Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) is writing new climate rules aimed at helping Oregon reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The rules won’t do that, but they will impose even higher housing and transportation costs on Oregonians.
This is LCDC’s example of what it calls a “climate-friendly” neighborhood. Pay no attention to all of the cars in the picture. LCDC photo.
LCDC is a seven-member unelected commission that rigidly controls all of Oregon’s private land. Most importantly, it requires cities to have urban-growth boundaries and forbids development of most areas outside of those boundaries. The proposed new rules will impose even stricter policies on landowners in urban areas.
Most importantly, the proposed rules require major cities to ensure that at least 30 percent of all new housing is “climate-friendly.” This is defined as “mixed-use areas that contain, or are planned to contain, a greater mix and supply of housing, jobs, businesses, and services.” In other words, New Urbanism.
Does LCDC have any evidence that this will reduce greenhouse gas emissions? No. If reducing greenhouse gas emissions is so important, and this is supposed to do it, then why doesn’t LCDC require that all new development meet this criteria? Probably because it is unmarketable: even most Oregonians still prefer to live in single-family homes on quiet streets, not in the middle of a bunch of shops and restaurants.
Another proposed rule is to eliminate parking mandates. I’m not a strong supporter of parking mandates, but the reason they were imposed in the first place is that, if parking was limited on on-street parking, people would end up driving around the block over and over until a space opened up. Requiring businesses to provide some of their own parking was a way to relieve congestion, which incidentally meant reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
This aerial photo shows parking lots in downtown Corvallis in red, supposedly demonstrating why LCDC needs to ban parking mandates. But those parking lots aren’t the result of mandates, and LCDC has no evidence that eliminating the mandates will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As evidence of the need to eliminate parking mandates, LCDC shows an aerial photo of downtown Corvallis showing parking lots in red with the caption, “Parking uses a huge amount of high-valued land.” But downtown Corvallis isn’t exactly high-valued land. Are any of these parking lots due to mandates or are they there because there isn’t any demand to do anything else with the land?
The real danger is that many planners equate “eliminate minimum parking requirements” with “impose maximum parking limits,” in other words, rules reducing the number of spaces builders are allowed to include with housing, offices, and retail areas. Does LCDC actually have any evidence that parking mandates lead people to drive more? Does it have any evidence that eliminating those mandates (or imposing maximum parking limits) will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions? I doubt it.
In short, LCDC is using the state goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to impose its own preferences on other Oregonians. If LCDC were serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it would instead require builders to make all new homes zero-energy homes, which adds only about 10 percent to the cost of new construction. It would also eliminate urban-growth boundaries, which would reduce congestion and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
More importantly, eliminating the boundaries would lead to a reduction in housing prices, thereby leading to a new housing boom, and if all of those new homes were zero-energy, the state would do a lot more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than the New Urbanist ideas contained in the proposed LCDC rules. LCDC’s emphasis on New Urbanism demonstrates that it isn’t really serious about greenhouse gases.
LCDC plans to adopt the new rules in May and is accepting comments until then. Don’t expect your comments to have any influence on the outcome, however, as the rules have pretty much already been set in stone.
The Wizard is one of the characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Unseen for most of the novel, he is the ruler of the Land of Oz and highly venerated by his subjects. Believing he is the only man capable of solving their problems, Dorothy and her friends travel to the Emerald City, the capital of Oz, to meet him. Oz is very reluctant to meet them, but eventually each is granted an audience, one by one. In each of these occasions, the Wizard appears in a different form, once as a giant head, once as a beautiful fairy, once as a horrible monster, and once as a ball of fire. When, at last, he grants an audience to all of them at once, he seems to be a disembodied voice.
Eventually, it is revealed that Oz is actually none of these things, but rather an ordinary conman from Omaha, Nebraska, who has been using elaborate magic tricks and props to make himself seem “great and powerful”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_(character)
According to estimates Parking lots in the US cover an area the size of West Virginia….. An asphalt desert the size, urban heat island effect of 24,000 square miles of artificial desert. You wanna curb global warming, green em..
Parking lot in Copgenhagen.
http://buildabetterburb.org/2013/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/TechUnivOfDenmakrLyngby_article_slideshow_01.png
Granted that’s for a university….
Here’s an American example, we do everything bigger…
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/34/15/61/341561724fb890950b08fbc42f32f308–cowboys-stadium-dallas-cowboys.jpg
Dallas Cowboys stadium, no it’s not actually in Dallas, they don’t have the space? The building is roughly 450×600 feet in size, but the parking covers 70 acres.
5-10 acres of surface parking and 1-2 multi story parking structures would have free’d up 50 acres Cowboys could sell for development. Instead it’s a desert. Bear in mind, NFL teams have only 17 home games, add some events, a concert, etc. NFL stadiums stay closed 330 days a year.
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Devoting 1/3 to half your cityscape to parking, people still spend time looking for places to park. A million dollar parking lot, thousands of gallons of Diesel, and a million pounds of trucked in materials, consuming a prime piece of downtown real estate big enough to house a huge number of people. All so a few dozen people a day can spend an extra minute burning gas and sitting on their ass instead of using their legs for 60 seconds. Most parking is consolidated by private business, namely big box stores and the like.
Parking is such a business police have mini vehicles running aroundto make sure people do it right and fine those who don’t.
I don’t believe in Auto-centric or Pedestrian centric… I believe in “Human friendly”… cities begin to finally reform their outdated parking standard; Building 200-400 parking spots for a retailer that receives only 1000 people a day (50-100 per hour), we need to stop talking about “taking away” spots and focus on what we all stand to gain. They call it anti-car. People call the cops if a person stays around too long……call it loitering.
I remember when Steve Jobs was midst of city planning discussion for his ring shaped new headquarters, before he died [from his stupid bitch of a wife who persuaded him vegetables and smoothies were better cancer cures than medicine] his discussion was to have minimalized surface parking, and plant 9800 trees including an apricot orchard… Beyond Apple’s Plan, the Apple Park, Get it has 11,000 surface parking spots, because city of Cupertino made the company do it.
According to estimates there are approximately over 1.6 to 2.6 BILLION parking spots in the United States. More than there are cars to park them. Combined parking spots, their lanes and various parking land infrastructure take up an area the size of West Virginia.
As cars grew in popularity in early 20th century; 2 inventions grew to dominate parking management and act as counter balancing foces
– The parking meter
-off street parking demands
Meter manufacturers popularized the meter; so they offered them FREE to cities; and Kept revenue til the meter was paid for, then ciy kep he revenue afterward. They installed them only on One side of the street only so folks could see how it worked on one side vs. the other. At the same time meters were invented cities invented “Off street parking requirements” or as we call em parking minimums which created a huge supply of parking at no cost to the city. Because of poor management of “on street” parking. off street rules differ… you have to have a minimum of parking for “Something”.
Hospitals it’s 1.8 spaces per bed.
Public pools it’s 3 space per 1000 gallons of water.
We pay for parking for every capacity in life, except largely as drivers. Antiplanner supports Auto users paying for the infrastructure they use…. imagine if they had to pay for all the parking….. They’d grab a shovel and tear it up themselves.
Since parking requirements use 2-4 times more land than building itself. It puts buildings further apart making it more difficult to walk, dangerous for small non-motorized vehicles. And creates artificial shortages for housing. That 90 acres of Dallas cowboy parking could accommodate 150-250 single family homes or 700 mixed housing stock of individual and row houses.
Land is expensive for housing and free for parking and you wonder why we have a problem
As a person involved in development in a Portland suburb, I’ve watched the “Climate-friendly” rules evolve over the past six months and the author is correct in that no amount of comments will change the proposed rules. In fact, Jesus Christ could come down and proclaim these rules are crap, and LCDC would not care. They have their vision of utopia and that is what we are all going to live it, like it or not.
And one other thing regarding this discussion of parking. Lazyreader seems to think that we don’t pay for parking and that’s why so many parking lots exist. Wrong.! The big-ass parking lot outside of Best Buy isn’t free. Everything you buy at Best Buy has a few cents added to it to pay for the land, construction costs, and maintenance expenses for the parking lot. The same is true for the “free parking” at the mall.
In fact, even the street parking outside your house isn’t free. Streets are expensive to build and adding 8-feet of asphalt on each side of a street for parking makes development more expensive. That expense is added to the cost of each house in a subdivision.
If you want to eliminate surface parking then the land needs to be worth much more so it pays to build a structure on it rather than use it for a low-value use like parking. But even in those situations parking doesn’t disappear. Instead it goes into multi-story parking structures. You can see this in downtown Portland where land has a high value. And in Vancouver, BC, while surface parking lots don’t exist, every one of their residential needle towers and office buildings has multiple levels of parking under the building.
Trying to create a utopian urban environment by eliminating parking is like trying to cure a cold by getting rid of all your tissues and handkerchiefs.
”
Trying to create a utopian urban environment by eliminating parking is like trying to cure a cold by getting rid of all your tissues and handkerchiefs.
” ~Trapped in Portlandia
Tissues don’t cure the problem of sickness, they simply act as reservoirs for boogers……
New York is giving the Buffalo Bills $850 million in taxpayer funds for a new stadium, the biggest pro sports subsidy of all time.
Three days ago, NY announced a $800 million cut to children and family services.
The Bills owner is worth $5.8 billion.
Democrats gave them the best government money can buy!
Here is the evidence that LCDC if full of certifiable idiots that do not understand climate, history, logic or science:
There is NO CLIMATE CRISIS! – THE CLIMATE HAS ALWAYS CHANGED!
5000 years ago, there was the Egyptian 1st Unified Kingdom warn period
4400 years ago, there was the Egyptian old kingdom warm period.
3000 years ago, there was the Minoan Warm period. It was warmer than now WITHOUT fossil fuels.
Then 1000 years later, there was the Roman warm period. It was warmer than now WITHOUT fossil fuels.
Then 1000 years later, there was the Medieval warm period. It was warmer than now WITHOUT fossil fuels.
Then 1000 years later, came our current warm period. You are claiming that whatever caused those earlier warm periods suddenly quit causing warm periods, only to be replaced by man’s CO2 emission, perfectly in time for the cycle of warmth every 1000 years to stay on schedule. Not very believable.
The entire climate scam crumbles on this one observation because it shows that there is nothing unusual about today’s temperature and ALL claims of unusual climate are based on claims of excess warmth caused by man’s CO2.
http://www.debunkingclimate.com/warm_periods.html
http://www.debunkingclimate.com/climatehistory.html
http://www.debunkingclimate.com
Feel free to disagree by showing actual evidence that man’s CO2 is causing serious global warming.
As with the Antiplanner’s earlier post about the cult of climate change, New Urbanism is just another icon of the religion. If you challenge the cult on this they tend to get emotional and snap back at you with some unsubstantiated claim. At best the belief that their design system enhances efficiency is an untested hypothesis. However, looking at what has already occurred any cursory review of data will reveal they claims simple don’t pan out. Also, I suspect as the housing crisis worsens even traditional supporters of this ideology will walk away from it.
@Trapped in Portlandia Your assumption about parking only applies in highly dense areas. If you stop forcing density the value of parking goes way down. There was some smart growth advocate in a college town I used to live in a while back. He wanted the city to tax all parking spaces even on private land in suburban and exurban areas of the town (which was quite remote and generally rural in nature). His argument was that parking “was expensive.” Ironically, his policy idea would have been the major cost driver of parking in the city. Thankfully, everyone just ignored him.
Re: Parking Meters.
The job of a parking meter is not to raise revenue but to make a record of how long the car has been parked in a location with signs declaring, for example, “One Hour Parking Only.”
If the meter runs out a penalty is assessed (Parking Ticket) and the vehicle may be towed away. This is, for example, to keep workers from parking all day in a spot designed to support local retailers.
Embrace the power of and.