As the president of the famous accelerator YCombinator mentioned, there is one thing we have not done to lower the cost of housing: Build more. But it’s easier to say than to do. Where should we build? Most of the city is already built and there’s almost no space where to grow. Well, unless we are not seeing it because we are blind by our own subconscious that considers something as “normal”.
As Aaron from SF Streets Blog mentions: “What if San Francisco stopped adding car parking? The idea might sound a little odd to the average person, but when you look at where the city is heading, the really crazy scenario would be to keep on cramming more cars into our neighborhoods. Under current policies, SF is poised to build 92,000 spots for personal car storage by 2040, consuming an ungodly amount of space in our compact, 7-mile-by-7-mile city. At what point does it stop?”
So, where to build? Where there are parking lots. Two things will happen in the future: everyone will rent their driveway/garage bringing down the price of parking and making private parking come into the share economy.
Why do we believe this? This is the sequence of events.
1-Parking lots will fight for the customers attention because parking startups will subsidize the product making the demand increase to the point of saturation.
2-The raise in the price (which is happening — avr $300/m) right now will also raise the price of housing to a stupid situation where you pay 5 times the value of your lease for a parking spot.
3-This will make it very interesting for those with garages/driveways to rent out their spaces when they commute out of the city. Economically interesting, plus need to pay for rent/mortgage.
Also, those in the city with garage/driveway (built in it) but that commute inside the city, will drop the car and adopt full Uber/Lyft. Self driving cars will be next, but those that commute will still have an economic advantage on owning a car. This will take time to change. But it will.
4-Once everyone come on board the prices will fall sharply? Why? Well, technology and sharing economy trust will make available more inventory that we ever had, make it also efficient on the usage side. Demand will shift towards peer-to-peer network.
For every new parking lot that we build we could instead build 200 apartments, and then we will lower (hopefully) the price of housing. We would see something we called the “Airbnb effect” : they have now 1.5M rooms available! This has affected some hotels, but in general they are still thriving. Private parking can/will co-exist with parking lots. We can bring more housing and more people into our beautiful city without the need of building any more space. Let’s just embrace the sharing economy!
If you believe as us, that this will happen, come join us and list your space here: www.fleckparking.com Check also our app on the AppStore and Google Play store.
