Of possible interest.
Access magazine is published bi-annually by the University of California Transportation Center. It is an excellent source of information relating to transportation and land-use issues in CA.
Parking Requirements and Housing Development: Regulation and Reform in Los Angeles
By Michael Manville
Spring 2014
Access magazine
"When cities require off-street parking with all new residential construction, they shift what should be a cost of driving—the cost of parking a car—into the cost of housing. A price drivers should pay at the end of their trips becomes a cost developers must bear at the start of their projects. Faced with these minimum parking requirements, developers may build less housing, and the housing they do build may be more likely to include parking. Parking requirements could therefore reduce both the amount and variety of housing in a city.
Will parking requirements always have this impact? No. In low-density areas where parking is cheap and most people want it, developers might build lots of parking even if it isn’t required. In downtowns and inner cities, however, parking requirements could profoundly alter the housing stock. Downtown land is expensive, its parcels are often small and irregular, and its buildings frequently cover their entire lots. In these situations, any on-site parking must be subterranean or structured, which is always expensive and sometimes physically impossible.
When parking is difficult to provide, laws that require it on-site with housing are laws that constrain the housing market. Minimum parking requirements can make it difficult to build housing for certain people, on certain parcels, in certain buildings, or in certain neighborhoods. When cities require on-site parking with every unit, developers cannot build housing explicitly for people without cars (who are often low-income), or for people who own cars but are willing to park off-site.
The law also makes it difficult to construct housing on small parcels. Nor can developers easily convert old buildings into housing. Central cities have many architecturally and historically significant buildings that predate widespread vehicle ownership and thus lack parking or the space to add it. These old buildings should be a competitive advantage for cities; they are a pleasing amenity most suburbs lack. If parking requirements keep these buildings vacant, however, they become albatrosses rather than assets. And if old buildings and small parcels dominate a neighborhood, as they do in many inner cities, then parking requirements can stifle an entire neighborhood’s growth.
Parking requirements could, in sum, obstruct infill development, affordable development, and neighborhood redevelopment..."
http://www.uctc.net/access/44/access44_parking-requirements.shtml
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