San Jose has long been known as the home of vast parking lots and suburban sprawl, but a coalition of transit advocates and tech companies have introduced tools they say will turn the city into a testing ground for the future of housing and parking policies in California.
The tools include an Airbnb-like platform for parking garage management and a heat map of San Jose’s parking demand that advocates want to use as a guide for expanding metered parking in the city.
At the heart of the tech rollout is a push to decrease parking in San Jose — a city that is one of the most “overparked” municipalities in the state, according to transportation advocates — and pave the way for more homes, retail and restaurant spaces.
And city officials are on board. In December, San Jose became the country’s largest municipality to abolish decades-old parking minimums that fueled expansive concrete lots and commuter sprawl. Other cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, have eliminated most parking minimums. Berkeley has eliminated parking minimums for multifamily developments except for two areas in the hills, and Oakland has reduced parking minimums and eliminated the requirement in areas close to public transit hubs, such as downtown. The state also banned parking requirements within a half mile of major public transit stops last year.
In downtown San Jose developers have historically provided at least one parking space per apartment unit. And housing and transit advocates worry that despite the city’s policy change, developers will continue building car-friendly structures, limiting the density of San Jose’s building boom and the impact of a new BART line in the next decade.
“Many developers are probably just going to stick there,” said Stuart Cohen, the founder of Transform, the organization leading the tech rollout. “Because it’s just what people have done traditionally. So we’re really trying to create a new model of development, where often you won’t even have to have one space per unit.”
The $1.6 million project, backed in large part by a Knight Foundation grant, will see Transform push developers to scale down their parking garages by using Parkade, a private application that allows tenants and landlords to manage limited parking spots by renting out unused spaces.
Evan Goldin, the Parkade CEO, said the company helps buildings make better use of limited parking by eliminating unneeded long-term parking spots and turning others into short-term rentals that cater to guests. In one case, a Los Angeles apartment eliminated some parking and used the space for a restaurant, he said.
“There were literally people that lived in the building that were renting long-term parking just so their girlfriend could come over twice a week,” said Goldin. “That’s pretty silly.”
Another company, Parknav will provide a real-time parking heat map and phone app of San Jose’s downtown area that shows expected parking availability based on studies of cell phone data and other metrics.
Cohen said the map can be used by city planners to see where parking demand is high to expand metering locations, along with providing a roadmap for adjusting rates that fluctuate with demand.
“You can much better come up with regulations for parking,” he said. Right now he said city parking management is “all visceral and best guess.”
Parking has been an important driver of housing costs because it reduces the number of dwellings that can be built and hikes the per-unit cost of development. A 2020 SPUR report estimated that parking garage spots cost about $50,000 per space to build, and even more if the garage is underground.
The impact of San Jose’s elimination of parking minimums is still unknown. Michael Manville, an urban planning professor at UCLA, said the city shouldn’t expect parking garage construction to end anytime time soon. The likely impact is a “little bit less” parking with some more housing that “adds up over time.”
Even if a developer wants to build less parking, the other challenge said Manville, is convincing lenders to finance a project that veers away from car ownership in a city where the car has historically been king.
“The key is, do you have a market in mind of people who are willing to walk a block or two to get their car?” said Manville.
While a short drive through San Jose will reveal large parking lots sitting half empty, some parts of the city, including neighborhoods in East San Jose, are already facing a severe parking crunch. Some community representatives say the city needs to take a cautious approach to discouraging parking when public transit is not a viable option for their residents’ day-to-day lives.
“When developments are not including parking spaces it’s not going to deter these residents from not having cars,” said Councilmember Peter Ortiz, who represents East San Jose’s district 5. “They’re just going to park in the surrounding neighborhoods, which are already being impacted.”
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