How a Parking Lot Fight Explains America's Housing Shortage
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Hey, listeners, I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. Your money briefing is still on a break, but we'll be back soon with more personal finance coverage. In the meantime, this week, we're bringing you a special series on one of the biggest financial challenges facing Americans today, housing. The American dream of owning a home has become more elusive with rising prices, limited supply, and high mortgage rates. So what are local lawmakers and federal politicians doing to fix it? Today, we're looking at the NIMBY, not-in-my-backyard politics, that has been a longstanding hurdle in the push for new housing. That's giving way to a YIMBY, yes-in-my-backyard groundswell. What's News host Luke Vargas takes us to one neighborhood where a fight over parking lots has become a test case in America's housing debate.
That's after the break.
California has said yes to building more homes.
How did a Menlo Park parking-lot dispute become a symbol of the national housing debate?
Several estimates put its housing shortfall at or above 2.5 million units, and state lawmakers have passed bills to help get projects approved, especially if they're near public transit. But not far from Menlo Park Station, where express trains whisk commuters to San Francisco in just 40 minutes, it's clear that the state's YIMBY movement still has plenty of work to do. For years, this leafy suburb home to Mehta has been trying to build 345 housing units for what are deemed very low-income households. For a family of four, that's an annual salary of between $60,000 and $93,000 a year. And where they'd be built is over three downtown parking lots.
It's stunning, isn't it? Can you imagine?
I met up with Leora Tanwatko-Ross, the California director of Yimby Action, Menlo Park's Lot 3.
It's sort of a back alleyway, right? You can see those lines of trash bins, right? It's kind of like the service entrance to all of these places. And it's really just ripe for new buildings and places to live. I mean, if you look up, we could go up. Absolutely, we could.
Proposals from three developers envision replacing Lot 3 with a multi-story car park with apartments at the top. But many local businesses aren't buying it. We are very, very dependent, of course, as a grocer, on parking. Third-generation grocer Richard Draeger supports affordable housing at alternate sites, saying that shoppers put off by years of construction and parking disruptions would take their business elsewhere.
What I see is that every single parking space represents a certain percentage of your sales. When you take away 50%, now try to make ends meet. If you look at this downtown and you compare this downtown with most downtowns, you don't have the Fortune 500 downtown. group of retailers. So what happens, unfortunately, is as these small independent businesses get pressured, who takes over that aspect of the market? It's another big chain operation.
Outside his supermarket and in shop windows around Menlo's distinctively old-school downtown are signs to save downtown Menlo, backing a November ballot measure aimed at stopping any repurposing of the parking lots without a public vote. Should it pass, Tenwatco Ross predicts a lengthy fight with Yimby Group suing if development plans are delayed again, wasting time and money as the housing shortage remains unaddressed.
What are the proposed plans to replace downtown parking lots with housing in Menlo Park?
Housing really dies a death by a thousand cuts. If you say, like, you know, this housing proposal needs to fix every problem, it needs to provide housing, but it also needs to make sure it fixes all the traffic problems in our town, then builders will just simply pull out.
Well, to help us unpack zoning's role in the U.S. housing shortage, I'm joined now by Journal residential rental market and housing policy reporter Rebecca Picciotto. Rebecca, what is the outlook around getting housing built at the local level? Some big cities obviously have been trying to tackle their longstanding barriers to new construction. Obviously, California there. I came across plenty of groups that have YIMBY in their name. It's a moniker that's kind of in vogue now. New York's mayor proudly embraces it.
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