Dissecting Curb Parking


Alan Durning has an outstanding post over at Sightline looking at the policy and expectations around residential curbside parking, including this gem:

Urban planners and lawyers may think of on-street parking as public property: a shared, public resource to be managed for the common good. Most home owners–and most voters–think of curb spaces as their own, their domain, their property.


52 responses to “Dissecting Curb Parking”

  1. I used to live across the street from a large reduced rent apartment building (with a parking garage) for seniors. Those little old ladies would park in front of my house sometimes for WEEKS at a time without moving their car. They would often even take up 2 parking spaces. That drove me nuts!!

    I don’t mind someone parking in front for a few hours or even a day here and there – but the “camping” was just ridiculous. I just wanted the opportunity to unload my groceries / kid / etc near my doorstep, is that too much to ask?

    BTW: For those of you taking notes, this practice is illegal – the law (which is not enforced — yes, I called) is that you cannot stay parked in the same spot more than 24 hours at a time.

  2. BTW: It was mostly newer Cadillacs, Lincolns, etc in the (secure) parking garage. Hooray for subsidized housing!

  3. I don’t care about people parking in front of my house, as long as they are smart about it (you can fit two cars, so don’t park in the middle).

    Max,

    I believe you can only park a car for a few days in one spot here. You should have called parking enforcement.

  4. Curbside spaces in commercial districts seem to have great value, for people coming-and-going to shops.

    I’m beginning to understand why newer towns have started prohibiting long-term curbside parking entirely in residential areas. It’s the “I own this spot” attitude. You don’t get it quite as much from businesses.

  5. It would be relatively easy to ramp up enforcement of
    rules re: storing your car on the street. Pickups and vans full of junk make it hard for drivers and cyclists and pedestrians alike. Goodbye old VW busses. Also, I am fine with telling my neighbors- you have a driveway- use it! Streets would be better and safer.

    And yes, I helped get the parking minimums put back in. I don’t care for Mr. Shoup, but my car hoarding neighbor is also annoying.

  6. BTW: For those of you taking notes, this practice is illegal – the law (which is not enforced — yes, I called) is that you cannot stay parked in the same spot more than 24 hours at a time.

    Any thoughts as to why–could it be the difficulty of proving that a car that is observed in a place, and then observed in the same place 24 hours later, wasn’t moved in the interim? With short-term parking, generally in business district, there’s a reasonable presumption that if a car is found in a space and then found there three hours later, it wasn’t moved–but that presumption breaks down for longer durations, and parking spaces located close to one’s residence.

  7. Here’s a potential fix:

    Every area has one night-time period, once a week where no vehicles can be on the street. SE PDX No street parking 2 a.m to 4 a.m. Tuesday- you will be towed. NE PDX No street parking Weds 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. Weds- you will be towed. We’d get the “stored’ cars off the street. As for my car, I keep it on my dang property. My neighbors can do the same. To own a car is to accept responsibility for stowing your car safely.

  8. I think we would need to be careful to not punish those with a low-car lifestyle. My wife and I share one car, but it will often sit in front of my house for days, because she walks to work, and I usually bike. Strict enforcement of the 24 hour policy would punish us more than it would punish my neighbor, who has 3 cars that move more often; even though he is creating more of a parking burden than we are.

  9. Here’s a fix: take out the on-street parking and put in bike lanes.

    Here’s another fix: charge for on-street parking everywhere.

  10. There are a lot of areas of Portland where houses have no parking other than what is available on the street. We forget, the city was not entirely built to accommodate automobiles. Like Chris I, my wife and I had our one vehicle sitting in front of the house for a week or more at a time while we biked, walked and used transit.

  11. my wife and I had our one vehicle sitting in front of the house for a week or more at a time while we biked, walked and used transit

    In that case how would you feel about public policy that would provide disincentives for this behavior (like making you move the car daily) in order to encourage you to divest your car and make use of car-sharing as an alternative?

  12. I have a disabled former USCG personnel who lives down the street, and has no driveway at all. He has three (imported) cars. Some of the other houses around here also have no garages. And that’s true in a lot of other areas of Portland, which the historical preservationists wanted preserved.

    So what do you propose? No car for them, so they have to take transit? Or have to move the car every day, and I guess if you’re gone on vacation someone has to do it for you? Is there a car moving service?

  13. Is accommodating car collectors who want to live in housing with no off-street parking really a public policy problem? If someone likes fish but has no fishing pole, is it the city’s problem to ensure they have a constant supply of fresh fish?

  14. If you can afford to collect cars, you should be able to afford to park them. (When I collected cars I had a garage & driveway.) If you’re going to collect cars, don’t move into a place with no parking. If you have no parking, don’t collect cars. If you have no parking and you want to collect cars, either move or find someplace off-site to park them.

  15. Well, here I will disagree with most of you…

    Property taxes and vehicle registrations. There, I paid for the spot on the street in front of my house.

    I am as transit oriented and bike friendly as they come – search the history of this blog or other places I have been active if you don’t believe me.

    But I feel even the 24 hour law currently in place is too restrictive.

    We do have some liberties left in this country, right?

    If people don’t like the lack of parking they won’t live in that neighborhood. But don’t penalize me because I’m parking my car on the street (which I am not currently doing BTW).

    I just think its going too far to in some ways.

    We can allow it but also keep balance too!

    Lets require parking stickers to park on the street. Each residence can get 1 free sticker. The second sticker costs $100 a year, the third sticker costs $200 a year, the fourth costs $300 a year, etc etc. Based on residence – not residents. So each house or apartment only gets 1 free regardless of how many drivers live there. We could also base the fees on length – smart cars and iQs could be cheaper and long bed 4 door trucks could be more expensive…

    With regards to the long-term problem I say that the proposed solution above where whole streets are no parking once a week is too hard to accommodate – because where do the cars go and what do people who need to sleep so they an go to work do about moving the car?

    To get rid of long term parking on the street we could simply have every other block or every other side of the street be no parking once a week. That way half the parking is still there and people who use their cars will be able to park on the OK side of the street on that day…

    Or just – who cares? If we start charging for on street parking like I proposed above – the problem may fix itself.

  16. Wrong. Those taxes go towards a lot more than the street in front of your house. How about if I exercise my liberty by parking in front of your house?

  17. “Wrong. Those taxes go towards a lot more than the street in front of your house. How about if I exercise my liberty by parking in front of your house?”

    What would be the advantage to that? Just to prove a point? Let’s stick to reasonable scenarios. I also paid taxes to have the street in front of my house maintained, and have paid lots and lot of taxes via Multnomah County Tax assessor.

    Importantly: Now that summer is here one might think that all Portlanders bicycle. However, since I live right on the Springwater Trail, I can say that in the winter the riders on that route drop to

  18. Go ahead Ron. No harm done. Unless you’re doing something else illegal there… I don’t mind other people’s cars…

    But I am not sure how much funding the 20 or 40 feet in front of my house consumes. Considering we pay thousands of dollars in taxes every year and the place was built in the 1920s I would wager that patch of asphalt is probably paid for many times over – even considering all the other things my taxes and fees pay for.

  19. I don’t think you can carve out any public service or feature and claim a private right to it based on taxes. Taxes pay for whatever we want them to pay for, and what they pay for is subject to change without an individual’s consent.

    In some neighborhoods city taxes used to pay for clearing leaves off the streets, now they don’t. Do affected residents have a private right to declare a portion of their taxes reserved for cleaning their streets?

    Taxes used to pay for some schools to be open that subsequently closed without a comparable replacement. Do residents have a private right to demand that a portion of their taxes keep a particular school open?

    It’s possible to imagine privatizing street parking, Chris Smith has mentioned it more than once. But that definitely isn’t what we have now.

  20. I don’t have any kids. Why should I pay several hundred dollars a year for schools? I rarely go to the library (a local newsstand and my computer will have just as much information). Why should I pay taxes for libraries? If I dug a hole deep enough my septic discharge wouldn’t hurt anything. Why can’t I do that? Why do I have to wear a seatbelt when I am going four blocks at 30 mph for my next stop? Why don’t

    “I don’t think you can carve out any public service or feature and claim a private right to it based on taxes.”

    Then why do liberals get behind suing government so much?

    bjcefola, I have read your stuff on BlueOregon and think you sound like a micro manager that likes to spout off on politics. In fact I think most of blue oregon sucks. This so called “progressive” vision is based on one underlying thing—padding our state with people of a like mind who will go along unquestioningly with some of the kookiest ideas around. I don’t like suburban development which is why I moved into the city. It’s been fine the way it is, leave it alone. I don’t want to see Boston or SF politics here, thank you. The bottom reality is that prices in Portland are going through the roof—and there is a relatively small group of landholders standing to reap multi-million windfalls from present development schemes.

    And to finish my comment above (dk what happened):
    “Importantly: Now that summer is here one might think that all Portlanders bicycle. However, since I live right on the Springwater Trail, I can say that in the winter the riders on that route drop to less than 5 percent of summer volume.”

  21. “I think we would need to be careful to not punish those with a low-car lifestyle.” “My wife and I had our one vehicle sitting in front of the house for a week or more at a time while we biked, walked and used transit.”

    Wow, thanks for the shared sacrifice. The neighbors hire lawyers to fight no parking apartments because their gardens are being punished by the shadows of high rises, but the “low car folks” can’t be asked to make any sacrifices.

    Shall we create a new caste system in Portland with childless, carless knowledge workers willing and able to live in small apartments at the top, and at the bottom a blue collar worker who needs a car and love his or her single family house.

    Wait- we have that caste system. Bike commuters get whatever infrastructure they want, and it takes three fatalities to get a sidewalk near a grade school in Outer SE.

  22. Its always good to take a look at zoning adjacent to one’s property. If you are within 100 feet of commercial property that is zoned for multi-family housing, then don’t be surprised if something gets built.
    There is public benefit from having more residents along commercial streets with good transit and bike connections as they are less likely to be taking up lane space on city roadways with a private motor vehicle. Also brings more customers to local businesses.

  23. Lenny,

    The neighbors were lulled into complacency by realtors and the city. No one expected the rapid
    addition of no-parking apartments.

    There should be a law that realtors must disclose
    the local zoning in easy-to-understand terms, as well as disclosing any nearby streets designated as “F.” There should also be a disclaimer that the city does things piecemeal, so don’t expect enough services or infrastructure when the density goes in.

    Yes, there is some merit to the argument that the neighbors should have been more suspicious of the city and BPS and avoided Richmond. But regardless, there is little shared sacrifice for those rich enough to have great bike gear and a car- it’s all “me! me! me!”

  24. Mamacita,

    You’re welcome. My family is saving the city and its taxpayers money by reducing wear on our public infrastructure. What are you doing to make your city a better place?

  25. Chris I,

    I bike a lot and provide low-cost professional services to the working poor. And keep my car on my property.

  26. “There is public benefit from having more residents along commercial streets with good transit and bike connections as they are less likely to be taking up lane space on city roadways with a private motor vehicle. Also brings more customers to local businesses. ”

    Yeah. And so prices go higher and higher.

    ” I bike a lot and provide low-cost professional services to the working poor. And keep my car on my property.”

    What sort of services? I have always been poor, and have always worked. Despite being a skilled trade union member from 1979 to April 2013, my average lifetime earnings were only $17,000 per year, I have no inheritance in anything, and got finacially screwed because former police Chief Tom Potter let some bad fraudsters squeak by in 1992, when the PPD should have inderdited their little con game. Cost me about half of what I have made in this life.

    Plus the fact that my (former) union has gone whole hog into signing up illegal aliens (as has Multco, too) and even though they (the union) keep begging for more taxpayer funded projects, they themselves dodge legal taxes whenever they can. So that is why I took an honorable withdrawal in April and haven’t looked back. Except looking ahead to the appropriate prosecutorial action. : )

    So can I get in on some of those services to the “working poor?” I grew up on pock marked street off of Foster Rd. where my dad would grab a chicken out of the coop, once in awhile for a special Sunday dinner, as a respite against the hot dogs and potatoes.

  27. I get a newsletter from the water bureau every once and while. I wish all bureaus did the same.

    The transportation bureau could share a list of nearby funded projects to be completed in the near future. A long-range list of projects could help me understand some of the major changes I might expect to see. A map of road designations can tell me that Foster Road is a “city bikeway” and I won’t be as surprised when the stripe one along it next year.

    The planning bureau could offer a reminder of the nearby zoning, implications to neighbors, and a summary of recent applications. And none of this color-coded planners speak – I want to see a rendering of what full build out would look like in the area around my house.

    People have a hard time seeing the world as anything different than it is today – it would be great to remind them that everything is changing all the time.

  28. Wow. A few commenter really demonstrated the attitude of “I own this parking space” (hint: you don’t). If you have off-street parking (as I do), you own it. If you’re parking in the city street, you’re making use of a *public good* and you have to share.

    If the city charged for parking everywhere you’d get rid of this “City property is my personal property” attitude damn fast.

    And I think nobody disputes that the city has the right to charge for parking everywhere.

  29. When you cut into the curb and create an off-street space, you are buying your parking space, and taking one off the street (maybe two depending on other curb cuts nearby. This is a problem :(

  30. “And I think nobody disputes that the city has the right to charge for parking everywhere.”

    We can dispute whatever we want to. What you are talking about is a change in city ordinance—and there is a lot of precedent that, since in most neighborhoods there hasn’t been a lot of commercial burden, parking standards should remain the same. I think the governmental covenant is with the established residents —-not those who hypothetically would come here.

    My suggestion to the incipient “policy planners’ here is that they find something else to do with their time. No one will think the less of you.

  31. Note that most of the Richmond, as well as every other neighborhood in PDX, is zoned for single family housing. There will never be a four story apartment building, let alone a high rise, behind 99% of residents. Its only along transit and commercial corridors that more density is allowed.
    And most neighborhoods, with exception of NW, are awash in curb side parking for anyone who cares to park their vehicle there. When parking gets tight, if it ever does, set up a permit system. What on earth is the big deal with this handful of folks in the Richmond neighborhood? The faster developers build apartments and condos along corridors with good transit, the better. That is the future. They will build parking if they need it to sell their products, but why require it by law? Parking lots are a blight in every corner of this city. House people, not cars!

  32. “And most neighborhoods, with exception of NW, are awash in curb side parking for anyone who cares to park their vehicle there.”

    >>>> And now the NW District with its recent permit system has numerous parking spaces during weekdays to accommodate people who have to come for business in the neighborhood.

    It seems that before many folks would from outside would park their cars and walk or take the bus into downtown. So the new permit system may not be good for alternative transport?

  33. Lenny,

    Why Richmond? Well some of us were former canvassers and Sol Alinsky fans. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, old hippies, it was a great group at the fundraiser I attended. I am sure that the crowd was more like 75 at that one localized event. Citizen action against Sackoff carried the day because there were a lot of us.

    Overall I sometimes feel spleen because the city planning elite ignores any facts that don’t fit their theory. Sorry Lenny, but that was no handful. That was well organized, authentic grassroots community organizing.

    So, is it good thinking to

    a. consider all data, even unwelcome news
    b. consider changing your theory
    or c. create a narrative that departs from reality
    but allows you to hold onto theories in which you have a heavy investment.

    Hundreds of homeowners from all ages and income levels are banding together to raise money to fight developers. You can call us names, but it’s Hales who matters. And tell me why you be hating on Sol Alinsky and snobbing on the Responsible Growth associations. The RNRG is your accountant, the manager at the organic store, the nurse, the garden designer, your friend’s cousin. They have names like George and Patty and Steven and they cycle and recycle. They range in age from twenties to eighties and they range in income from elder hippies to rofessionals.

    Come to a meeting sometime, or venture out for Indian food in Beaver-tron. Non-urbanists don’t bite.

  34. “Note that most of the Richmond, as well as every other neighborhood in PDX, is zoned for single family housing. There will never be a four story apartment building, let alone a high rise, behind 99% of residents.”

    >>>> So Lenny you hit the nail right on the head. Because of this fact, Portland will never be a dense city, and should not be building rail lines, as they require very dense corridors to work well.

  35. The rise of the Neighbors for Responsible Growth group in Richmond shows that Richmond is not as left-wing radical as many would assume. Many seem to have an environmental ethic that only extends as far as it doesn’t cause a change in their lives.

    Changing your light bulbs and recycling only go so far when 36 percent of the emissions in our city come from transportation. Even if one needs to drive a car every day, at least one could refrain from making it hard for those who don’t by requiring them to subsidize car drivers with on-site parking spaces. To get the density that a walkable neighborhood requires, one might have to put up with more cars parked on the street and certain houses in a narrow strip north of Division in shadow part of the day.

    And the low-car are punished; by rainstorms, heat and dangerous traffic!

  36. Doug Klotz,
    METRO’s own statistics say that only 14 percent of local GHG comes from “surface passenger transport.”

    This is why it is kind of silly to try to reduce that via multibillion transit systems. You might get it down to 12 percent, but the money could have been spent on a host of other things. Meanwhile, with more people, other production of GHG will go up, especially in places of employment. Plus people going places other than by the public transit, like in evenings in weekends.

    And then if the new population here in Portland wants to invest in something, it will probably be in real estate, corporate stocks—-or something else that environmentalists hate. You can already see a hypocritical shift in liberalism from their zero population growth mantra a few years ago, to wild clamoring for growth, now.

    And now they are talking about changing long accepted local practices. Is this just so some planners can live out their dream?

  37. To invoke Alinsky, you have to turn things on their head. He would be organizing the less well off no-car or low car folks, not the middle class establishment in the neighborhood. Read the role of TWO, The Woodlawn Organization, during the U. of Chicago’s effort to “renew” Hyde Park in the 50’s and 60’s. Sad to see fellow “graduates” of the 60’s turning into NIMBYs.
    But why not address my main point. What is the big deal if people park their cars, if they have them, on the public street in front of some one else’s home?
    Renewing Portland and keeping the Tualatin Valley in agriculture requires that more people live in the city, and they are showing up in droves. If the market will support rentals on commercial and/or transit streets, why would we not give developers, non-profits, builders of all stripes the green light to house people without the added expense of auto storage.

  38. NO, people ARE NOT moving here in droves. In fact, the population of the city of Portland has been increasing by about 1% a year. There is faster growth in Wash. County, and much faster growth in some other parts of the country.

  39. @Nick, City of Portland population has been increasing by 1.5-1.8 percent per year since 2006:
    https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&met_y=population&hl=en&dl=en&idim=place:4159000:5363000

    Population in the four-county metro area has been growing a bit slower, about 1.3 percent per year. Washington County is basically the same range as Portland, 1.1 to 1.9 percent.

    @max, I think it’s worth noting that in the U.S., almost all owner-occupied housing is subsidized.

  40. Ron:
    I was quoting the Multco/Portland Climate Action Plan, which lists, in fact, 38% for “transportation”, the largest category. The other four in that pie chart are Commercial 25%, Residential 21% and Industrial 15%. But you seem to have found a figure that breaks it down further, between “surface passenger transportation” and presumably freight, or maybe flying as well (or subway?).

  41. Ron:
    Is that figure of 14% for the Metro region? Do they give a figure for the City of Portland?
    Thanks

  42. Thanks Ron:

    While this document is brief, it is interesting to note that about half the GHG emissions credited to the region involve “Goods and Food”. The document says:

    “Goods” (25 percent) and “food” (14
    percent) include the life cycle greenhouse
    gas emissions of items such as clothing,
    furniture, cars, food and beverages. It
    also includes packaging of products and
    single-use items that are quickly relegated
    to the waste stream.”

    So a lot of those emissions are generated elsewhere, where the products are manufactured. I would argue that we have the ability to affect the GHG emissions from motor vehicle use more than it’s 14% share. The other 25% of the pie is building GHG emissions, including our share of Boardman’s emissions to generate the electricity we use to light, heat and cool buildings. Certainly that’s something we can do something about as well, with increased insulation, smaller dwelling units, and shared walls, e.g.

    We could do something about the 48% that is Goods and Food by growing more food and manufacturing more products locally, if only because not as much transportation of freight would then be involved.

    Of all the 100%, though, the other half of the pie, with 25% being passenger transportation (14% local trips) and 27 % being energy used in buildings seems like the area we’d be most likely to be able to affect.

    So, I would argue that that 14% starts to look like the “low hanging fruit” compared to manufacturing refrigerators here to avoid shipping them.

  43. I live in Minneapolis, MN (have lived in Portland in the past) where the parking limit is 72 hours. I am a candidate for mayor and am proposing eliminating the time limit for people parked directly in front of the address the car is registered to. I am curious what people in other cities think of this proposal. It has been received fairly well here by those I’ve discussed it with.

    I understand it’s not “fair” in the sense that not every residence is fronted by a legal parking spot, but it seems to me the best that can be reasonably done to help the “low-car” folks without harming others.

    (By the way, I used to post here frequently about Tri-Met. I noticed there’s a seemingly anti-transit person named John Charles who’s either posted here or been referred to. I’m not him, for clarification’s sake.)

  44. I live in Minneapolis, MN (have lived in Portland in the past) where the parking limit is 72 hours. I am a candidate for mayor and am proposing eliminating the time limit for people parked directly in front of the address the car is registered to. I am curious what people in other cities think of this proposal. It has been received fairly well here by those I’ve discussed it with.

    I understand it’s not “fair” in the sense that not every residence is fronted by a legal parking spot, but it seems to me the best that can be reasonably done to help the “low-car” folks without harming others.

    (By the way, I used to post here frequently about Tri-Met. I noticed there’s a seemingly anti-transit person named John Charles who’s either posted here or been referred to. I’m not him, for clarification’s sake.)

  45. “So a lot of those emissions are generated elsewhere, where the products are manufactured. I would argue that we have the ability to affect the GHG emissions from motor vehicle use more than it’s 14% share. The other 25% of the pie is building GHG emissions, including our share of Boardman’s emissions to generate the electricity we use to light, heat and cool buildings. Certainly that’s something we can do something about as well, with increased insulation, smaller dwelling units, and shared walls, e.g. ”

    I’m trying to make sense of your wandering logic. What I said was that the prospect of achieving any substantial reduction in GHG through spending billions on light rail is almost zip. I’m guessing that the 14 percent could be reduced to 12 percent; You are saying that locally geenerated GHG through local passenger transport is more realsitically at—-20 %? That’s 50 % more than METRO’a analysis. So several billion spent on light rail gets it to what figure? Please nail something down that you would bet on…

    Meanwhile we could have actually done something.

    And in spite of that, with more people moving here, overall GHG would go up. Unless you expect people to sit around tiny apartments for the rest of their lives, except when they are out on their bike.

    “We could do something about the 48% that is Goods and Food by growing more food and manufacturing more products locally, if only because not as much transportation of freight would then be involved.”

    Agreed. If liberals would stop purchasing foreign made autos (like $75,000 imports that Portland’s liberal elite love) it would keep more money in the US economy so that cities like Detroit and Cleveland wouldn’t be huge failures.
    Methinks you are peeing up a rope.

  46. What I was trying to do was separate out the things we could reasonably influence, like mode share, from things that are more difficult, like where goods and food are made. I wasn’t thinking of cars, but other goods (like refrigerators), made back east. But the point is taken that much is made overseas as well.

    Upon separating out the “difficult” stuff, like the source of manufactured goods, I was leaving the local “actions” (50 percent of the total) as easier to influence. That is, emissions from transportation and from buildings. Of this 50 percent,about a quarter of it is passenger transport. That’s what I meant by a larger share.

    Spending more on transit isn’t necessarily the right path, but enabling a more concentrated pattern would help, by itself, and in conjunction with transit and cycling. It also enables more neighborhood businesses, affecting trips other than commute trips.

  47. “Spending more on transit isn’t necessarily the right path, but enabling a more concentrated pattern would help,”

    Sure, from a totally theoretical, best case scenario. My pet peeve, is that in this scenario it is, for all intents and purposed, impossible for those aspiring to homeownership to build their own homes, or contract to build. This has been a way, in Portland’s past, for a fair number of people to acquire a nest egg, equity, net worth—whatever you want to call it. Or, a lot of people also did it by purchasing relative bargains in areas that had declined, and as part of a trend, rehabbing a home and riding the coattails of appreciation because the neighborhood revitalized.

    For example, North Portland has had tremendous opportunity in the past few decades. The 1980’s gang problem plus the Carter recession had tanked values, and if you could buy and just ride those times out until neighborhoods renewed you could do fairly well.

    But with mass, corporate produced condos this is much harder. And my liberal neighbor in Sellwood says that it is a Saudi investment group building pushing the bike apartment on SE Tacoma.

    Please show me in your model where this—an alternative to purchasing from the corporate builders— can be done; except in the dwindling opportunities to change a residence to a rental.

  48. Ron:
    As far as I know, you can still buy an older house in areas that have declined, fix it up and ride the coattails of increasing value, IF you are savvy or lucky enough to predict which neighborhoods will increase in value. I don’t see how relaxing parking requirements along transit streets measurably affects this, except if the increased density leads to increased amenities, commercial or otherwise, raising property values in the neighborhood, which could be a positive effect.

  49. @Ron,

    Go Gateway, young man, Go Gateway!

    Plenty of fixer-uppers around there and just to the north, and there are very few of those despicable Urbanists and obnoxious Greenies trying to run your life. It’s mostly just wanna-be Greshamites who didn’t know that the city was eyeing their backyards.

  50. “As far as I know, you can still buy an older house in areas that have declined, fix it up and ride the coattails of increasing value, IF you are savvy or lucky enough to predict which neighborhoods will increase in value. ”

    Yes, there is a window of opportunity right now. But I don’t want to hear more whining about “equity” a few years from now, for those who miss this opportunity. And,IMO, Gateway sucks.

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