> Parking minimums prevent developers from free-loading on a commons, that commons being street parking.
Another way of looking at it: parking minimums require developers to encroach upon a commons, that commons being land that could otherwise be used for more productive things than free parking.
Of course it is — unproductive land use creates negative externalities that affect the entire surrounding community. It's like saying "a factory dumping waste into a river doesn't pollute the commons if the river runs through their property".
The article explains this well:
> The office, filled with workers and transactions, generates far more in economic activity and value creation than its land value and, therefore, rises the highest. The apartment, where dozens of residents live, stands nearly as high. The rowhomes add steady, smaller value. But the parking lot does something different. It dips below the surface, shown as a red bar sinking into the ground.
> Why below ground? Because in economic terms, a parking lot doesn’t simply fail to add value; it actively subtracts value. Every year it sits idle, it consumes some of the most valuable land in the city.
> When valuable downtown land lies idle, it blocks the housing, jobs, and amenities that could exist there. The costs ripple outward: higher rents, longer commutes, fewer opportunities nearby. What could have been a productive part of the community instead becomes a hole in its fabric.
The LVT focus on profit above all else is why it is an unsatisfactory solution.
If the most important goal for every plot of land is to maximize its economic activity & tax revenue, that's going to be a miserable place to live.
All of the space uses that make a town nice to live in, are also underutilizing the land if the sole goal is to maximize economic activity.
Open space with native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, sports fields of all kinds like soccer fields, community pools, hiking trails.. all of that is wasted land if viewed through the lens of LVT maximization. All that space should be crammed full of high rise offices and apartments.
LVTs focus is on maximizing land value, not profit. It just so happens that when a landowner maximizes the value a piece of their land provides, higher profits are almost guaranteed.
It's also a bit of a mistake to view LVT solely through an economic lense. Sure, we quantify it through a dollar amount or a difference in profits, but the value in LVT comes from how individuals value the land as a whole. So you are absolutely correct that a place without native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, etc. is going to be valued less than a place with those amenities by a lot of people. But only if people value greenspace and amenities more than pure economic output, which is mostly the case when it comes to residential spaces.
If people value greenspace, than the land around said greenspace will have a higher value. LVT would then incentivize those land owners to maximize their value, which would obviously include not destroying or removing the greenspace. Instead of would (likely) be to densify housing, or convert existing buildings to mixed-use spaces.
> If people value greenspace, than the land around said greenspace will have a higher value. LVT would then incentivize those land owners to maximize their value, which would obviously include not destroying or removing the greenspace.
This is where I believe LVT breaks down when faced with greedy reality.
In a perfect world, I totally agree with the above. That would be pretty awesome.
Could that ever happen in the real world of greedy corrupt politicians who never look further in time than the next election?
How do we assign monetary value to pleasant and beautiful things that provide quality of life? Like the parks and playgrounds and sports fields, etc etc. I'm sure there are studies, but the numbers are not as clear-cut and not as immediate as tax revenue this quarter, so they get ignored.
Each individual lot gets evaluated in isolation and the most profitable choice, individually, is to maximize revenue on that lot, so every lot ends up being a high rise concrete box, either offices or apartments. It would take a very brave politician to say let's look at the big picture long term, sacrifice some tax revenue today and build for a better quality of life because long term that will raise values more.
LVT is uncommon so a lot of it is argued in theory, but I suggest looking at a somewhat similar decision process happening in cities today, which relates to the homeless.
How are cities reacting to homeless? They fence off all the open green space and parks, rip out benches and bus stop roofs, eliminate all public bathrooms and so on. Making the area miserabe for everyone, destroying quality of life. Oh but it is difficult to measure quality of life, so they don't.
It would be much wiser for society as a whole to attend to the homeless and let us all have the open parks and benches and bathrooms, city life would be far more pleasant and long term also more profitable if cities can thrive instead of decay.
But that's not how politicians think or act, so I'm fairly sure it would be the same with LVT.
Well I can't speak to the notion of corrupt politicians, but it's worth noting that if it's in the interests of the landowners, then they'd likely fight to keep anything that they feel would keep their value high. And especially if they started developing/investing in their land to maximize the potential return of the land. Anecdotally, I've seen individual homeowners stir up enough support in my major Canadian city to stop city councils from starting somewhat major development projects, so I don't think that it'd be as inevitable as you're making it out to be.
It's also a mistake to say that a lot of land gets evaluated in isolation, because that's not even true with a the current property tax. You absolutely factor in the surrounding community and external factors when valuing a piece of land. Land in a downtown area is going to be inherently worth more than land on the periphery of a city due to the activity and potential of the land to generate economic activity.
To your point though, would you say that an apartment building next to a park (or even within several blocks of a park) is worth more than an apartment building with no park in proximity? I think most people would as well, therefore the apartment building with the park in proximity would have a higher value (which would extend to all land in proximity of the park), and thus the local government would be able to collect a higher tax dollar amount because of the park being there. Whereas maybe they could get a similar total amount by building another building, but why would a local government purposefully lower the amount of tax they'd collect on each plot of land? It's in the interest of the local government to maximize the value of the land within their jurisdiction to collect the highest amount of tax possible. Just like it's in the landowners interest to develop and invest in their land to get the highest return on their investment possible.
Re: homelessness, it would seem to me like a large group of people without housing would benefit from a system that incentivizes building more housing. Which LVT does. It would also encourage public spaces to be as ammenible as possible, so that the park is as appealing as possible in order to maximize the value for surrounding lots of land. At this point though we're talking second or even third order effects of LVT, which like you mentioned aren't super clear or even assured because LVT mostly remains in the theoretical. But if we have a sound theory, at this point why not try it and see what happens? Our current systems are very clearly failing us, so if we have ideas with sound reasoning, can things really get so much worse than they already are?
> It's also a mistake to say that a lot of land gets evaluated in isolation, because that's not even true with a the current property tax.
Sorry, my sentence may have been confusingly worded. I don't mean for tax computation (which certainly uses neighborhood comparables), but I mean that every lot owner will evaluate the maximum profit for their own pocket only, without any regard to greater good of the town. So every lot owner will sell to the developer who'll make a highrise building. Let "someone else" sell a lot to build a library or a tennis court! But there is no "someone else", everyone will seek to maximize personal profit which means no nice places will exist, only tightly packed concrete highrises.
> To your point though, would you say that an apartment building next to a park (or even within several blocks of a park) is worth more than an apartment building with no park in proximity?
Absolutely! But to actually sacrifice short-term tax revenue for longer-term benefit would require forward-thinking politicians. You mention being in Canada so those might exist there, but here in the US, there are none.
> homelessness, it would seem to me like a large group of people without housing would benefit from a system that incentivizes building more housing
I hesitated to mention homeless because my comment has nothing to do with the homeless issue per se. Only using it as a very real example where we can see that town governments are completely willing to ruin quality of life for everyone (fencing off parks, etc) just to save a few dollars short term. Even though it would be immensely better to spend a bit more upfront, to raise the quality of life for the whole town, which will bring in more prosperity and more property value and more tax later on.
> Open space with native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, sports fields of all kinds like soccer fields, community pools, hiking trails.. all of that is wasted land if viewed through the lens of LVT maximization.
No, because all of that would be open to the community. The waste is only if it was locked up for use by certain people.
>Of course it is — unproductive land use creates negative externalities that affect the entire surrounding community. It's like saying "a factory dumping waste into a river doesn't pollute the commons if the river runs through their property".
Pretty damn rich to say such a thing when exactly this sort of hand wringing that brought this whole crap about.
"oh no, think about how the commons will be polluted if we don't compel people to build parking space". -some karen in 1970, probably
The right thing go do is back off the regulation. Let land owners do what they please. If that's a parking space (it almost certainly won't be in the overwhelming majority of cases) so be it. And then when there's enough demand parking garages will go up.
>The right thing go do is back off the regulation. Let land owners do what they please. If that's a parking space (it almost certainly won't be in the overwhelming majority of cases) so be it.
This is exactly how it is here in Tokyo. People are free to build parking lots (or parking garages even) if they want. But they don't, except in rare cases, because it's far more profitable to build an apartment building or shop or some other building there. Though for apartments, they'll usually build a small parking lot (or garage for a big apartment building) and charge very high rent for residents who want to park their car there, which is a small minority of residents.
Once a city gets to the density of Tokyo with the transit of Tokyo, there's little reason to build parking. I would expect that in smaller cities around Tokyo, plenty of building owners choose to build parking.
I mean, yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying? End mandatory parking minimums, institute a land value tax and then let the market decide whether parking is truly a valuable use of space.
The river dumping analogy is so bad it's laughable. Obviously you don't own the entire river when the river merely runs through your property nor do you own the ocean or the watershed, and property values surrounding yours go down by a measurable amount when you dump things in the river. What negative externalities does a parking lot create that an empty lot does not? Minimal noise from people pulling in and out? Extra walking time between lots that are built up? Some pollution from the cars? These are normal externalities from literally any building that might be there as well. You can see how this is a different class than a polluted river, and is literally immeasurable.
With regards to the argument presented in the article, it's arguable that parking lots create value by making places accessible to more people. As such, a parking lot raises the property values and economic output of neighboring properties. I didn't see anything about that covered in the article, nor did I see any actual data. This is why chambers of commerce and the like support parking mandates, because they actually have positive externalities, not negative ones.
> With regards to the argument presented in the article, it's arguable that parking lots create value by making places accessible to more people.
I think it's arguable, but I think it's not the full picture. Let's look at downtown Columbus, Ohio where I live. With the parking lots that exist, there's less housing, which means that people move further away from where they work, creating traffic, creating highway construction costs, insurance, &c. I'm quite sure that creating a parking lot makes the location of my employer (well not mine literally) more valuable, but it does seem like it creates more costs. If those lots were, say, because it's a downtown location a 10-story building with 300 residents those people would be shopping downtown, going to restaurants and bars downtown, spending more time there, &c.
There are cases where a parking lot does create economic value, though I think those are more nuanced and limited. I'm not sure your point nor the one you were responding to, nor mine for that matter, are able to really calculate the economic costs of surface parking lots without taking into account factors like, well where the hell is the thing?
> As such, a parking lot raises the property values and economic output of neighboring properties.
Cherry-picking this comment. I'd add to what I wrote above, but I'd also add that I'm not sure that there is evidence to support this statement and if you take this to its quasi-logical extreme you wind up with your entire neighborhood just being one gigantic skyscraper with a Costco and doctors office inside surrounded by parking lots or something. And then the increased profit flows to Costco's shareholders which is fine, but for your local economy that's kind of bad versus having a variety of stores that can open and close. It's putting your eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Everything about city planning should generally be done in moderation. Including enough parking and enough residential space, but not too much or too little. A city consisting only of residential apartment blocks but no parking, transit, or stores will be a pretty terrible city as well.
I assume that Syracuse or other similar tier-2-to-3 cities would be far worse off if you replaced all the parking with apartment buildings.
Yea I think that's fair. I personally advocate for mixed-use medium level density over skyscrapers or the suburbs which are both not ideal either. Something more like European towns and villages but since it's America we can have a little bit larger homes. I live in that style of neighborhood today, and have a 2.5 story house and detached garage and back yard. Though it's not quite as dense as it should be, but zoning rules have recently changed to allow the main streets on the east and west side to build better density which will be great for everyone here. We can't have a grocery store really because the density isn't there. Tons of good restaurants and coffee shops and such.
I've never been to Syracuse but with the university there and number of employees you may be right, but it really depends I think on the layout. In the US once you get away from college towns or smaller towns like you're describing and get into medium-sized American cities we really lack density and transportation and we pay out the ass for the poor planning and past destruction that took place. It's changing though.
Underutilized surface area of the Earth contributes to more resource, energy, and time consumption for everyone else in society to move around it.
When ranking consumption such as large cars, flights, plastic toys, etc, space on the surface of the Earth, within an urban/suburban metro, is at the very top in terms of impact on others.
Another way of looking at it: parking minimums require developers to encroach upon a commons, that commons being land that could otherwise be used for more productive things than free parking.