Parking’s Timely Death – Making Way For More Housing

Remember when Joni Mitchell sang about paving paradise and putting up parking lots? Now parking lots are becoming a thing of the past, but does that mean paradise is farther away? Not, if paradise is a beautiful new, and more affordable home.

Faster than the iPhone evolved, transportation is evolving, and changing everything around it. Fewer people own automobiles or plan to purchase them than ever.  Particularly among millennials – car ownership rates are declining and anecdotal evidence shows a growing number of young people don’t even want to learn to drive.  Ride share services and consumer sentiment are both contributing to lower car ownership.

Now, a car is a burden equating to debt, parking charges and gridlock, while ride share services offer at-your-fingertips convenience and affordability. That means that housing that is in design and development today, would be much less likely to need any sort of parking or car storage, which would be a huge cost savings. So, how else will this new transportation culture benefit housing?

According to Humphreys and Partners Architecture firm based in Dallas, TX, a finalist in an Uber Elevate design competition to create a structure that would be a hub for their vision of urban mobility in 2023. The Uber Elevate team is working with partners to launch fleets of small, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in a number of markets in just four years.

Walter Hughes, vice president of design at Humphreys, was lead on the project to create a Skyport and a Mega-Skyport that would be able to handle 5,400 passengers and 180 landings and takeoffs in an hour. He shows how it works, the design innovation, and the material specifications in this video.

Eliminating the need for parking spaces and structures would definitely open up land space, potentially driving down land costs – and possibly helping to solve the nation’s housing affordability crisis. Exactly what some cities, like San Diego, are combating with new parking requirements that eliminate parking requirements for multifamily housing developments near transit hubs.

Without cars and the parking structures that come with them, huge opportunities would open up for developers. Adele Peters actually breaks down the millions of ‘useless’ parking spots that can be identified with new software in this Fast Company article.

Plus, if cities are not spending the millions of dollars needed to build these parking structures in the first place, perhaps that money can go to supporting programs that give developers incentives, make permits easier, and/or into other process innovation for new housing development.

San Diego’s plan to reduce parking included an estimate that each parking space costs between $35,000 to $90,000. Which is close to the costs of a proposed parking structure in Montpelier, Vermont with 348 spaces and donated land adds up to more than $10 million.

The change to autonomous vehicles and lower car ownership will also have an impact on infrastructure, affecting road width and traffic patterns. From his design perspective, Hughes points out that even building entries are changing—most visitors won’t come from the parking garage they will need a drop off and pick up location instead.

Hughes says that Humphreys is already thinking of how to provide landing areas for aerial vehicles on the firm’s new designs that reflect their experience in the Uber Elevate program. He says a large housing development in a dense urban area could offer enough landing space to service a six to eight block area.

Seem far-fetched? Should housing developers be incorporating drone travel ideas into plans today? Japan is getting closer day by day. According to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, the country is writing the regulations for flying vehicles and flying prototypes this year.

Yet, there are dissenters who shoot holes in this idea becoming reality in the US. David Levinson, Transportist, literally thinks that people will be shooting holes in them, saying that Americans like to believe that they own the air above their house and might make sport of these unmanned vehicles traveling across their airspace.

Although the idea may be attractive, it just may not be practical yet. Buses carry many more people than aerial vehicles can, yet only transport about 5% of US travelers, Levinson says. Plus, the flying vehicles would need more space than buses.

Perhaps a simplified version of the impact of lower car ownership, would be from the KB Home ProjeKt, themed Where Tomorrow Lives, that offers a community concept of several homes that share access to one garage where they share an electric vehicle. That would mean that not every home would need the square footage associated with a garage, saving land space in a way that is economically beneficial and more environmentally friendly.

At the same time that we are experiencing a transportation culture shift, Levinson says the reality is that there will be a work revolution, where the new tech world all works remote.

“I’m thinking there will be a real estate crash,” Levinson says. “The population grows less than 1% per year. We are overbuilt for a world where people work remotely.”

If that’s the case, there will be very limited demand for downtown parking space.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.