A half dozen residential buildings have been put up in my Washington, D.C. neighborhood in the last five years, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are shorter than their surrounding buildings—markedly so. Two recently completed developments are a full two stories shorter than the buildings they abut, and a soon-to-be opened development in the middle of Adams Morgan is just three stories tall despite being next to several five story apartment buildings. A newly completed condo building across the street from our eight-story building is also a mere three stories tall.
The diminutive height was not the desire of the developers, of course, who lose out on millions of dollars for each missing floor; The truncation was at the behest of the neighbors and the plethora of self-styled community activists who reside in Northwest D.C., who have the wherewithal to hold things up indefinitely if they don’t get their way.
Why would progressive activists fight for fewer homes to be built in a neighborhood where housing costs are already so pricey that few middle class households can afford to be there? By the employment of a syllogistic two step: Step one is to dismiss the idea that supply and demand are at all relevant to a market such as this (a tactic employed in any discussion about the minimum wage as well), and step two is to argue that the neighborhood simply cannot accommodate the cars of additional residents, given the extreme parking congestion that already bedevils the area.
It is surely true that on-street parking is difficult to find in the neighborhood—there are many more permits given than there are available spaces, and people who drive and park on the street spend a significant amount of time in their quest to find a parking space.
The excess demand for parking permits owes to the fact that the government charges just $25 a year for on street parking; as a contrast, private parking in my neighborhood goes for $3,000 a year. In other words, the city charges less than one percent of the market price for parking.
Washington, D.C. doesn’t have a housing policy: It has a parking policy to which housing is subservient. The notion that there is a birthright for local residents to park on the street in front of their building for next to nothing does more than just create a parking mess—it has become the determinant of how future development occurs in dense neighborhoods in the nation’s capital.
Residents who fear greater parking oversupply zealously fight every new development. The three-story condo development near our home withstood a plethora of legal battles from activists and nearby condo associations that cost in excess of $1 million, according to one person with knowledge of the legal proceedings.
The previous city councilman pledged to his base—the myriad self-styled activists—that he would fight every single development that turned townhomes or large residential dwellings into multiple units, and that he would do so in the name of helping maintain affordable family dwellings in his ward. Even by the standards of politicians it was a crock: Middle-class families don’t dwell in homes that cost $2 million, which is the going rate for a townhome in this part of town. On the other hand, middle-class families can and do move to the neighborhood to live in $500,000, two-bedroom condos, which these new developments create.
But one wealthy family in a townhouse will have at most two cars that fit in parking spots behind their house. An expanded townhome with four condos might have four or five cars–some of which will have to fight for street parking with the rest of the horde.
There’s no shortage of examples where the government has let private individuals use public land at a reduced price: Mining rights in many parts of the country go for a mere fraction of their market value, for instance, and grazing rights on public lands are notoriously underpriced. But it’s difficult to identify any situation where the government gives private individuals access to a public space for less than one percent of its value.
The artificial scarcity of housing created by these activists benefits the wealthy coming and going. The brake on new housing keeps the price of their own homes high, while fewer people moving into their neighborhood means that they have less competition for their artificially cheap on-street parking.
And make no mistake, it is the wealthy who are storing their cars on the street: On my block there are 20 on-street spaces, and Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and Infiniti make up over half of what’s currently sitting along the curb. There is not a single car older than 10 years, which is the median age of automobiles in the U.S.
It makes sense that these cars would be nice, since there is virtually no housing that would be considered affordable by most measures. The 20something professionals who do manage to shoehorn themselves into the tiny affordable apartments that are in the neighborhood make it work financially by jettisoning their automobiles. Going carless in Adams Morgan is not necessarily a big sacrifice, however, since there’s a plethora of mass transit servicing the neighborhood and it’s only two miles to downtown—a distance that’s easy to traverse via walking or biking. Indeed, the proximity to downtown and mass transit is a big reason why so many people want to live here.
And to clarify, most of the cars on my block aren’t “parked,” since that implies they are placed there temporarily until they are used again in the near future. It’s more accurate to say they are being stored, since few of them are used during the course of a week. They are merely toys for the wealthy to use on a weekend jaunt or an occasional trip to the grocery store.
Or less: There’s a vintage canary yellow corvette that’s sat untouched on our block for the last three years, a few steps away from a vintage London Cab—in pristine condition—that had a for-sale sign on for two entire years before it recently disappeared. I called the number; its owner was asking $80,000.
The optimal policy for desirable communities near mass transit would be to tell the wealthy car owners to suck eggs and auction off a finite number of on street parking spaces each year, and use the proceeds to subsidize mass transit for low-income people who live or work in the neighborhood. By capping the number of cars legally allowed to park on the street, some of the vim and vigor of the self-styled community activists who reflexively fight every development will be dissipated, and more quasi-affordable housing will appear.
Strictures on the height of new buildings, and thereby the number of new condos that can be built, are implemented to benefit the wealthy by keeping property prices high and protecting their scarce, underpriced on-street parking. It’s high time that residents of dense communities petition the government to charge a market price for all on-street parking, and quit letting parking policy dictate housing policy.
Ike Brannon is president of Capital Policy Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington D.C.
