The uneasy case for lower Parking Standards

Minimum parking requirements are the norm for urban and suburban development in the United States (Davidson and Dolnick (2002)). The justification for parking space requirements is that overflow parking will occupy nearby street or off-street parking. Shoup (1999) and Willson (1995) provides cases where there is reason to believe that parking space requirements have forced parcel developers to place more parking than they would in the absence of parking requirements. If the effect of parking minimums is to significantly increase the land area devoted to parking, then the increase in impervious surfaces would likely cause water quality degradation, increased flooding, and decreased groundwater recharge. However, to our knowledge the existing literature does not test the effect of parking minimums on the amount of lot space devoted to parking beyond a few case studies. This paper tests the hypothesis that parking space requirements cause an oversupply of parking by examining the implicit marginal value of land allocated to parking spaces. This is an indirect test of the effects of parking requirements that is similar to Glaeser and Gyourko (2003). A simple theoretical model shows that the marginal value of additional parking to the sale price should be equal to the cost of land plus the cost of parking construction. We estimate the marginal values of parking and lot area with spatial methods using a large data set from the Los Angeles area non-residential property sales and find that for most of the property types the marginal value of parking is significantly below that of the parcel area. This evidence supports the contention that minimum parking requirements significantly increase the amount of parcel area devoted to parking. JEL codes:R52, H23Parking, Land Use, Sprawl

The Role of Cost, Scale, and Property Attributes in Landowner Choice of Stormwater Management Option.

Cities throughout the world are experimenting with Low Impact Development (LID) strategies to replace ecosystem services degraded by urbanization. Stormwater management may need both centralized/publicly-managed infrastructure and decentralized provision by landowners. For landowners to participate in these programs they will need some latitude in the choice of techniques and siting. However, these landowner choices will affect the bundle of ecosystem services provided (such as infiltration, aesthetics, pollution filtering, and others) as well as their spatial distribution. We studied the Santa Monica (CA) stormwater regulations that require stormwater management on a large portion of development and redevelopment but allow a significant degree of landowner choice over the method of rainwater management. We use a novel dataset to investigate both the cost of rainwater best management practices (BMPs) and landowner choice of rainwater BMP. We find strong evidence of economies of scale in capital costs for the smaller size ranges of the BMPs in our data, and that property factors such as land use and overall redevelopment project cost affect rainwater BMP costs. In addition, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that property factors such as building density and land value are important factors in the landowner’s choice of rainwater management option

The Determinants of Nonresidential Real Estate Values with Special Reference to Local Environmental Goods

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of the determinants of non-residential real estate values in Los Angeles County. The data base consists of 13, 370 property transactions from 1996 to 2005. Separate spatial econometric models are developed for industrial, commercial, retail and office properties. The study focus on the impact on property values of local amenities. Our analytical results provide insights on how amenities may affect non-residential properties values and how the impact may differ across property types. Our empirical results offer evidence that explicitly modeling spatial dependence is necessary for hedonic non residential property models where there is interest in local amenities. We also show that it is also important to account for the temporal dimension since ignoring it can lead to misinterpretation of the real measure of spatial dependence over time. Moreover, we find that in general amenities that are jointly valuable to firms and household, such as parks or air quality have either weak or non-robust effects on nonresidential values. However, the fact that the joint amenities coastal access and crime appear to have stable correlations across specifications would be consistent with a higher firm than household valuation. In contrast, those amenities that are likely only valued by firms, such as transportation access and proximity to concentrations of skilled workers have robust and significant correlations with non-residential values.N/

The Shadow Cost of Parking Minimums: Evidence from Los Angeles County

Minimum Parking Requirements (MPRs) are almost universal in U.S. cities and common in the rest of the world. In the U.S., parking requirements for commercial buildings commonly require 700 ft2 of parking for each 1000 ft2 of floor space. To the extent this is a binding requirement, MPRs could result in distortion in commercial development. MPRs require either the allocation of land for parking, or very costly substitution of structured parking for land. Therefore, MPR distortions are likely to increase with the value of land. A steep gradient in the cost of the MPRs leads to the possibility that MPR costs could be high enough to change where developers find it profitable to locate commercial development. In particular, MPR costs may be high enough in dense, high land-value areas to discourage development or move it to outlying areas. We use a Mixed Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) approach to estimate a hedonic specification using sales of office properties in Los Angeles County. This approach allows local variation in the estimates of marginal values of key parameters, including the value of on-site parking. To control for unobservables, we use the Linn (2013) method to incorporate pre-period prices into the MGWR estimator. Then we use these hedonic estimates plus locally-specific estimates of parking costs to estimate the cost of MPRs on a property by property basis. We check the robustness of the results by comparing our estimated costs to the in-lieu-of-parking fees that are offered by some of the cities in our sample. Our estimates of MPR costs are close to these market values for escaping the parking requirement. Our results show a significant gradient in MPR costs. Smaller properties in dense, high land value areas in Los Angeles can have MPR costs that amount to about 30% of building construction costs while properties in outlying areas often do not have binding MPRS. This gradient is likely to be sufficient to move development from high land value, dense, city centers into lower value areas. Our suite of methods could be applied to other building and zoning regulation, such as height regulation and inclusionary housing where the cost gradient is also likely to be important

A Description and Analysis of Mediterranean Cities and Regions Planning for Climate Impacts

The current literature on local climate change adaptation contains comparatively little research into local and regional adaptation to climate change, and few comparisons of local climate adaptation initiatives across broad climate regions. Our conjecture is that areas with similar climates will face similar sets of climate risks and therefore can share adaptation solutions. This paper examines 36 adaptation plans (cases) selected from across the five Mediterranean climate regions in order to find if there is evidence that groups of cities and/or regions share similar responses to climate risks. We examined adaptation strategies for sea level rise, increased temperatures, flooding, reduced water supply and drought, wildfires, extreme weather events, and increased GHGs and air pollution. We examined the cities’ adaptation plans and categorized them into four stages: training, assessment, recommendations, and implementation. A contribution of the paper is a new way of analyzing adaptation by building a matrix of adaptation policy stage and climate impact area that shows which policy options have advanced from planning to implementation in our cases. We found that a wide variety of cities have completed assessments in one or more of the climate adaptation areas. Our major finding is that these Mediterranean cities often have quite similar plans for dealing with several climate risks. Many cities are planning stormwater runoff infrastructure overhauls in order to ameliorate the impacts of climate-related water supply and flooding effects. Similarly, many cities are proposing greening strategies to deal with heat island effects. Finally, we observe that the adaptation plans imply large cross-cutting infrastructure investment with their concomitant financial demands. We also observe a common gap, that while retreat from threatened areas is likely to be a necessary strategy for sea level rise, flooding, and perhaps wildfire, retreat is seldom mentioned, and not at all at the implementation stage. The key contribution of this paper is to provide a starting point for researchers and policymakers to consider the similarities and differences in adaptation approaches across Mediterranean climate zone cities. This paper establishes a baseline for adaptation policy in our urban cases that additional research can use to examine adaptation progress moving forward

Climate Change Adaptation in Mediterranean Cities: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Given the highly developed nature of Mediterranean regions and their importance in global trade and migration, it is crucial to develop comprehensive solutions for climate change. The widespread societal impacts of climate change add urgency towards transdisciplinary and transnational solutions for climate change adaptation. We represent the Mediterranean Climate Change Consortium (MC-4), an international network of scholars, policy makers, and practitioners working towards climate change adaptation in cities with Mediterranean climates. Our proposition is that areas with similar, Mediterranean, climates will have more climate adaptation lessons to share with each other than areas with distinctly different climates. As a step towards this, we present this special issue, which is a collection of articles and practitioner notes focused on climate change adaptation in Mediterranean climate cities. While this issue has a special focus on southern California, we hope these articles serve as a springboard for the discussion of adaptation lessons from other Mediterranean areas. We look forward to highlighting these regions in subsequent issues. We would like to invite other Mediterranean climate change adaptation scholars and professionals to join us in sharing their research and case studies to be collected in this volume

Report of the committee on a commercially developed space facility

Major facilities that could support significant microgravity research and applications activity are discussed. The ground-based facilities include drop towers, aircraft flying parabolic trajectories, and sounding rockets. Facilities that are intrinsically tied to the Space Shuttle range from Get-Away-Special canisters to Spacelab long modules. There are also orbital facilities which include recoverable capsules launched on expendable launch vehicles, free-flying spacecraft, and space stations. Some of these existing, planned, and proposed facilities are non-U.S. in origin, but potentially available to U.S. investigators. In addition, some are governmentally developed and operated whereas others are planned to be privately developed and/or operated. Tables are provided to show the facility, developer, duration, estimated gravity level, crew interaction, flight frequency, year available, power to payload, payload volume, and maximum payload mass. The potential of direct and indirect benefits of manufacturing in space are presented

Assessing the Effectiveness of California's Underground Storage Tank Annual Inspection Rate Requirements

Several states have experimented with varying degrees of local government implementation of hazardous substances (including waste) regulation. Local implementation allows more coordination of hazardous substances inspections with other local business regulation activities. However, there is the danger that some local governments may not pursue vigorous enforcement because of concerns over business and tax competition. California has instituted the most thorough system of local control over hazardous substances regulation in the nation. It has also gradually put in place a series of measures to attempt to hold local governments to minimum regulatory effort standards and to encourage enforcement actions when violations occur. These minimum standards and enforcement incentives appear to be successful as a whole and offer tools for other states considering local control over various environmental regulations. This report analyzes the minimum standards and enforcement incentives adopted by California