The High Cost of Residential Parking

Seattle's smart new plan to give tenants transit passes instead of parking spaces should help housing stay more affordable down the line. To get a sense just how much money renters might save, the city relied on a 2012 study of how parking impacts affordability from its neighbor in the Pacific Northwest, Portland. That work is striking for both its clarity and its conclusions, so let’s took a closer look.

Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability modeled what happens to unit prices when a building developer decides to include parking. A few specs if you're into that sort of thing: the sites were 10,000 square feet (so, about 4 stories tall), zoned for mixed-use (so, shops on the ground floor), with units averaging 550 square feet (so, depending on your persona, cozy or cramped).