Bottom-Up Shorts: How To Remove Parking Mandates in Your Downtown
In this episode of Bottom-Up Shorts, host Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Michael Bassili, one of the leaders of Strong Towns Nanaimo, a Local Conversation group based in British Columbia, Canada. Bassili explains how his Local Conversation created a parking campaign that convinced their city council to vote 8-1 to eliminate parking mandates in their downtown.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06
Thank you so much for tuning into this bottom up short, I'm Norm with strong towns, and I've met all kinds of strong towns members all over the place, and almost every time I'm like, man, I've got to tell somebody about these people. And so that's what a bottom up short is a quick introduction to the regular people that are doing really exciting things in their communities, even when, as I'm sure that they would be willing to share with you, they initially felt a little bit hesitant or reluctant, or wondering if maybe there was somebody else that was better that was able to do this type of thing. And so if you like what you hear in these bottom up shorts, please let us know. And as always, take care of your place, because that's exactly what Michael basili and Caitlin Middleton in Nanaimo, British Columbia have been doing as leaders of the strong towns. Local conversation, strong towns Nanaimo. The reason I want them on the show is because they've been instrumental in helping to get Park and reform to happen in their community. And so I wanted to bring on Michael and Caitlin to talk about this and to take the opportunity to really shed light on how the work of cultivating and nurturing a community of people that care deeply about building a lasting prosperity in the community can really have consequences for the long term health of the community. And so Michael tell us what's happening in Nanaimo that we should be excited about and maybe learn some lessons from
Michael Bassili 1:24
thanks. Norm. Really, really exciting stuff happened in Nanaimo this week. On Monday, council voted eight to one to direct staff to eliminate mandatory parking mandates all throughout downtown. This follows a sort of three or four month boot on the ground campaign from strong towns and IMO from us, lobbying Council, working directly with staff, speaking to dozens and dozens of developers, architects, stakeholders all throughout the community, all throughout the region, honestly, to get a unified voice behind parking reform. We have published our own report called people over parking a couple of months ago. It's about a three page report available on our website going through all of the sort of obvious wins that parking reform has. Of course, it has some consequences for the urban form of a city. Early on, every change is necessarily zero sum. There we have little changes that may have parking spillover, may have development ramifications initially, but the desire that we had, that the community had, was to literally put people over parking. Nanaimo, like many communities in British Columbia, has been fundamentally built for vehicles. Last five decades of development in Nanaimo were auto oriented, and so we have an over abundance of storage for cars, not enough storage for people, and that has led to a housing shortage in town, 1% vacancy rates all throughout the region. The Nanaimo region, rents are through the roof, and it's quite painful for a lot of people living here. And what we became obvious when we spoke to developers, architects, small and large, was that they when they receive a site, the first consideration they make is, where am I going to put all of this parking? City mandates, for context, Nanaimo, throughout most of the city mandates roughly 1.62 stalls per housing unit. That, of course, varies depending on the region of town. In 2018 and I know, updated their off street parking by laws to create these parking zones downtown, having the most lax and then further out from downtown, having more parking required for units, but on average, about 1.62 units parking stalls per unit, with the new provincial housing legislation allowing for the sort of natural densification of our suburban city, people started wanting to build duplexes, triplexes, levels throughout town, and they're running up now against Parking mandates in our downtown right now, if someone owns a an old, maybe an old miner's house in harewoods, kind of by the university, it's a normally sized single family home lot, and they want to turn into a duplex, maybe with two basement suites. So four units in total, you need between six and eight parking stalls per what the city mandates, which is preposterous, on top of the added cost, roughly, you know, give or take, about $100,000 per stall underground. And the ranges vary depending on where you are in town. For above ground, where are you going to put all that parking, if not on the on the surface level of presence? Again, this is a single family lot. It's going to have to be underground. That's going to skyrocket the cost for development, and that gets passed on, invariably, either to the developer or the owner, and the owner is probably, who's the one, who's going to be bearing that cost in the end, right? Because you have to make up that development, a development sort of charge at the at the building level, right? So these, these costs. Trickle down, and it restricts the sorts of developments that we can build in town. Periods. We spoke to so many developers for one particular Doug back house of masthead properties in town, who's building this incredible load of this, like mid rise development right downtown, right near the water. And he was talking about his frustrations with trying to fit this completely normal, three story building with 20 units of housing, something like that, around the astronomical parking requirements downtown, where transit already exists, where the bike lanes the city is built to already exist, where the sea wall and all the walking paths and sidewalks are those groceries down the street. I mean, this should be an easy win, right? We just, we got so frustrated hearing all about this, and at our local conversation every month, we get about, you know, 30 or so dedicated strong towns members in town to come out and chat about these sorts of things. And a common thread is, is housing costs and the desire for densification and the frustrations with parking. It sort of underpins a lot of what we're talking about in our local conversations every single month. And so we just kind of dove in head first. We decided this is a sort of low hanging fruit for the city, and it might be friction full for some people. Obviously, parking is very contentious. If every community you know in North America will have their own fun stories about parking, complaints of public hearings and council meetings about even with all that friction, it's worth it. It's incredibly important. And so we, you know, we started off small, right? We wrote a report, we held seminars and meetings every month to talk to people about parking. We had, like, a parking Q and A where we handed out parking related gifts for the winners, stuff like that, to get people kind of thinking about it. On our website, we launched a little forum that, like, uses AI to just generate a pseudo template of support letter. So, like, you know, one of our complaints from our mayor, the wonderful Leonard Krogh, was that usually when people do these campaigns for emails, they get the same email every single time. So I said, Okay, Leonard, I'll do you one better AI will generate it'll be great. Of course, we encourage people to customize it pertain to their particular situation. But that was incredibly successful. On top of that, Caleb Middleton did an incredible, incredible job of reaching out to, again, dozens and dozens of stakeholders. There's this giant spreadsheet. This is a big matrix of people, architects, developers, all throughout Nanaimo and businesses as well, to try to get a sort of litmus test for like, do people even want parking reform? Do people understand the benefits? Do people not, you know, want this, like, should we even bother going through the effort? Because if it's going to be contentious with the community, you know, we need to know we're up against, right? But it was honestly the exact opposite of what we were expecting. Every single person we spoke to was supportive of parking reform. The the closest we've gotten to a negative response was the initial apprehension someone, uh, kind of shows in their face when you say, I want to eliminate parking mandates city wide, they kind of step back a little bit. They say, Hang on, I drive a truck. I run a construction company. But once we explain, of course, that the idea of proving the mandatory parking minimums, you can still build smoke parking as you want, but the minimums are illuminated, then their face lit up. Oh, wow. I could have put 10 extra units on Metro drive where the bike lanes are. If I didn't have to build all this parking Oh, I could fit this really cool building right downtown in this strange corner lot that just wouldn't make sense if I had to fit an undergrad parkade or surface parking lot. It's once you kind of lay out what this actually is. Every single person we spoke to, honestly, including the counselors we spoke to the face just faces just let up. And for counselors who whose faces didn't line up, we had examples. We pulled potential developments that died in Nanaimo and showed Council and staff the consequences. There is this incredible proposal for a daycare in Nanaimo at the corner of Victoria Road in Milton, right downtown, deny mo for contact has a downtown parking mandate exclusion zone that only affects commercial uses up to the first 100 stalls. So let's say, if you build a restaurant and you need 105 stalls, you'd only be mandated to build five. That's the sort of idea. This does not apply to residential buildings. This proposed daycare was on the other side of the street from where this parking exemption zone ends. So it is still it's still downtown, but right across the street, BC law mandates that outdoor play areas exist for these daycares. This is a an old church they're trying to renovate, which had an existing rear parking lot due to the topography of the site, the only place they could have put this outdoor play area was at the corner of essentially Island Highway, which is not to send your kid to play. I do say so myself, the proposed developers, they went back and forth with staff, and they would not budge on parking so. And we showed this, we showed the designs, we showed the space, the topography, all the all the staff and council said, Hey, we are in desperate need of daycares in our community, especially downtown. Here is one that was on your desk and it died.
Michael Bassili 10:14
We also had another, like Nanaimo, famous cafe, the buzz Coffee House, the owner, Phil, had to close his location at the corner of island highway in Rutherford, kind of in the north end of town, very sprawley, not very walkable. He was looking for a new location to open up this cafe. So he found a couple of spots that he liked downtown. One particular one he told me about was at the on Fourth Street, Fourth Street and Bruce. So we're kind of at the university, half between the university and right downtown. I used to live right there. Super walkable, likable busses run by there all the time. Slam Dunk right there's a beautiful, vacant little shop right between a panago and an Indian restaurant. The building itself was built way back when, well before the concept of parking mandates existed. The city told Phil that if you wanted to open his cafe, he would need about 30 parking stalls. 30 parking stalls is bigger than the lot. You could not fit that anywhere in this lot. And this is a triangular shaped lot too, so there's no possibility for an underground parkade. And even if there were Phil is just some guy in town who has no money to build 30 times 100,000 in terms of parking stalls on the ground, so that this whole absurdity kind of kept unraveling. We kept showing all these examples, and I guess eventually we whittled down the right people, because again, on Monday, they voted eight to one to direct staff to eliminate them fully downtown wide. And we've been working with staff pretty closely on this. We've met with them several times in the run up to the governance priorities committee meeting, which is where this happens. And they indicated, through their high level, phased approach for what they want to do in annamo. We, of course, we're pushing for full elimination city wide, because that we think that's the simplest, easiest solution to this problem, right? Let the market decide how much parking you can build in the middle of nowhere. And honestly, if you're a developer who can even get a loan to build a parking free development in the outskirts away from civilization, God speeds. Realistically, if you want to sell these things, you're gonna have to assess the situation, assess the context of your neighborhood, and decide from there, right? We found we came to a really good compromise with staff. Obviously, the first phase here is downtown. Afterwards, they're eyeing up the next phase, which is going to be all of our urban nodes. The incredible provincial housing legislation for transit oriented areas came into effect, which eliminates parking mandates around transit stations. So we don't have any train stations in my mobile we have bus stations. So we have the university. We have wood road Town Center, we have Country Club Town Center. These are sort of, sort of bigger urban nodes. Of course, there's also a downtown exchange. There are building currently in downtown Nanaimo, which will now be covered by this parking man exclusion that they voted in. But there are other nodes in town that are also designated as urban centers in the OCP that they're going to be trying to eye up for elimination Next up, right? Another easy win, right? We want to see these places densify. This is already where transit is. This is already where people want to live and communities or where Job Centers are. And again, it's another easy win, and we are working with staff on what we think is another excellent next step here, which is transit oriented corridors. Nine most busses run pretty frequently on several streets, on Bowen road and waka saya on Comox road. So a normal drive all these different places in town that busses kind of converge out of these transit exchanges and kind of run down these corridors. These are, again, right, incredible areas to densify and to, you know, have this sort of easy win for the city, right? It's easy for people, we think, to see free developments appear on our rapid transit corridors, because people are already taking the bus in, and I'm more like crazy on these places it's in, you know, something that's very obvious and easy on our end, that we see it as a sort of simple win, right? But of course, we got to continue to keep pushing for full elimination, because we want to be aggressive. That's our whole job as a as community advocate, is to be aggressive and progressive in the ways we we pitch these solutions, yeah, that's sort of the gist.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:24
Oh, that's fascinating. And and again, it's making that case that this is not removing parking. It's removing the city regulations around parking and allowing for the market still to determine what that is, but on a site by site or location by location basis, which is far more nimble and far more sort of context specific than any sort of 18 page document could ever hope to be the 1.62 calculations or things like this. You know, my sense of just knowing you got to meet you last summer when we did an event together in Nanaimo is you probably would be doing this no matter what. But what does it mean to be able to bring together a group of other. People to talk about these ideas in the context of Nanaimo and to mobilize to take action together.
Michael Bassili 15:06
It feels absolutely incredible. Like you said, we would have done this regardless, but having such a large group of dedicated people who love this city, who want to see a change for the better, who have been to other places. They've been, we've been to Vancouver, we've been to Victoria. They're right next door. We know what these these places, with transit, with with dense housing feel like and look like, what kinds of opportunities they they create in our communities. Seeing that and bring that to Nanaimo is incredibly empowering. Every single month, when we sit down with at least 30 people, we typically max out our room at the library. We used to we worked our way up from small cafes to bigger and bigger venues because we couldn't just, we just couldn't account for all of them, seeing all those faces, hearing all those diverse voices, brainstorming, coming up with plans of action. It just makes it worth my heart. Honestly, it's incredibly exciting and reassuring that we're not the only ones who think this is a good idea. And also it's reassuring at this stage to see that council and staff agree as well. Like everyone is on the same page at this point. And it's, it's, it's a cool direction to see the city go in, right? You know, 50 years plus of auto right to development has sort of scarred Nanaimo. And, you know, people know, when we first started this group, people are incredibly pessimistic about the outcomes of these sorts of changes, right? They've lived in anamo Over 30 plus years. They've seen nothing but highway expansion and parking lot redevelopment, explore expansion in the north end. That's the Nanaimo they see and feel. We offer them a different alternative here, we said, we can make so much change with simple community oriented advocacy and initiatives. We can, we can lay the foundation for better, smarter growth in our city. We can advocate for a better way of development that sort of is contrary to the historical ways Nanaimo has grown. And we can, you know, we can kind of build the city better for your kids, for people, for newcomers coming to Nanaimo, for people who are retiring in Nanaimo, right? We want to build the city for for people, not for cars. And that's kind of, you know, our whole mantra at this point,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 17:15
yeah, oh, that's fantastic. And so much to mull over. And for those that are discerning, you'll notice that Caitlin has not joined the conversation, but certainly Caitlin's contributions, as well as Michael's contributions and Nanaimo, together with a growing local conversation group, I think, are going to have a transformative effect over time in increments, building up in stages and phases. And so with that, thank you so much, Michael for joining bottom up shorts and thank you to all out there continue to keep doing what you can take care of and take care of your places you.
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