About a year ago, Portland enacted “Inclusionary Housing” policy requiring new apartment buildings of 20 units or more to offer up a portion of the units at below market rents.
Developers are able to select from a few different options and the rents are calculated according to a percentage of the city’s median family income (30-80%). I’m not sure how this policy would apply to new condo buildings.
This is an interesting account by The Portland Mercury of what this policy may be doing to the housing market. I say may because it’s only been a year and there could be other factors at play.
Between 2013 and 2017, Portland typically built between 3,000 and 6,000 new units per year. Since the IH policy went into effect on February 1, 2017, 682 new units have applied for permit.
About half are coming from one developer who appears to be building the requisite affordable units in exchange for no parking minimums. They are now proposing buildings with zero parking.
Again, in all fairness, it’s only been a year. But already Mayor Ted Wheeler is looking at other incentives to encourage more new construction in the central city. The biggest levers: height and density.
All of this begins to speak to the very real impact of inclusionary zoning on development feasibility.
Photo by Zach Savinar on Unsplash
Last night I had a dream that I was driving around in a snowstorm and, for whatever reason, my tires had almost no tread on them. So I was all over the road. Strange. I have no idea what this means, if anything at all.
But it did remind me that I can absolutely imagine a time when the thought of driving your own car (outside of it being maybe a hobby) will seem positively archaic. I mean, think about how messy our current system is. Roads are a chaotic and oftentimes dangerous place.
The more interesting question for me though is: how will self-driving vehicles change our cities, our habits, and so on? In Elon Musk’s recently published Master Plan (Part Deux) he outlines 4 main goals for Tesla:
Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it
Let’s think about what these could mean.
One translates into decentralized energy generation and storage. Now all of a sudden the cars on our roads will be roaming around our cities collecting and storing energy, eventually returning home at the end of the day to power our homes. I can already imagine fleets of sun worshipping cars chasing the light as it moves across our cities.
Two is recognition that self-driving vehicles are going to have a meaningful impact on traditional public transit. (Elon reveals that Tesla is working on high passenger-density urban transport.)
Three addresses the chaotic current state and the massive potential of networked cars.
Four is particularly interesting to me. I wonder to what extent this income will simply subsidize car ownership or if it could actually transform cars into an investment (rather than purely an expense). Will people end up buying self-driving vehicles in the same way that people buy real estate for yield?
Furthermore, how does this notion of a shared vehicle pool now completely change the way we think about parking requirements. For instance, today we think about parking in terms of individual usage. This tenant requires/wants X amount of parking. All 2-bedroom apartments require Y amount of parking.
But if we’re now all sharing our vehicles, parking requirements would then be based on some broader and collective demand curve. Parking would become less individualistic and instead become more of a yard where self-driving vehicles come to store themselves when not in use.
Once again, we reach a point where utilization rates go up for each vehicle and overall parking demand goes down. Good thing we’re getting rid of parking minimums.
What else could you see happening?
I’ve been writing about the hypocrisy of parking minimums for years now. Some posts here, here, and here.
To me, it doesn’t make sense to try and promote more sustainable forms of urban mobility while at the same time mandating a minimum number of parking stalls in every new development.
Do you want people driving or not driving? Pick one.
That’s why I was happy to see the following action item in the province of Ontario’s five year plan to transition to a low-carbon economy and fight climate change (thank you Ken Wilcox for bringing it to my attention):
I haven’t gone through the entire action plan and so this post is not a commentary on that. It is, however, a commentary on subsection 1.4. I believe it is the right thing to do and I’m stoked to see it in the plan.