*Street parking in San Francisco. (Source:* *Flickr/Russell Mondy.)*

Public policy has winners and losers. Nothing your city can do that is of consequence will produce winners 100% of the time.

In 2018, San Francisco became one of the first U.S. cities to eliminate all parking mandates. No longer is new development in the city required to provide off-street parking spaces. One of the many benefits promised by advocates of this program was that it would lower the cost of developing badly needed housing. Mission Local reports that, sure enough, since 2019, the city’s centrally located Mission District has added 732 new affordable apartments with zero new parking spaces.

The same Mission Local piece reports, however, that this has become a huge problem for working-class residents of these buildings. The article by Annika Hom is full of anecdotes of stressed-out residents losing hours of their lives to moving their cars around between scarce street parking spaces to comply with city time limits and street sweeping schedules, struggling to juggle commutes and kids’ school schedules and other travel commitments, and in some cases, racking up thousands of dollars in parking fines.

Although San Francisco is one of the easiest American cities to live car-free in, 47% of households earning less than $100,000 annually have at least one car. 22 percent of low-income San Franciscans drive to work. And that includes people whose specific jobs more or less require it, because—for example—their destination is not transit accessible, or they need to transport tools.

Does this mean parking reform has been a failure, or accidentally worsened the city’s already brutal inequality?

First, let’s be clear about what is actually going on. The reason people are struggling here is not really because of city parking policy, but because of larger factors that make finding a suitable living situation horribly difficult for many San Franciscans. The parking issues are a side effect of a miserable status quo.

No developer, of affordable housing or otherwise, is prohibited from building parking spaces in San Francisco. They are simply no longer required to do so. Because the cost of building housing in San Francisco is so exorbitant—Hom cites a figure of more than $700,000 per apartment—many are opting not to. If the parking mandates were still in place, these apartments would likely cost $40,000 to $75,000 more to build, and require more land, so there would be even fewer of them.

The policy of parking requirements would (and did, for decades) create its own set of winners and losers—but the losers’ suffering would be less obviously tied to parking policy than in the case of the people Hom profiled for Mission Local. It’s harder to write a think piece about that sort of diffuse harm, where there isn’t a simple linear nexus between policy and victim. But the harm is still real.

Many commenters on Hom’s piece pointed out that the policies that entrench car dependency and force low-income people to own, maintain, and rely on motor vehicles are far more regressive and harmful to the working class, on balance, than a lack of parking in some low-income apartment buildings. It’s a fair point, and an accurate one. But it’s also no consolation to the 60-year-old bagel delivery driver Hom spoke with, whose shifts begin before the buses start running in the morning.

Telling people who are individually suffering that, well actually, on average, people like them are better off, is not the way. Even if it’s true.

Let’s talk about why people who need cars for their jobs are stuck in buildings with no parking. It’s not because there’s a shortage of parking in San Francisco—or, more to the point, because anyone is prohibited from building more to meet the need. But affordable apartments are scarce, there are long waiting lists for any kind of subsidized housing in San Francisco, and most of the new units coming online are in a handful of large buildings in relatively small pockets of the city.

What would happen under a housing market with more abundance and more variety is that people could naturally “sort” according to their personal priorities. For a lot of low-income people, a parking space won’t be a priority. They don’t own a car, or their situation allows them to deal with parking it on the street and moving it as necessary. (I knew a lot of people who did this when I lived in San Francisco.) They would rather have a smaller or less nice or slightly more expensive apartment if it can be near mass transit.

For some, for whom their vehicle is extremely important—maybe they’re a landscaper or an electrician or a delivery driver, or they have a kid and rely on grandparents in an inaccessible-by-bus neighborhood for day care, or any number of other reasons—that won’t be true. Those people should be able to choose a building with parking, maybe in a less transit-rich location, making a different set of tradeoffs that make sense for them.

The fact that people who really, really need a reliable parking spot—something that is genuinely true of a subset of low-income people—feel forced to take an apartment in a building without any parking is a consequence of both the overall housing shortage, and the way we have restricted new building to a monoculture. That is, there are only a handful of neighborhoods, featuring the same type of product over and over.

I’ve argued many times that parking is a problem with market-based solutions. The city could charge a market-clearing price for street parking. In fact, they could easily charge a price that results in open spaces near any given block, so people aren’t wasting hours of their lives circling for parking in the evening. And private operators could build a parking garage to meet the obvious demand among the kinds of residents profiled by Hom, and could charge a market rate for those spaces, maybe on a monthly basis. (This is what affluent residents of dense downtowns generally do: they pay for a garage space for their car.)

The problem is that that market rate would not be cheap, because San Francisco is home to some of the most expensive land in all of North America. The price of everything that happens on very expensive land—commerce, housing, parking—is driven up by the price of the land itself. The rich can simply outbid the poor for access to San Francisco, period, and it’s going to take a lot to mitigate that fact. But asking parking policy to shoulder the burden of the much larger problems of societal inequality and artificial housing scarcity is not an answer.

Subsidizing the working class is reasonable and necessary in a place like San Francisco. Mandating (not even subsidizing) parking for them, specifically, is a stupid way to go about that.

Yet, the concern is that this is one more straw on the camel’s back, that parking with turn into yet one more thing that is a standard amenity for the rich, but largely unavailable to the poor. And that will only deepen the difficulty and indignity of being low income in a place like San Francisco. That concern is well founded. We can’t write it off.

At Strong Towns, we’ve talked a lot about subsidiarity. This is the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest, the most local and personal, level of authority that is competent to make them.

Applied to parking, this would indicate that the decision of whether to rent an apartment with a parking space should be between you and your landlord. The individual is more capable of determining whether they need parking than city hall is. And the builder of an individual building is more competent to determine how many parking spaces they should build than city hall is.

The harm documented by Mission Local is not caused by the absence of top-down parking mandates, but by subsidiarity violations elsewhere in society. The lack of ability for the community to secure their own housing needs. The lack of adequate transportation options where there is obvious need for them. (Mass transit in San Francisco serves portions of the city and metro well, but much larger portions poorly or not at all, and that includes large areas where mostly poorer people live.)

If we view the challenge as increasing the amount of agency that low-income people (and all people) have over their life circumstances, then we can start to imagine lots of paths forward that won’t take the form of top-down mandates but locally led, bottom-up solutions. More centralized layers of government can still support these solutions with financial resources and technical assistance.

If you asked residents of the 732 new affordable apartments in the Northeast Mission—a dense, very walkable neighborhood with scarce on-street parking—to devise a solution to their parking woes and pitch it to city hall, I bet they would come up with ideas. They might involve changes to the system of permitting or fines, or the pricing of street parking. They might involve finding some land on the periphery of the neighborhood that could be reserved for parking in the near term.

I don’t know, because I don’t live there. And that’s the point. The solution to parking problems in a different neighborhood—say, one that is much lower density with more underused land, but also with less walkability and public transit—would look different. And should look different.

There’s a well-intentioned impulse among people who think hard about planning and public policy to try to anticipate and address every possible instance of someone being harmed by a policy change. Tweak the policy, create carve-outs or compensatory benefits, or the like. Under this mindset, policymaking becomes reactive. “Who is going to be mad about x and how do we placate them?” This takes the place of policy based in a coherent vision of “How should x work?”

The end result of this tendency is monstrously complicated public policy kludges. It’s tinkering and micromanagement to the extreme. An early, failed version of statewide housing reform in California, for example, would have created a map of “sensitive communities” to be exempted from certain upzoning requirements. If this bill had passed, no doubt an agency would have to have been created to continually revise the map over time. All sorts of interest groups would try to mess with the boundaries on the map. It would have been a nightmare.

Imagine doing the same thing with parking policies. My fear is that policy makers will read the kind of reporting that Mission Local just did and that will be their conclusion. Let’s not have parking mandates more broadly, but let’s apply them to certain kinds of low-income housing projects in certain kinds of locations.

When you think about policy from the top down, and then you try to solve everyone’s objections to the policy also from the top down, you get into ridiculous territory pretty quickly.

The genius of ending parking mandates and subsidies as a policy is its utter simplicity. You don’t commission a $300,000 study. You don’t have to cobble together 100 pages of legislation based on years of stakeholder consultation and lobbying.

You press “delete,” and boom, your city’s parking policy is better than it was, in that a costly, destructive mandate with no scientific justification is now gone.

But some people will end up worse off in the near term because of that change. It’s not worth denying that. If “Will anyone be harmed by this?” is the criterion for government doing anything, that’s a recipe for complete paralysis.

The question before us should not be how do “we”—bureaucrats working at a remove from people on the ground—”solve” for every unintended consequence of our policies. It should be how we increase the genuine agency of people on the ground. What options are available to people to solve their own problems, together with their neighbors? City hall should put itself in humble service to that goal. And otherwise get out of the way in areas—as with mandating inflexible amounts of parking—where it has a long history of being in the way.

Is Parking Reform Hurting the Poor in San Francisco?

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