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BONUS: You Can’t Afford to Live Here Because of Cars (Patreon)

Published:
2023-03-28 10:01:00
Imported:
2026-06
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  • TWOC-2023-03-28_Matt_Lewis_CAYIMBY.mp3

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Content

Hello, Dear Patreon supporters!

What if we told you that some of the biggest, most exciting, and potentially transformative victories in The War on Cars are being fought and won these days by people working on affordable housing? In this special Patreon-only episode of the podcast we are talking to one of those people -- Matt Lewis, communications director of California YIMBY. In the last few years, California YIMBY has launched an impressive barrage of legislation aimed at making housing more affordable by challenging the mid-20th century “California Dream” of single-family, automobile-dependent, suburban sprawl. Housing, transportation, climate, equity and inclusivity... For YIMBYs it’s all the same issue.

We hope you enjoy the chat with Matt Lewis.

As always, thanks for your support and for encouraging your friends to enlist in The War on Cars.

-- Doug, Sarah & Aaron

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Comments

John Gear

I just sent this to my city council and town planners because the planning commission process is trying to pervert a proposal to limit parking requirements -- after the workshop with the city council, the next proposal actually would have allowed MORE parking for multifamily units. To the point that housing and transport are one thing: Hello, I STRONGLY support the staff recommendation on parking for multifamily housing. Actually, I support something more aggressive — make the current minimum parking rule into a maximum, and eliminate the idea of mandated parking minimums in Olympia entirely. As Prof. Douglas Shoup has shown again and again, including in his monumental book “The High Cost of Free Parking,” the minimum amount of parking to provide is a decision that should be left to the market, not to bureaucrats applying tables that have no basis in research or economic testing. I am shocked to see that Olympia would be proposing to permit even more surface parking than is allowed today. We have such a huge oversupply of parking in Olympia, meanwhile we have a terrible shortage of housing for people. Ultimately, those two things are intimately related — the more parking we require, the more unaffordable our housing becomes, while at the same time we make driving alternatives more difficult for people, because we’ve spread out to accommodate all that parking. We are every day experiencing the negative economic and environmental consequences of centering automobiles rather than people in our development patterns, and parking minimums only aggravate every one of our problems. Housing is becoming completely unaffordable to a greater and greater share of people, and yet we’re proposing to force developers to burden residents with the costs of parking, even when they would otherwise use the money to provide housing for people. The current regional fire authority proposal is just another sign that we have bankrupted ourselves in the S. Sound region with an unproductive development pattern that doesn’t pay its own way, and parking is one of the greatest causes of development that is unproductive and unsustainable. As a recent Strong Towns video puts it, the root cause of our financial woes is “near rural densities with urban amenities.” Nothing hurts the provision of affordable urban amenities as badly as parking lots, which hurt water quality, climate emissions, and the likability of a place. It is time to stop putting cars and only car users at the center of our thinking and start recognizing that our economic woes are almost entirely due to the way we build our places with cars at the center instead of amenities for all people, not just the ones who drive. Our goal must be to make Olympia a place where everyone can participate fully in social, civic, religious, and economic life as first-class citizens without having to have a car. People would fall over if you proposed that all developers must give all residents an electric bike but, compared to a parking space, making developers give residents electric bikes would be far more helpful in terms of creating a cleaner city, with healthier people, and with a much more economically productive future. Cordially, John Gear Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Karla Hovde

I would love to see more short interviews of this style with spokespeople/leaders of activist organizations in many different states.

Noam Preil
>>105114292

Oops, using this site is awful. | Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay. That's one of the best ways I've heard this put.

Dan Martin
>>105272697

I second this! The people you've been landing on the pod lately are fantastic! Let's do it again!