More Parking? The Last Thing for Downtown

I've written and researched quite a bit about parking over the years. Far more than I care to admit. I am resurrecting some of the old writing and research and adding some of my new data since Tim Rogers from D Magazine reached out to me this morning regarding a quote from my friend Mike Ablon where he suggested downtown needs ten more parking garages.

Of course, given my research I couldn't disagree more. Below is my immediate response and further below are charts showing my old and new research:

Parking is about as pure of a demand/supply equation as there is. I like to keep tabs on average monthly parking costs in downtowns (aka Central Business Districts or CBDs for short). Parking space has to compete with people space for real estate. If there is high demand for people space (jobs, housing, etc.) parking will get crowded out, which is why I like it as a proxy metric for downtown health and vitality.

Parking is also one (ONE) form of access, typically a rather inconvenient form of access -- particularly in high demand cities -- compared to 1) proximity and propinquity (land use mix and variety) and 2) transit (particularly in high density/high demand cities). So, to some extent it is needed. But what is needed LESS THAN supply, is a lower supply/demand ratio.

Think of it this way. A rule of thumb related to downtown businesses is that once the C-suite moves out, they will move the business out with them. The same thing happens with amenities like shopping and entertainment. When enough population and dollars move somewhere, they won't want the inconvenience of driving long distances for those experiences. Downtown Dallas is not in a strong enough place currently to compete and offer something unique (even if the Dallas Mavericks remain). There must be unique attractions at 24-7.

What IS needed, is more housing, particularly at a wider variety of price points. The luxury rental market is just too shallow. I won't get into real and/or perceived issues regarding downtown living here. However, that range of housing product is generally difficult to deliver, we are running out of easy to convert office buildings to residential, and the city's resources for helping to finance housing in downtown seems to be pretty tapped at the moment.

Another very localized issue is that the notion of downtown Dallas as a Central Business District is changing. The job center that used to organize around Main Street is migrating northward around Klyde Warren Park and basically between the Arts District and Victory - the No Man's Land Spaghetti as I once called it, warning that we needed to fix the dangerous, convoluted street network before the real estate market found the area -- which it now has, entrenching some of those problems.

Something I wrote about Seattle and Dallas downtown parking situations ten years ago:

It would be insane to suggest taking a CBD from one end of this continuum (low parking costs to high parking cost city) to the other with the snap of your fingers.  However, as every revitalizing place shows, you can systematically work your way up if you know what you’re doing.  Seattle updates their parking census every three years in order to know the supply and demand in every district around their downtown.  High cost is critical to off-setting the negative externalities of parking, which is why Seattle and every other rational place wants to systematically decrease the impact of parking on the value of their city.  If that means less parking, so be it.

However, in Seattle’s case the aggregate amount of parking has increased, but the ratio at which office and residential has parked has decreased.  Total parking only went up because jobs and residential numbers have jumped so high.  Their CBD now has nearly twice the jobs as Dallas’ CBD, three times the residents, and somewhere between 60-70% of the parking, which we would better know if we had a solid accounting of Dallas parking supply.  What we do know is that parking in Dallas is CHEAP.  Meaning, there probably is too much.

We (and every city) should also be doing a detailed parking survey in downtown every few years, but ideally make it even more sophisticated (I haven't seen Seattle's version in years so maybe it has become more sophisticated).

Now for the research. First the new:

Find the charts at this link:

https://medium.com/@WalkableDFW/more-parking-thats-the-last-thing-for-downtown-213d82536564

The above chart is from a survey I did for nearly 150 downtowns across the USA on average monthly parking costs in downtown. Dallas ranks 48th between Columbus and Hartford. I then broke this down against common peer cities below:

For the older data I used Collier's International 2013 CBD Parking Survey (which I replicated with more cities last year because I missed the data).

Land use comparisons of parking costs and people space.

The above charts show Job Density and Average Parking Costs and Population Density in downtowns versus Parking Costs. And below is Storefront density from the Storefront Index (created by City Observatory). Unfortunately, I moved parking costs onto the x-axis many moons ago for this chart so it appears as if there is a different curve from the above charts.

More demand for people space equals higher parking costs.

Specifically related to parking and downtown's general health and vitality, what is needed is a strategic systemic approach to increase the demand/supply ratio with the goal of HIGHER parking costs as a market-response. You can't just raise parking costs and get this effect. The higher costs have to be the by-product of delivering more demand for people space and reducing the parking spaces per job/resident ratio.

Dallas is facing very difficult, entrenched systemic problems in its downtown many of which are very specifically due to the misguided thoughts of the 20th century of building freeways and parking; demolishing people space to make room. These problems are only intractable if we lack the political will to do what is necessary, which is systematically breaking down the car-centric infrastructure and restoring the value of proximity in the real estate market.