Every debate about housing or development in Seattle will eventually come down to one question — “but where am I supposed to park?!” It’s as predictable as Godwin’s Law. The disastrous soon to-be former Mayor of Seattle could have created some car-free areas — the pandemic helped show the value of public streets for the use of all of the public — but declined. The incoming Mayor seems unlikely to do anything along those lines…the election was clearly revanchist, pushback against the small gains made by progressivism.
Street parking and surface lots — unimproved parcels on valuable sites with pay boxes to remit rents out of town — should be among the first things to go but this city has to transform itself from a city built for cars to one built for people. The removal of the “ugly as a mud fence” Viaduct was a start. Could a lid over the livid scar that is I-5 through downtown be next?
The debate over the free parking in West Seattle, on lots owned by a local business group, could be instructive. The value of the lots — the property tax — has risen past where it makes sense to hold on to it so they were considering selling to a local housing non-profit. The reaction was predictable: people actually said out loud that if the local hardware store was going to make them pay for street parking, they would take their business to the suburban big box store. Like the Bradley effect, one never knows if people will do what they say they will do, but the public display of car/parking dependency is real. It will take decades to undo what car-dependent land use planning has done. The combination of low density — because land was cheap — and distance — because gas was cheap and roads/parking were “free” — has created a tangled knot that will have to unpicked carefully. But the sooner we start, the better. Getting rid of street parking, reclaiming parking lots on high-value land will both remove distance by filling in housing and businesses and make them more accessible, ie more valuable to those who live there.
Some will see the prices of the new infill development as proof that this won’t work, that density doesn’t lower prices. But that’s premature. Of course, prices will go up in the short term, as people move to these new more desirable areas. The obvious lesson seems to be that we need more of them, not less.