Could the way Canadians park vehicles be part of the housing crisis? – National | 24CA News
It’s no secret that Canada is dealing with a serious housing scarcity. But may the sheer quantity of area used for parking automobiles be a part of the issue?
A current Re/Max report taking a look at participation within the housing market stated the “vast majority” of lower-priced properties within the Greater Toronto Area are parking areas, and that a lot of the 250 ‘properties’ listed on the market below the $400,000 value level are parking areas, lockers and vacant land.
For housing advocates, it touched on a longtime frustration.
“Four parking spaces side-by-side on a surface parking lot is about the same amount of space as a one-bedroom apartment,” stated Mark Richardson, from the Toronto-based housing advocacy group HousingNowTO. “If we’re going to spend money – particularly government money and government time – on things that land, that space is better used as places for people rather than empty car storage.”
A 2021 report by the Canadian Energy Systems Analysis Research, also referred to as CESAR, stated Canada has exponentially extra parking areas than automobiles. The report stated Canada has round 23 million light-duty automobiles however has someplace between 71 million to 97 million parking spots.
That suggests there are 3.2 to 4.4 parking spots for each automotive within the nation.
In some cities, parking takes up a lot of the area within the metropolis’s downtown core. In Regina, for instance, practically half of personal land within the metropolis’s downtown core is parking tons.
In the town of Toronto, a bylaw dictates {that a} parking spot needs to be 5.6 metres in size, 2.6 metres in width and have a vertical clearance of two metres. This involves round 156 sq. toes for a single automobile, whereas in response to Canadian Real Estate Magazine, the scale of the typical Toronto apartment is slightly below 650 sq. toes – across the identical because the 4 parking spots Richardson cited.
“It encourages sprawl,” Richardson stated. “It’s not being turned into housing and it helps lead to our housing shortage.”
According to the CESAR report, 40 per cent of Canada’s parking areas are residential, 26 per cent are industrial and institutional, and the steadiness are “on-road” areas.
Much of this has to do with “parking minimums” – or the requirement that builders should construct a sure variety of parking areas for any new growth.
Rebecca Clements, a researcher on the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia, advised Global News that Minimum Parking Regulations (MPRs) have had a devastating affect on housing affordability in lots of industrialized nations together with Canada and the United States.
“This forces developers to include parking everywhere, greatly contributing to building costs,” she stated. “MPRs also reduce the diversity of housing and non-residential land uses, by effectively prohibiting zero-parking buildings which might otherwise be excellent designs.”
In December 2021, the City of Toronto abolished parking minimums, following Edmonton’s lead.
Richardson stated that was the results of advocacy by housing teams in Toronto, who’ve argued parking minimums made it exhausting for reasonably priced housing initiatives to be constructed.
“We had a project in Toronto where for 32 units of seniors’ co-op affordable housing. The old default bylaw said they needed 42 underground parking spaces. So that would have cost that not-for-profit $4 million to create the parking before they created a single unit of affordable housing,” he stated.
“These parking minimums in many cases have been around since the 60s and the 70s. It’s taken us 40 years to get into this hole. It’s going to take us at least 20 to get out of it,” he stated.
Are parking minimums on the best way out?
In addition to Toronto and Edmonton, the cities of High River, Alta. and Lunenberg, N.S., abolished native laws for parking minimums in 2021. In December, metropolis councils in Vancouver and Saskatoon took comparable measures. The metropolis of Regina, which is in search of cash from the federal Housing Accelerator Fund, can be trying to make modifications to its parking laws.
According to the Parking Reform Network, a non-profit that advocates for parking coverage reforms, main American cities like San Francisco, CA, and Austin, TX., have additionally abolished such measures.
In New Zealand, the National Policy Statement – Urban Development requires all municipalities to take away parking necessities for brand spanking new developments.
Clements stated one of the vital profitable examples is that of Japan, the place on-street parking is “effectively banned” in Japan.
“There are MPRs in Japan, but they mainly apply to large offices and commercial buildings, so basically all small to medium homes and retail establishments are exempt. This helps greatly with offering more home and building diversity, and affordability,” Clements stated.
Japan additionally has a “proof of parking” rule, which implies you can not register a automotive with out first having secured a parking spot for it.
“This shifts the responsibility for parking onto the car owners themselves, rather than making it the general public’s problem, where car owners demand and expect parking to be provided for them everywhere in the public domain,” she stated.
But in Canada, consultants say eradicating parking minimums gained’t be sufficient and cities want to start out prioritizing growth that’s transit-friendly and constructing extra strolling distance developments.
“We have a chicken and egg problem. The problem is we want dense development but development isn’t initially dense enough,” stated Dawn Parker, a professor on the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning. “Retail activities, other activities, employment locations are so spread-out people still need to have a car.”
Parker recommends that within the brief run, cities construct multi-level parking tons concentrated and contained to sure areas in a approach that they will later be transformed into housing items quite than sprawling parking tons that dissipate land that may very well be accessible for housing.
In the long term, Richardson says Canadian cities have a selection dealing with them throughout this housing disaster.
“It’s parking or it’s people,” he stated. “You really can’t have both at this point.”
