urbanSTL

Free parking makes it cheaper to own a car. But, as UCLA economist Donald Shoup has long argued, it makes everything else more expensive. Parking at the supermarket is embedded in the cost of groceries. Parking attached to an apartment building is built into the price of rent.

It is important that the EPA is doing its best to share the good news on how location trumps building design, but who is listening? Certainly not the EPA. A mere month after releasing the above study, the agency announced that it was relocating its 672-employee Region Seven Headquarters from downtown Kansas City to the new far-flung suburb of Lenexa, Kansas. Why are they moving 20 miles out of town into a former Applebee’s office park? Well, because the building is LEED (green) certified, of course.

Kaid Benfield, a long-serving environmental watchdog at the National Resources Defense Council, did some numbers, and he found that while “an average resident in the vicinity of the current EPA Region Seven headquarters emits 0.39 metric tons of carbon dioxide per month … the transportation carbon emissions associated with the new location are a whopping 1.08 metric tons per person per month … one and a half times the regional average.”

These numbers are, of course, just a stand-in for the actual increased carbon footprints of the EPA’s staffers, most of whom will probably not move from their current homes. Presuming these employees’ houses are distributed around Kansas City in the normal manner, the vast majority will have their commutes lengthened, many by 20 miles or more each way. Those who need to take transit to work will now have to get on the highway.

Given the size of the lot, Monson said he was not able to provide on-site parking and sought a waiver for 36 on-site parking spaces. City code allows developers to forgo on-site parking at a fee of about $25,000 per required parking space, the estimated cost to the city for providing space in parking structures, and would have amounted to $900,000 for the proposed project.

"If we had approved that project as proposed, including waiving the parking fee, that would open the door to a pretty substantial amount of high-rise development without parking in the downtown area," Throgmorton said. "To combine those two aspects, the $900,000 subsidy without any affordable housing, given how important affordable housing clearly is in our city right now, it did not seem like a wise vote at that moment."

moorlander wrote:

http://mymodernmet.com/dallas-nature-di ... iver-park/