first? So a politician can actually hand it to a bunch of legislators and come up with something he can actually put on his platform?<p>Sure let&#x27;s abolish the minimum. But that won&#x27;t do a darned thing to help congestion and the housing shortage other than make LA more like Atlanta where there&#x27;s an island of density around a bunch of ugly sprawl with more dense pockets springing up in the periphery. We&#x27;re still waiting for market conditions to fix the city. And market forces don&#x27;t care about what we want. Promising low-income housing in desirable real estate markets doesn&#x27;t work but is the only thing politicians can put on their platforms that people will vote for.