Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. Planning Manager Tim Kelly emails a weekly GR Forward update to the project Steering Committee. Here's this week's communication:

Hope you all had a great week.

This week we continued our presentations of the draft GR Forward plan around the community. Below is a list of groups we met with, and we appreciate all the feedback we have received to date. As always, please let me know if you have additional ideas for groups that we can meet with.

  • DGRI Alliance for Investment
  • DGRI Alliance for Vibrancy
  • Downtown Social Service Executive Meeting
  • Grand River Restoration Steering Committee

For those of you that have not had a chance to review the plan, a reminder that you can find it here: http://beta.downtowngr.org/our-work/projects/gr-forward. Feel free to share the link with anyone that might be interested.

Additionally, as I mentioned in last week’s email, this is simply the beginning of our review period. The official 42-day review will not begin until the City Commission approves the plan to be released, but in advance of that we welcome any feedback and ideas you have now.

Web Numbers

The latest web and social media numbers are below. Be sure to continue to share the links below in your network so everyone can stay up to date with our GR Forward activities.

Resources

Another great article on Minneapolis and some of their changing policies on transportation and parking.

Over the past months, the City has taken a number of steps to encourage use of their growing mass transportation systems, and address rising construction costs, increasing rents, and a lack of developable land.

Among their approaches were to eliminate parking minimums for small to mid-size developments within a ¼ mi of a rail or bus line, and to require only one space for every two units of housing in developments with 50 or more units, The approach grew out of City leadership’s recognition that parking is an amenity that should respond to customer demand, similar to a fitness center or swimming pool. Instituting parking maximums means that if developers believe parking provides a competitive advantage to attract residents, they are free to provide it. However, if other solutions are available, they are not required to do so.

This transition in thinking gets to an important point in real estate economics, which is there is no such thing as free parking. Parking lots and ramps are expensive, not only in terms of construction and maintenance, but also in opportunity costs. With scarce land, every off-street parking space comes at the expense of another development, which could provide tax revenue to municipalities. As an example, a 2014 study identified each parking spot in the city of Hartford as representing $1,200 of potential tax revenue.

But the potential lost revenue is only one side of the issue. More troubling is the impact minimum parking requirements have on housing affordability. As with most markets, the cost to construct a parking space is ultimately passed on to the end user. For parking spaces at housing developments, those costs are passed on the form of higher rents. For low-income families, this means housing becomes less affordable, which is especially troubling as low-income families are less likely to own cars in the first place. As Donald Shoup, the retired professor from UCLA who wrote the seminal piece on parking economics stated,

“The worst thing that many American cities have done for low-income people is create a world in which you need a car. Parking pushes everything farther apart, and even if you're too poor to own a car, you have to pay for all the free parking you don't use."

While it is clear parking is a necessity for cities and downtowns, it is important to think about the unintended consequences of dated policies on land use and housing costs. By requiring more parking be built than is needed, cities are not only missing out on potential tax revenue, but likely pushing up rents as well.

As always, let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise, have a great weekend.