Quote:
Originally Posted by exit2lef
A true measure of productive building height would subtract floors devoted to parking podiums. Build a 20-story building with four levels of above ground parking? It'll count as a 16-story building. Parking podiums may be a quicker and less expensive way to boost height, but that comes at the expense of the street-level experience and the strength of the urban fabric. I'm all for height, but I'll take shorter buildings with less parking, no parking, or underground parking over any of these podiums.
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I agree, California recently did away with minimum parking mandates near public transit as most urban cities such as San Francisco and San Jose were doing away with them. Great article below about California passing legislation to do away with parking minimums. Below are some snippets and a link to the full article.
https://urbanland.uli.org/planning-d...nders-approve/
Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, recently presented a paper to UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate about the benefits of removing parking requirements.
“A sizable [amount of] research literature suggests they undermine housing affordability, encourage driving, and discourage walking and public transit use,” states Manville. “Rolling these requirements back is thus a big change, and essential to meeting California’s affordability and sustainability goals.”
On the front lines of possible pivots to new typologies is Mark Oberholzer, principal, AIA, LEED AP at the Los Angeles office of KTGY. He believes the new law “could become a holy grail of workforce housing near transit.” He notes that his office receives 20 to 25 inquiries a year from owners looking to develop small, mid-block parcels. For many of these, mandating parking also requires building a podium to support it, which is often prohibitively expensive.
And as a designer, he’s excited about the prospect of creating “new people-centric buildings” that help revitalize neighborhoods.
Previously, parking-structure podiums and subgrade parking tended to dominate design at the street level, often with a small lobby fronting the garage as the only human-oriented space.
“This is not pedestrian-friendly. It doesn’t contribute to the neighborhood, and it’s simply not exciting. But if your ground floor is now free of parking, you can create welcoming ground-floor units, some facing the street. You can have courtyards accessible on the grade level rather than up in the air. In general, it makes the entire building more open, interesting, and inviting.”
And what about those developers retaining parking? How might these designs change? “One solution is to decouple parking from the building and build more efficient parking in the neighborhood, perhaps down the street from the apartments and perhaps aggregating the needs of more than one building.”
A lot of the historical typologies have a specific character. Prior to parking mandates, attractive California courtyard styles helped define neighborhoods at various scales. But it’s not the architectural style that’s important to unleashing new building types; it’s the freedom from imposed parking.
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