An example of housing illustrating a transit first land use policy

Lisa Bauso for The New York Times. FEWER CARS There are no parking spaces for the condos bought by Annemieke Clark and Daniel Pasley in downtown Portland, Ore.

Andrew calls our attention to this article from yesterday's New York Times. (Note that if you read the Sunday Times, but you "callously" toss the Sports section aside, most Sundays, the NYT publishes a shouldn't miss article about Real Estate on the back page of this section.) From "No Parking: Condos Leave Out Cars:"

ANNEMIEKE CLARK and her boyfriend, Daniel Pasley, do not spend a lot of time driving. Ms. Clark, a 29-year-old nursing student at Oregon Health and Science University, takes the bus to school. Her boyfriend is a “crazy bike rider,” she said.

So when they decided to buy their first home last winter, they chose a one-bedroom unit in the Civic, one of the first new developments in Portland to market condominiums without parking spaces.

Ms. Clark said they bought the $175,000 condo, which will be ready next summer, because “it was absolutely the cheapest one selling.” Mr. Pasley also hoped a unit without parking would inspire Ms. Clark to sell her 1992 Subaru. “So, part of it was idealism — that we would get rid of the car,” Ms. Clark said.

Although condominiums without parking are common in Manhattan and the downtowns of a few other East Coast cities, they are the exception to the rule in most of the country. In fact, almost all local governments require developers to provide a minimum number of parking spaces for each unit — and to fold the cost of the space into the housing price...

Today, city planners around the country are trying to change or eliminate these standards, opting to promote mass transit and find a way to lower housing costs.

I wrote about this idea with regard to Washington, DC, in this blog entry, "Comments on Proposed EYA Development at Takoma Metro Station, Washington DC."

DC needs to adopt a transit first land use planning paradigm. You might think that we have, but we haven't.

Index Keywords: transit; land-use-planning