Ep. 113: Road Scholars on Parking Requirements with UC(LA)'s Amy Lee

California passed a landmark law in 2022 prohibiting cities from mandating minimum parking requirements near major transit stops. Amy Lee explores how cities and developers have responded.

Show Notes

• Lee, A., Millard-Ball, A., & Manville, M. (2025). State Preemption in Theory and Practice: The Case of Parking Requirements. Urban Affairs Review, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/10780874251385240
  • Abstract: In U.S. law, states can override actions of local governments that contravene state interests. In practice, preemptions are often more ambiguous nudges, and local responses can vary by interpretation and interests. This paper explores one such case of state preemption: California’s 2022 law that limited local governments’ ability to require automobile parking. The authors find that the law’s complexity and ambiguity created intense debates about interpretations, in all jurisdictions, leading to heterogeneous implementation across cities. Local interests also motivated strategic responses to the law, which the authors present in a threefold taxonomy: cities interested in parking reform used it as a springboard; cities interested in parking reform but facing local resistance used it as a protective shield; recalcitrant cities treated it as an obstacle or subverted the law.
• California AB 2097 (2022): https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2097
• City of Sacramento History of Parking Mandates Memo https://www.cityofsacramento.gov/content/dam/portal/cdd/Planning/parking-revisions/A-Short-History-of-Sacramentos-Parking-Mandates.pdf
• HCD AB 2097 Technical Advisory: https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/policy-and-research/ab-2097-ta.pdf
• UCLA Center for Parking Policy https://its.ucla.edu/programs/parking-center/

Transcript

Madeline Brozen  0:05  
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm today's host, Madeline Brozen. I'm returning to take the wheel from Shane Phillips as we bring you another limited series of Road Scholars, our transportation detour. This series is supported by Transfers Magazine. Transfers is the research publication of the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center. Transfers and Housing Voice share a similar mission, turning knowledge into action. In today's episode, we are talking with Amy Lee of UC Davis about how cities and developers have responded to a landmark state policy change in California. This state law prohibits cities from imposing minimum parking requirements on projects located near transit. As we dig into with Amy, passing a law and implementing it locally are two very different things. We're going to discuss the sometimes hopeful, often messy reality of the first few years of this bill and walk through how this legislation has accelerated and stalled local change, as always, the Housing Voice podcast is the production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt, Shane Phillips, and Tiffany Liu. Please send any of your feedback for Road Scholars to me at mbrozen@ucla.edu, and with that, let's get into our conversation with Amy Lee.

Madeline Brozen  1:39  
Amy Lee is a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California Davis, where she researches the policy and politics of transportation and planning and the decision-making processes that govern travel behavior. Welcome to Road Scholars. 

Amy Lee  1:54  
Thanks very much. I'm happy to be here. 

Madeline Brozen  1:56  
I'm also joined by my co host, Juan Matute, Deputy Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Juan, welcome back. 

Juan Matute  2:03  
It's good to be back with the two of you. 

Madeline Brozen  2:05  
Amy, we ask our Road Scholars guests to kick things off with a memorable transportation journey. The definition of memorable is entirely up to you. So what experience would you like to share with our listeners? 

Amy Lee  2:17  
Sure, this is always a fun one for us transportation folks, the one that comes to mind, just top of mind most quickly is the one that I think was the most joyful experience I've had in transportation in quite some time. And it was I was lucky enough to take a trip to France, and I stopped over Paris en route to visiting some family who live there. And we were walking around Paris, kind of wearing off the jet lag, and it has a phenomenal bicycle network, if you've ever been over to that neck of the woods. And as we were walking around, it was pretty hot day. It was the tail end of a heat wave, and I was looking at this bicycle network thinking, Wow, this looks a little nuts. It's a wild bike network. I don't know how. I don't know it's a little bit nervous, I guess, to jump into it. And then ultimately, we we rented bikeshare bikes the next morning and hopped into that bicycle network in Paris and had a ball of a time just beaming around Paris, visiting the High Line that they have there and getting into that network. And I have had maybe not so much fun in the last several years, especially getting around a new city. At one point, I looked over and there was a cargo bike full of dogs biking along the network as well, and one of them, obviously, was running alongside, I think it was the herding dog of the bunch, and it was a dog walker who was also using the bicycle network. And it was full of kids. It was full of parents with their kids on their bikes, and it was just an absolute joy. And it really raised the bar for what I think of as a transportation person, when often we're talking about, how much can we reduce stress of our networks? Because I was having it was like the joy meter was just off the charts. So it's fun to just be in a different entire metric of biking around a big, beautiful city. 

Madeline Brozen  3:59  
Were the dogs in the cargo bikes, the dogs didn't have their own bikes, right? 

Amy Lee  4:04  
So it was one of those cargo bikes with kind of the bucket on the front, and there were approximately six dogs in the bucket, and one more running alongside that hopped in when they got to large intersections or roundabouts. So, you know, it was nose to nose, tail, to tail in that bucket full of dogs.

Madeline Brozen  4:26  
Wow, feeling safe and joyous and surrounded by dogs. What else can you ask for? 

Amy Lee  4:31  
And a few baguettes and a chocolate croissant and you have everything in life, yeah. 

Madeline Brozen  4:35  
Pretty sure you probably got the chance to get that as well. So what a fantastic journey you got to share with us. So turning to our matter at hand today, the article we're talking about was published in Urban Affairs review and is titled state preemption in theory and practice the case of parking requirements. Amy, along with her co authors, Adam Millard-Ball and Mike Manville, take on the study of parking reform by examining some of the early pathways that cities are taking after California passed a state law in 2022 ab, 2097 prohibiting local governments from mandating parking requirements for developments near transit. The central question is, when the state says stop requiring parking in these areas, do actually cities stop the answer, turns out, is complicated for a number of reasons we're going to get into today in order to answer this question, Amy and her collaborators conducted interviews in six cities that represent a variety of regions, city sizes and development contexts. They interviewed planners and developments in each of these cities, as well as people involved in crafting and implementing the bill at the state level. So that's a real high level summary, and now we get to dig into the details. So to start our conversation, can you share what motivated this paper and why this interview approach felt like the best way to get at what you wanted to learn?

Amy Lee  5:58  
Certainly. So a lot of the motivation for this work is that we know that bills are passed at a state level, the legislators. And legislature works out various components of those bills. They make deals. They write this law that goes on to the quote, unquote books. It becomes statute. And that law is not self implementing. It sits at that state level, but it, in this case, requires that cities and counties and municipalities and developers that are the ones who are building housing developments and other kinds of developments take advantage of that law, or react to that law in some way that really where the quote, unquote rubber meets the road for a law like This is is at that local level, and in fact, at that project level. And so we wanted to know, at when a bill gets passed at the state level, what is the implementation of it? How does it really work mechanically when it's being used or evaluated, or perhaps not used at those local project levels for something as particular as parking requirements. And so in order to do that, a lot of parking studies are often looking at a bill that has been passed or some sort of ordinance, perhaps, and they look at the number of parking spaces before and after to get the sort of quasi experimental view into the effect of a policy, but we wanted to dig into how the policy was getting implemented, not that we couldn't count parking spaces to understand that question. And so for that, you have to talk to people. So we talked to, as you said, local planners, planning directors, transportation engineers and transportation staffs at local governments. We talked to developers who are developing in these cities. We also talked with some elected officials and appointed officials, so planning commissioners, a couple of council members, city council members, so elected officials to understand how they interpret the law, how they're understanding it, how they're putting it into practice, and how they're responding to it. So we got to have conversations with a lot of folks around the state, and it was really that kind of conversation that let us understand what was going on with that law.

Madeline Brozen  8:03  
Throughout our conversation today, we're just going to talk about these cities in the paper. You put a list of the ones that you may have interviewed, but don't actually name them, which is totally appropriate. You know, it helps people be more candid protects privacy. I assume people have been trying to guess, like what the cities are or who said this. You said that in the paper that the interviews took 30 minutes to three hours. Mostly, I want to know who talked for three hours, and did they actually produce three hours of useful material?

Amy Lee  8:42  
I will continue my use of academic privilege to maintain confidentiality for that interviewee. However, I will disclose it was not Donald Shoup who talked for three hours, though, one would have guessed there is another person out there who will talk to you about parking requirements for as as long as perhaps Donald might have been willing to to answer your question three hours. There was certainly incredibly useful information that you can get, especially a lot of folks in California, government and governments and in kind of these policy I call them a policy arena of planning and parking especially, have worked in this area for a really long time, and so they have a wealth of experience that they can share. They can kind of trace the patterns over time. And so if you hit someone at the right time, usually, I've done a lot of qualitative research work. If you hit someone on a Friday afternoon when they don't have anything else on their calendar, they're usually very generous with their time. People generally, really are generous in this field, and also really love to talk about it. So it's, it's a lovely little niche of of the planning and transportation world, because you get some wonks who are very friendly.

Juan Matute  9:53  
Always lots to talk about when it comes to parking, I found.

Amy Lee  9:57  
No shortage, yeah.

Juan Matute  9:58  
So getting back to talking about parking. Your paper places this study within the broader academic literature on state preemption. One perhaps widely known application of state preemption is political. A conservative state government might preempt a more liberal city's ability to increase, for example, the minimum wage, but AB 2097, and parking reform are fundamentally different. They're not about partisan political battles, but rather about collective action problems. Can you elaborate on the literature and any partisan political dynamics at play in California?

Amy Lee  10:35  
Yeah, so you're absolutely right in the we were approaching this, this topic of parking and parking reform and a state preemption of local parking policy as a collective action problem, where a collective action dilemma is often what they're called, and those are very well studied, especially in the sort of the natural resources governance literatures. In fact, a Nobel award winning UCLA graduate, Eleanor Ostrom is who we really I've really drawn from in understanding these sorts of collective action dilemmas and what they really are whenever there are individuals in these situations face decisions in which acting in their own short term individual interests would create outcomes that leave everyone worse off is the idea of a collective action problem. There are a lot of names for these from this literature, and they're also like the one that we're often most common with, is this prisoner's dilemma, but it's where these individual actions leave everyone worse off. In this case of parking we're thinking of individuals as these individual cities and their individual parking actions or decisions around parking and parking supply, making the overall case of California sort of worse off, and that's where the individual cities have their interests driven by their voters or constituents who might be calling up planners or city council members saying what they want. The new parking costs are borne by new residents who would be moving into a new housing complex. But when those are added up collectively, in a state like California that has growth and air quality problems and climate change problems, adding a lot of parking makes the state worse off, not to mention housing affordability in the state is a statewide problem. So parking is one example, though, but these kinds of dilemmas are all over everyday life. I mentioned oftentimes they're around fisheries or pollution, but also there are things like public broadcasting or weather forecasting, these things that kind of individual interests might not say that we would have radio broadcasting, but we're all better off with this kind of collected action decision,

Juan Matute  12:46  
yeah, and I think we'll get into later, it's not just adding the parking that might have an impact. It's requiring the parking, and I'm looking forward to that part of the conversation.

Madeline Brozen  12:56  
Amy, even though you mentioned, a lot of cities kind of have this auto-centric approach, we do know that there's a lot of parking reform happening in California cities that predates this bill. In Sacramento, there's parking maximums in some parts of the city, where the city says you actually can't build more than this amount of parking in the central business district, for example. And actually, they publish a really cool memo about all the parking required history in Sacramento. We're going to put it in the show notes if you really want more information on that. But it's not just Sacramento doing these things right, like the city of Sacramento versus the state. We think about things, people up in Sacramento, but why did the state need to step in? What problem was AB 2097 solving that voluntary local reform couldn't do on its own.

Amy Lee  13:46  
Yeah. So the voluntary aspect is, what I would underline there is that you have cities as cities were voluntarily electing to reduce parking or eliminate parking minimums or impose maximums. They were doing these parking reforms, you got exactly that kind of a patchwork of municipalities that had elected into this cohort of parking reform. You still got that sort of collective action problem. You got a lot of cities who didn't elect into parking the nose. And so you create more of a patchwork to where these housing markets are really working, way beyond a single city and even sometimes a single metro region, we get these inter regional patterns of housing and housing costs. So what was really the kind of banner issue that the legislature was trying to address with 2097, AB 2097, was housing affordability and the costs of provision of parking. Another component of this that a lot of folks brought up, it's not quite in the legislative piece itself so this is a bit of editorializing, but housing near transit and really providing housing, and therefore residents to ride the transit network that we support with public dollars. And so having a lot of what some people might say, like overparked or really highly parked housing developments around our transit system was doing a disservice to the transit systems in California. So you get those kind of co-benefits between the pairing between land use and transportation, or housing and transportation, specifically transit in this case.

Madeline Brozen  15:14  
So the idea was to kind of try to bring more cities into the parking reform era and try to kind of do the spirit of what California is doing in coordinating land use and transportation, but trying to take it more beyond just planning, but kind of implementing a difference in the buildings themselves.

Amy Lee  15:33  
Yes, and the real kind of thing that would happen here is that state level nudge of all of the municipalities so that it wasn't you didn't get self selection. You got the state saying all cities that meet these certain criteria, the state was coming in to sort of solve that collective action problem of cooperation that wasn't happening before the state stepped in at that higher level and preempted local land use around parking.

Juan Matute  15:57  
So before we get into the weeds of how cities reacted, can you give us a parking reform 101, on the law itself at a high level? AB 2097 prohibits cities from enforcing minimum parking requirements within a half mile of certain public transit. But your paper points out that there's actually a lot more to it than that. So what are the key triggers that actually make a parcel of land eligible for this exemption?

Amy Lee  16:22  
Absolutely So yes, you're exactly right. So at the core of AB 2097 is that a public agency, cities, counties, the California Coastal Commission is a public agency. And so that was actually a big definitional conversation falls into that. And so all of these public agencies, they shall not impose or enforce any minimum automobile parking requirement on residential, commercial or other development projects if the project is located within one half mile of public transit. What is public transit that is defined in this law as a major transit stop, as defined in Section 21155, of the California Public Resources Code. What's in Section 21155? It is that a major transit stop means a site which is actually an important definition or word choice in there, we'll come back to a site containing either an existing rail or bus rapid transit station, ferry terminal that is served either by bus or rail transit service or the intersection, get ready. Buckle up the intersection of two or more major bus routes with a frequency of service intervals. At the time of writing, it was a service interval of 15 minutes or less during the morning and afternoon peak commute periods later. Bill the next year change that peak to 20 minutes or less. So what you get is a half mile drawn around a site, ie a parcel that has a trans rail stop, a bus rapid trans stop, a ferry terminal that's served by bus, or this intersection of two major bus routes or more.

Juan Matute  18:08  
So I'm sensing some ambiguity.

Amy Lee  18:10  
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Juan,

Juan Matute  18:13  
so are there any exceptions?

Amy Lee  18:15  
Absolutely there were carve outs that were written into the law, of course. So there are probably not going to get all of them, but hotels are carved out. It also ensured that these were not to impact parking spaces accessible to people with disabilities, which created ambiguity as well. Another component that is really important in here based on the area that was drawn out by this law is that it's any of those transit stops I mentioned can be either existing or they can be planned in the long term regional transportation plan, the long range transportation plan usually has a horizon of 20 to 30 years. So it could be something coming down the pipe in, you know, a dozen or a couple decades. But those carve outs, as I mentioned, hotels, disabled parking spaces, electric vehicle parking spaces, got to carve out because we shall not impose anything that would reduce electric vehicle parking spaces. And then, apart from a carve out, there's sort of an escape hatch that's built into AB 2097, and it is this quote, unquote, escape hatch that allows a local jurisdiction to enforce its minimum parking requirements for housing development projects. If that public agency makes written findings, it writes up some sort of report, it has to do so within 30 days, saying that if they were not to impose their minimum parking requirements, then the development would have a quote, substantially negative impact, supported by a preponderance of evidence in the record on the public agency's ability to meet its share of specified housing needs, or existing residential or commercial parking within a half mile of the housing development. So in short, it lets a public. Agency kind of write up a report saying we shouldn't have to enforce this law because it would create a negative impact on our housing stock or our housing conditions.

Juan Matute  20:08  
Okay, so that seems like a lot of nuance that we can unpack later in this discussion.

Madeline Brozen  20:14  
The idea of a major transit stop, as you mentioned, is codified into California law. Because it's not just this law that actually hinges on preemption for housing, but in fact, a bunch of other housing laws about density bonus and things of that nature, we could spend an entire episode on that topic. And so we are actually going to spend an entire episode on that topic with some of your collaborators. So we're just gonna do an abridged version of what you walk through here. So you kind of outlined, you know what it says, but what are some of the main issues with this definition and people trying to operationalize it?

Amy Lee  20:53  
Sure. So this really is getting into the crux of our findings. The meat of our findings here in that those things that I just rattled through, there's ambiguity that reasonable people with good faith can disagree about how to define an intersection of two major bus routes 20 minute intervals during the morning and afternoon peak periods. There are just a lot of conditions in there that some of them could be, and statements some of them could be ORs. It just kind of depends on how you operationalize that. When you're dealing with honestly, a data set of busses running through a city, it's a very tidy definition for a very messy sort of situation that actually happens on the ground. And there are a lot of ways to kind of take a pass at writing up a definition that catches certain types of bus stops. And so what we really found, you could easily find hundreds of people who would talk to you for a very long time about the debate of this definition. You know, the you get, the transportation modeler types, the forecaster types, the transit folks, the transportation departments and engineers, and so their result, we heard a lot of debate about how they drew up those areas. We in fact, have an entire rubric of the various definitions in the more expansive interpretation and the more restrictive interpretations, and the kind of like other interpretations that you get, for example, a definition of a bus rapid transit system. We don't really have well built out BRT in California, so it's a little bit what is being used most are planned BRT systems for defining areas around BRT. And then it's okay so the parking like, how much of the BRT system needs to be in a dedicated bus lane. Because oftentimes, for example, in LA, you'll have an express bus operating at peak periods, and it goes in and out of its own dedicated lane. Does that count as BRT? What if half of it is if? And so they're like, how much of the system needs to be in its own dedicated lane? Is it, all of it? Is it some of it? Is it where the station is, if that's in its own lane? Does that count? And so different people, different agencies and jurisdictions, had different calls on that. A lot of this was around. So transit like this is kind of how data get operationalized into policy, and vice versa, how policy gets operationalized into data. Transit data and transportation networks are often stored as lines and points. And so you get a transit stop is a point on a map. It's not usually pinned to an entire parcel, ie a site, as is called out in state law. So you have a point on a map and a circle drawn around that when if you actually use the entire T of a parcel of a transit station, you get a sometimes significantly larger land area that would be subject to that half mile buffer that would have its parking minimums preempted by the law. How do you deal with an underground stop? You know, sometimes those are a few acres underground. Is it the entire underground metro station or BART station? How do you deal with that? Is it just the entry point, like the escalator entrance, you know, like, how do you kind of deal with these things that are a three dimension? You have a three dimensional transit stop? How do you deal with that? And then overlapping bus routes? So, you know, some routes come together and then they have several stops along one busy corridor, you know, like, how many busses stop along the Wilshire Corridor, for example, and they part ways. Do those overlapping stops count as an intersection? I could go on, but I think you guys kind of get the point. There's just a lot of ambiguity and a lot of how do you operationalize something like this? You know, it's not just kind of like a clean grid of a transit map, and it's not so clear. It's just a very ambiguous definition with lots of ways you can interpret it.

Madeline Brozen  24:52  
So if I'm a developer, I want to develop in one of your case study cities that will not be named. How do I figure out if my parcel or site is actually 2097 eligible?

Amy Lee  25:03  
That's an excellent an excellent question. I mean, your your cleanest shot would be looking within a half mile bubble of a rail transit stop, particularly from the entryway or the like ticket booth of that rail transit stop, because it means its existing you can see the whites of its eyes, so to speak, and that distance of just a circle is the one that's used the most. For that reason, I said about points versus parcels, but where this comes down to is who a developer is dealing with is the City Council or the city's planning department when they're putting forward their proposed developments. And so the city, ultimately, a developer in a city need to agree on what that definition of within a half mile of transit is. So if that city is taking a more expansive approach to its definition or a more restrictive approach, it's a negotiation with that city of what is the area that they've deemed as within that half mile of transit? So it's a conversation with them. A lot of that kind of ice. As I said, some of this is coming from what is planned for the transit network in the long run. And so you get a layer in full of involvement with the regional planning agency, the metropolitan planning organizations or MPOs. And so there's a kind of a three dimensional, or three tier layer of policy and data that goes from an MPO, who gives the local agencies they have planned transit maps, and then the local government that interprets those and hopefully puts forward a map to show here are the areas. Some cities do that. Some NPOs put forward maps. But ultimately, it's the city or the county's call when interfacing with developer.

Juan Matute  26:50  
And so one of the things that you learned in your research that may be surprising to some people is that developers were often cautious about how they approached using the law. What did you learn about how developers approach working with cities, and how does their economic interest in a smooth approvals process influence how hard they're willing to push when there's disagreement over these definitions, and if it applies to a portion or all of their parcel?

Amy Lee  27:19  
Yeah. So this kind of, again, it comes down to what are the understanding, what those interests are of the party who's acting in this big collaborative system of land development, and the interests of developers that we spoke to generally were, there was not that sort of, we want to reduce our parking to zero because it's an expensive thing that we have to have to provide that nobody wants. But actually, when they think of parking as an asset that they can provide, they have people who they're going to be selling or leasing these units to, and many of those folks will want to have parking. So they're trying to take those market demands into account. But also the key component for these developers, as Juan you alluded to, is that they don't want delays, and they do not want to get into particularly a legal quibble with lawyers about the definition of how far away are they from a major transit stop with a city when each of those days of delay or weeks or months really adds to their debt financing that they are carrying as They're trying to develop this expensive capital asset. And so rather than sort of pushing for the most permissive definition under AB 2097 or reducing parking to the extent possible, they're they're trying to ensure a very smooth, expeditious route through the approval process with the City Planning Department and with city council.

Juan Matute  28:42  
Yeah, I saw in your paper that this delay costs an estimated $2,000 a day for every $10 million in project costs, which is significant and adds up for a very large project,

Amy Lee  28:55  
absolutely so every back and forth of note, your estimation of parking or distance was off every kind of review period or back and forth was something that developers particularly wanted to avoid.

Juan Matute  29:07  
Could you provide perhaps a specific example of how a developer approached parking, either given this ambiguity or given the other market conditions that they were considering?

Amy Lee  29:19  
Yeah, and I think this is an example in our paper even that a local jurisdiction mentioned that in an area that was certainly subject to AB 2097 a developer brought forward a housing project. And not only is it near transit, as the city had defined it, but also its on a corridor of the city that they wrote a an active transportation plan for it, walking, biking. They're really trying to take a sort of arterial strode style Street and activate it and make it more pedestrian and biking friendly. And when that developer submitted the proposal, they put parking on the entire kind of bottom floor. So it was over. It was part. Parking on the on the bottom, and with residential above, and the entrance to the parking garage was on this street that the city has been trying to activate for walking and biking. And the city went back to that developer and said, you know, we don't like this for our overall goals that we have in our plans and our general plan. Can you give us something better here for the walking and biking environment, take this entryway to the garage or these parking spaces here and put in a cafe or something that's a neighborhood asset. And so the developers removed parking from that stretch of that corridor and put in an ultimately, was a cafe or a coffee shop, and removed parking spaces do that. So is that the urging of the city to do that?

Juan Matute  30:43  
Yeah. And I guess improving urban design at the margins can be one of the many side benefits of having this Regulatory

Amy Lee  30:51  
Flexibility. Exactly.

Madeline Brozen  30:53  
So now we're going to get into what's really the heart of the paper, which is the pathways of how cities responded to this new law. You identify three different pathways. They could use the law as a springboard, they could use as a shield, or treating it as an obstacle. So let's start with some optimism and hope and talk about these Springboard cities. So these are the places that use the law as an opportunity to go further than the state actually required. How was that the case, and what were some of these gold star examples?

Amy Lee  31:23  
So the Gold Star examples are the ones who got these definitions handed down from the legislature. They looked at these. They looked at what areas they would potentially fall in in their jurisdictions, and said, You know what? Let's finish the job and just eliminate parking requirements across the whole city, like we don't want to, you know, this would cover most of our city. In some cases, there were some that, you know, there was a little piece of land, like 10% of their city was left over after 2097 so they said this would be arbitrary, to just keep this little sliver of our city with parking minimums, and it's honestly more work for us to maintain parking minimums in this sliver for this odd assortment of land uses over here. Let's strike parking minimums from our from our ordinance altogether. Or there are some cities, as I do this would be at least like half of our area. And just like, transit is changing all the time. So as transit changes, we're going to have to keep updating these maps. We don't want to do that. We've been moving as a city towards a sort of evolution of removing parking requirements. Let's use this as an opportunity. It would just be, I think one person said it would be weird and hard to try to maintain parking minimums in the rest of our city. So let's just eliminate them. We've been moving in that direction. And then there's the sort of like, the more marginal example like I gave of, you know, the springboard was maybe a little less springy, but, oh, you know, let's kind of use this in this case of a developer's putting forward something, and let's actually urge them to change the design of their project on this quarter we've been trying to do, push them to go a little further. So you get those kinds of cases both at the project level, or like, let's, you know, let's take the most expansive definition we can of what an intersection of major bus routes are, and use that as we're putting forward our maps for these developers, really, those were in cities that had had policy evolution towards parking reform, so they were responding to their constituents in what they said they had wanted when They voted for other components of city's plans and ordinances, and they're putting them into action using the kind of spur of this state law to propel it along.

Madeline Brozen  33:30  
Yeah, I think there's a quote in the paper that really is illustrating this point, that reads, good parking policy has been enabled by good management of parking supply, and it helps that those policies result in projects that are actually successful. So it sounds like it wasn't by accident, you know, or just this would be administratively simple, but rather kind of going further on. This new law was just the next step right in trying to kind of put the piece of parking management together in these cities.

Amy Lee  34:04  
Yeah, it did not come out of nowhere. And there was a state law, and suddenly an idea came along to, you know, get rid of parking minimums city wide, or something like that. But often, as this particular quote spells out, it was this that was a city that had been really managing its parking supply, almost sort of business like of you know, we have new housing coming in. We have garages that are underutilized. Let's do business here and have these housing units be able to, you know, they don't need to build a new underground garage or or reduce the number of units. But let's they use programs to really match supply and demand in a way that they didn't need to require new parking supply to be built. And also as a key part of I think that quote is that it helps it when those policies result in projects that are actually successful. It gave the community members who might otherwise. Be skeptical or show up and perhaps complain something to actually enjoy that coffee shop that went in instead of a big parking garage phase that's a community asset, or, Oh, this thing that's gone in now also has my new favorite restaurant in it. So maybe you don't complain about the new you actually are getting benefits from the development and people, you build that constituency among your residents, and good supply and good management of that was what this particular case was really showcasing, and said that was really crucial to being able to continue to innovate and push their policy forward.

Juan Matute  35:36  
So the shield strategic response is fascinating to me. Can you describe what that is and how it was used in the cities you studied?

Amy Lee  35:46  
Yeah, certainly. So we had the springboard cities and a shield city sort of archetype, and the shield was it was used a couple different ways, but oftentimes it was jurisdictions that were very clear that their constituents had voted on an affordable housing plan or a general plan with housing affordability goals that were very ambitious. And then this state law comes down around and so part of the work that those cities had done and in these kind of broader, more general plans included parking reform. And then this state law comes down. People are very concerned about the lack of parking or the city's lack of ability to enforce parking minimums and the city was able or the city's they use the state law as a shield to enact those local goals their constituents had been in support of at this general level, but then get very concerned about or complain about when it's coming forward at the project level, and they could say, we actually can't enforce our parking minimums, in this case, because of the state law. And they were able to use the exact kind of tool of state preemption. This is a state law. We can't break state laws to enforce parking minimums, and by the way, you actually voted saying that you wanted this, but they were able to use it as political cover, because it's coming down from the state level of government.

Juan Matute  37:09  
Yeah. So I'm wondering, could this shield be an effective way to get things built, get housing built, because it preserves the local officials relationship with their constituents,

Amy Lee  37:21  
absolutely, and I think that's why we see a lot of housing legislation going through the state level right now, so the state knows that there is this rub between local elected officials and their constituents, and by taking that decision making power up to the state level, you remove that conflict point for something like housing, that We are all better off when we have more housing supply, and so the state has kind of subsumed that role.

Juan Matute  37:47  
Well, sounds like smart multilateral governance to find find a way

Amy Lee  37:51  
polycentric governance absolutely solving a collective action dilemma.

Madeline Brozen  37:55  
So now let's get to the worst actors, the obstacle cities. One could argue that these were the ones that law was actually most trying to target or change. And I thought when I was reading this paper, some part of this response is just tied to the long standing conflict between state power and local control. So how much of this is just like maybe not actually about the topic and just about this local control power issue

Amy Lee  38:22  
that is a key component of it. Local Control is sacred in California, for sure, elsewhere as well, but the piece of the state is coming in and doing something around our land use authority was sometimes secondary to the fact that it was about parking at all. So sometimes it was in cities that perhaps had been considering parking reform, or they had made variance allowances for a lot of developments. To the effect of they almost had parking reform. You know, it just hadn't been codified. But it was, you know, the state is not in a they shouldn't be telling us what we should be doing with our land use. We all know very well the refrain, but it was used here, of one size doesn't fit all. You know, as a one size fits all, they're making us get rid of parking, and that's a state level thing coming down and kind of harassing these cities. And its in some cases, tiny cities with very few staff, if any at all, and they have to figure out what the heck a half mile radius around a major transit stop is, and they don't have the time and curiosity to figure it out in the way that researchers do, or larger cities do. They don't have a whole GIS department. They have maybe a consultant, planner who's part time. So part of it is that, part of it is, you know, please stop telling us what to do with our land use. That's not none of your business, and you don't get our local context

Madeline Brozen  39:44  
well. And maybe that's illustrated in this quote that went on to say that the law has been a middle finger to cities that aren't set up to accommodate a bill like this. Is that getting at the kind of technical capability, or are you interpreting that quote in another way?

Amy Lee  40:00  
Yeah, I think that's a bit more of, like a friction in the polycentric governance of land use. I'm not sure that's I think there's probably a technical component in there as well, but it's a little bit more beyond that idea of, like, let's draw up a map, sort of technical and just like we're a complex environment with, you know, populations that swing greatly during a course of a year, or we have some sort of exception that makes us not like the run of a mill, not the average California city. So part of it is like a planning, like technical planning conversations, and some of it is intergovernmental friction. We

Madeline Brozen  40:44  
can we can sit and think about a lot of different symptoms for that word friction, but we will move on. So in these obstacle cities, how common was kind of defiance or obstacle approaches? Because one thing that you talk about is that there's this regulatory Hydra, kind of citing some some work from other folks, or the idea that one, when one regulation gets removed, two else get added. So you know, how common was it to say, okay, sure, we've removed parking, but Aha, now we've done something else.

Amy Lee  41:23  
I will make the researchers caveat that we couldn't, I can't speak to how common certain things are, because these were cases. So we don't have, like, you know, counts of among our six to eight case cities. We saw this happen a few times, but we couldn't really say how many cities in California are doing this, I think it's a bit more of a like, I don't think I heard too much of that kind of dramatic scheming. So much, as you know, like this just doesn't make sense for us. Like, and you get various kind of perspectives of like, what makes us different, you know, the Royal us, or why it makes sense or doesn't. And so every once in a while, there were a couple of cases where there were given around, oh, if a project tries to take advantage of 2097 then we're going to do X, Y or Z to make that pathway to developing a little harder. That said that case where that was mentioned, 2097 had not been used to, I think, zero park a project, which was what the big concern was, is we're going to have all these developments with no parking whatsoever, and that just hadn't come to pass. So that sort of, I probably shouldn't say quid pro quo, because that has real legal meaning. But that sort of, if you do this, then we're going to make this harder for you. That just hadn't come to pass because no developer had put forward a project that had zero parked because that developer was paying attention to who that market was for housing in that area, and said, You know that, like people generally, have X number of cars here, and here's the kind of cars. Here's the fleet mix that exists in this particular city. So they were paying attention to the market dynamics of who would be potential buyers or renters of those units.

Madeline Brozen  43:10  
I mean, you did have people to be so egregious in their defiance that there was a quote that someone said on the record at a public meeting that they asked city staff to get around this law, which basically to ask, are there consequences to actually creating obstacles to 2097

Amy Lee  43:29  
Technically, yes, though they're not really clear. It's a sort of ambiguous pathway. And there were some, I will say, kind of the biggest obstacle were sort of like the heel draggers, is how I would really call it. They saw this. They really saw the bill as an obstacle to navigate around. They had people coming to public meetings, as you said, saying, can you get around this? We don't want to do this. So you get that pressure of like, let's make this like have the least effect as possible. So you get the like kind of treating this as a thing to try to just navigate, to make it the least impactful sort of piece of legislation as possible. So in some cases, those were cities that were like, We're absolutely not going to publish a map showing where you can not provide parking. We'll put that responsibility and the onus on the developer to try to figure it out. Whereas other cities were like, Yes, great. Take this map. Here it is like, and in fact, if you propose more parking than you need to. We're going to tell you to put in a cafe. You know, it's a very different approach to this state law. Others were like, Oh, we actually really don't think that planned transit should even be part of this law. And we, as we read it, we don't see it. So there was also someone who told me this was a direct quote in an interview, someone who said we're going to be ignoring the state law until we're told otherwise. They kind of were telling me they're gonna, like, disobey the law. So when you get these kind of the heel dragger type jurisdictions, what is a developer to do if they're wanting to get sort of enforcement of the state law? At the end of the day, it's a matter of a developer, it would have to sue the city. City or have the state Sue sort of on their behalf in order to get compliance with this law. I will tell you why. That might not be a very common tack. Is that a developer tends to be a to do a lot of work in the same city. If they have any desire to ever develop in that city again, they're going to think long and hard about pursuing litigation against that city that's going to be granting them their building permits, so they have a disinterest to get individuals and actors at local cities and on the planning commission and in staff and on the council to mad at them by suing them, what they could do, what and what has happened a bit is the cities may be put on notice by the attorney general or the state of California, or by organizations that are these sorts of housing organizations, and if they get letters or put on, you know, notice that they might be getting sued by the state, then generally, what we heard was that cities are more likely to follow the law because they don't want to get drawn into that sort of high level litigation.

Juan Matute  45:59  
They don't want to get in trouble,

Amy Lee  46:01  
right? Yeah, they don't want to get in trouble, but they that enforcement level, or that mechanism for enforcement is really on the like actor who's wanting to get something from that city, ie a permit to develop something so complicated relationship,

Juan Matute  46:17  
but then some aren't going to self police, yeah, as a transit researcher, I wanted to ask about how AB 2097 might impact future transit service planning, since it applies in these high quality transit areas with the ambiguity we discussed, and is there a risk that obstacle cities, cities like we've discussed, might actually gain the system by lobbying to reduce transit service frequency, just to keep their parking mandates intact, or other elements of their urban planning intact. For other bills,

Amy Lee  46:53  
That has been a rumor that has been going around, that cities are going to be or people will be lobbying to reduce transit service. I have not heard of that coming to pass. The example that's often held up is that the town of Atherton closed its train stop a number of years ago. We wouldn't be able to say for sure that it was caused by transit based housing laws, but that has certainly been a rumor, and its one of those sort of perverse or unintended consequences, perhaps, that you get people opposing transit because of the impact that these laws have on housing and land development. But I haven't yet been able to track a clean cause and effect of that. Where I we did hear in our interviews was that because this law is tied to planned transit in the future, what comes into play in terms of transit service affecting and preempting local parking requirements is what goes into a regional plan. And that was something that we heard from folks that what gets called bus rapid transit in a long range transportation plan will certainly be on the political table, because that has effects on local parking requirements and the inability of the cities, who are the board of the MPO getting their parking minimums or their parking ordinances preempted based on the definition of something that's in regional transportation plan, so it brings into play, certainly, at least what's in the planned pipeline and potentially what service is being offered on the ground.

Juan Matute  48:31  
Yeah, so that does sound like it'll create future conflicts. Do you have any ideas about a cleaner version of these bills, like AB 2097 that might use transit proximity to trigger these local development incentives, but don't create the same local opposition to increasing transit service.

Amy Lee  48:51  
That's a tricky one. When you create these sort of performance based zoning scenarios where zoning is contingent on some sort of performance measure, you introduce that kind of tension. And so, I mean, a lot of when I have read through these bills, and I think of how a clean version would look, a lot of it is striking out. A lot of the wording that makes things ambiguous, like, you know, most of it is around kind of reducing the quibbling, or reducing the components of the bill that are really open up these wide gaps in interpretation. Let's reduce the complexity here. Is kind of one of my main thoughts. But I doing that in a way that that doesn't create lots of local opposition to transit is would be something you'd need to kind of be very careful about

Juan Matute  49:41  
it may be hard to legislate away conflict. Is what I'm hearing.

Amy Lee  49:46  
Yes, oftentimes the ways that like this sort of ambiguity is introduced as a mechanism to avoid conflict. But rather than avoiding it altogether, what it does is it avoids it in the State House and sends it somewhere else.

Madeline Brozen  49:58  
Yeah,

Amy Lee  49:59  
there will be. Conflict. If there is, in fact, conflict around building of housing without parking minimums, if that's a contentious issue, then it's going to be it just depends on where that conflict sits.

Madeline Brozen  50:12  
So as we're wrapping up, you know, this paper is still pretty early in the story of this new law, and you all say it's, you know, It's too, too soon to say whether this law will ultimately succeed. But what are you looking for in the next, say, five to 10 years, to assess whether this law actually changed outcomes on the ground in terms of success or maintaining the status quo?

Amy Lee  50:34  
So we're already working on the next part of that, of trying to take a look at how this may have influenced actual parking provision. So the number of spaces, parking spaces that are built alongside new housing, is what we're looking at. So we're pulling development proposals and counting parking spaces or pulling those charts. You know, we're doing that experimental. It's a natural experiment, trying to see if we can see the effect of this law. What those don't tell us, though, the number of parking spaces do not tell us about those conflicts and the decision making process internal to those planning departments or those transportation departments, that local level. So it'll be really interesting to see how we'll be able to see how this has affected parking but this kind of ongoing, multi centric debate around housing and preemption, that'll be an ongoing kind of conversation, as California continues to to have housing be such a salient issue.

Juan Matute  51:30  
So Amy, this has been fascinating. Is there anything we haven't covered that you think is important, either from the paper or what you learned doing the interviews that you want to discuss?

Amy Lee  51:40  
I think one of the really interesting and hopeful things around these interviews was generally, folks who work for their local governments are really trying to do well by their constituents, and so I think it's really interesting. We can kind of villainize certain cities or kind of actors, but at the end of the day, a lot of these a lot of these folks are trying to do the best they can for what they think the needs are of their community, and are facing a lot of lots of different goals coming at them from different levels. So we didn't encounter, I would say, any sort of like Robert Moses, like villain. I'll be sure to say that they have different modes or methods or visions for what they think would be best for their cities or towns, and I think that's a really interesting thing, and it's really interesting to see how they take that overarching goal and translate into something as specific and arcane as parking policies and the minimum parking minimums as they are getting sort of talked about at the state level. So I think that's always a really fun one.

Juan Matute  52:40  
Well, we at UCLA love parking policy. We've recently established the UCLA Center for Parking Policy, which continues the legacy of Donald Shoup, professor at UCLA, who passed away last year and wrote The High Cost of Free Parking in addition to operating a external engagement enterprise with reporters, anybody interested in parking from reform from throughout the world. Don was there to communicate with them. And so there is information about this parking policy center in the show notes. And Amy, I understand you continue to work with researchers from the center on research projects. Can you just share a little bit about what might be coming in the future?

Amy Lee  53:23  
Yeah, certainly. So one of them is that the study analyzing the effects of 2097 as we're collecting data from around the state, from all different cities and counties around the state to look at how their parking provision has changed, that's going to be a very exciting paper and a very exciting study to get out on the street. And there's a whole host of other kinds of things that are coming out of the parking center. Mostly, I know about those more than I am involved in them, but this, this one that this paper that should drop in the next year. So it should be really fun. Stay tuned.

Juan Matute  53:58  
We're looking forward to that.

Madeline Brozen  53:59  
Well, it was wonderful having the former UCLA's Amy Lee on today. Thank you so much for joining us on Rhodes Scholars. You know, we don't get enough opportunities to see how policy actually works once it leaves the legislature, and this parking reform story in California is clearly far from over, so there's a lot more work to be done. We have the links to your paper and all the related resources in the show notes. And thank you so much everyone. We'll catch you on the next episode of Road Scholars. You can read more about Amy Lee's work on our website, lewis.ucla.edu where show notes and the transcript can be found. Thanks again to Transfers Magazine for their support. You can find them at transfersmagazine.org, the UCLA Lewis Center is on bluesky and LinkedIn and I'm mbrozen on bluesky myself. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai