Anyone recently looking knows La Crosse has a tight housing market. Median home sales prices have increased by 36% — from $158,000 to $215,000 — between 2019 and 2022.
Median rent has jumped by 42%, from $567 in 2012 to $807 in 2022. The vacancy rate is only 3.1% and nearly half (48%) of all renters pay more than 30% of their income on housing, a situation economists describe as being “cost-burdened.”
La Crosse needs to build 200-230 new housing units per year through 2030 to catch up to demand, according to this year’s housing study commissioned by the La Crosse Common Council. The decline in home construction due to the Great Recession of 2008, combined with effects of the late pandemic, have left a housing shortage and huge affordability gaps both here and across the nation. To remain a healthy city, we need affordable and available housing options for new employees and young families, but if people cannot find housing in La Crosse, they’ll live elsewhere.
That’s the problem and the stakes; what about solutions? City government can’t build housing itself, but we can remove regulations and legal barriers that have limited housing availability and therefore affordability.
One thing we can do immediately, and that other cities have already done, is make it so city code doesn’t require more off-street parking than owners need or want. This would return the decision about how much parking each lot needs to home and property owners; they could build more or less, according to their needs or judgement.
In removing government minimums for off-street parking, La Crosse would be part of a state-wide and national trend. Already in our area, Ashland, Winona, Stevens Point and Fitchburg have partially or entirely eliminated minimum requirements.
After three years of discussion and study, the city’s Neighborhood Revitalization Commission, made up of representatives from across the city, has put forward a pro-housing parking reform. It is called “right-choice parking” for property owners.
Instead of city government dictating the specific number of off-street parking spaces for residential housing, this ordinance provides flexibility in the future. Property owners can choose for themselves how much parking they need. This ordinance aligns with many city goals in the Comprehensive Plan and Climate Action Plan.
This ordinance does not take away any existing parking nor does it prevent any new parking. Instead, it removes top-down requirements for specific numbers of mandated spaces put into place a decade ago. It returns those decisions to residents, neighborhoods, developers, lenders and buyers. These requirements might have made sense in the past but are now holding us back from meeting the housing needs of today and the future.
Every parking lot or garage costs money and space. Surface parking stalls cost an average of $10,000 each, and multi-level parking stalls can cost up to $40,000. This cost gets added to a mortgage, or to rent, driving up either. Space matters too; a standard parking space takes up about 300 square feet, including space for the car and getting it there. Two spaces could be 600 square feet of living space; the size of a studio apartment or backyard cottage.
City residents have expressed concerns at NRC meetings about the possible risk of more on-street parking. I would respond that we need both housing and parking, but they are not equal in value. Where we can afford to live is far more consequential to a growing and economically-successful city than where we temporarily store our cars. We have no evidence of parking shortages in the same way we have evidence of housing shortages.
This proposal is not a drastic one; owners and lenders will still build parking. They would just make choices that follow their needs and judgements, not imposed regulation.
I invite you to support this change in city requirements, and wait to watch it work, one household at a time.