City weighs eliminating parking requirements
Developers could soon be freed from arbitrary off-street rules to enhance other forms of transit
Developers looking to build new housing complexes, office towers or retail shops in San
Jose may soon be freed of arbitrary off-street parking requirements, which is a dramatic policy shift that some fear will most adversely affect lower-income communities.
San Jose planners Friday presented a proposal to eliminate “mandatory parking minimum” requirements citywide and instruct developers to create plans within each project to spur residents to ditch their cars and hop onto a bus or train, ride a bicycle or even walk to get around. The City Council will decide whether to approve the plan at a meeting in January.
“The proposed ordinance changes are focused on advancing several key goals — the first of which is to right-size parking by effectively removing an arbitrary required zoning code and allow developers to decide on
the appropriate amount of parking based on a project’s location, tenants and access to transit,” said Jared Hart of the city’s planning department. “To be clear, this would not establish parking maximums but move to a market-based approach to ensure parking isn’t overbuilt.”
The elimination of minimum parking requirements not only would provide developers with more leeway to decide the adequate amount of parking spaces for new projects on an individual basis, but it also would allow existing businesses to move into older buildings that may not meet current parking minimums or convert existing parking spaces into permanent outdoor dining areas.
San Jose’s proposed policy change would go beyond state Assembly Bill 1401, which would ban cities across the state from imposing minimum parking requirements on new apartments and shops within a half-mile of train stations and bus routes.
Although the elimination of parking minimums has been embraced by a growing number of cities in recent years, residents and elected officials in San Jose are concerned about how it would work in a sprawling city such as San Jose, which lacks robust public transit options and already suffers from parking shortages in neighborhoods across the city.
“I’ve seen how it can exist, but I think every city and community is really unique,” Council member Matt Mahan said during a Friday study session. “We’re not just talking about how many parking spaces we’re going to have. This is about an overall shift in people’s life.”
An earlier survey by this news organization found that San Jose requires developers and business owners to provide more on-site parking than any other major city in California.
San Francisco and San Diego eliminated parking minimums altogether in recent years and both Berkeley and Sacramento made plans in January to do the same. In 2016, Oakland removed parking requirements near major transit corridors and set a cap on the maximum amount of parking allowed in those areas. Although Los Angeles has yet to go that far, it requires fewer spaces per development than San Jose.
In fact, San Jose’s existing minimum parking requirements often mandate that more space be dedicated to parking than a building itself. A 40-square-foot restaurant, for instance, is required to provide 330 square feet of parking, or eight times the size of the establishment.
The city’s minimum parking requirements came out of the post-World War II era when many cities worried that an inadequate amount of parking spaces at offices or apartment complexes would force vehicles to overflow into surrounding residential neighborhoods; a fear that many residents still hold.
Proponents of eliminating the requirements, including those in the city’s planning department, argue that it will reduce congestion by discouraging reliance on cars, help increase housing production by lowering the cost of construction and lessen the impact on the environment by curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
“This policy is one that falls in the footsteps of Climate Smart San Jose — this bold visionary move that San Jose did to position itself as a climate leader,” said Justin Wang, advocacy manager at the Greenbelt Alliance. “This is how we do it. This is the piece of the puzzle that we need to be unlocking.”
Under Climate Smart San Jose, city leaders have set an ambitious goal to become one of the first cities in the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the levels outlined in the Paris Agreement. By 2040, the city aims to ensure that no more than 25% of commute trips are made by residents driving alone. A report produced last year by the organization Urban Land Institute found that San Jose’s current parking policies negate that goal.
While many residents and city officials acknowledge the need to reduce the negative environmental effects of the city’s overreliance on vehicles, some are worried about the disproportionate impact it could have on certain neighborhoods in the city, particularly crowded low-income areas where available street parking is already difficult to come by.
Elma Arredondo, a resident in the city’s Mayfair neighborhood, called the proposal “a recipe for hardship on lower-income communities.”
In the part of East San Jose where Arredondo lives, there are approximately 15,000 residents per square mile — a density that is slightly lower than that of San Francisco.
The majority of households are filled by multi-generational families with three or more vehicles.
“To enact these proposed policies with these on-the-ground realities at this time will only negatively affect more lowerincome households,” Arredondo said.
Council member Magdalena Carrasco urged city staff to take concerns like Arredondo’s into consideration as they craft the final version of their proposal for council consideration in the winter.
“I do think that this would have a huge impact on one of the poorest communities in the city of San Jose,” Carrasco said. “And I’d like to be able to truly dig deeper into that and figure out how we can alleviate that to make sure that these vehicles are not going to go into the residential streets.”