 The Golden Bulls parking lot didn't always look this great. Just ask restaurant consultant Marvin Wells. Parking lot itself was just a blacktop with faded stripes, a rod iron fence that ran along the roadway, but then a clear view of the trash bins and the channel, which sits behind us. None of it very appealing. None of it appetizing at all. Today it's got astroturf, tiered levels, heat lamps, shade covers, and a gardener. It feels as relaxing as its surroundings and Santa Monica Canyon. It is actually the biggest part of the restaurant that we've had ever. We're busier than we've ever been. But this is not a local news story about a neighborhood steakhouse repurposing its parking lot. It's a story about a city that loosened its rules during the pandemic and unlocked a new world of possibilities for how the entire city could look and function. And it all ties back to parking. I think the government can comfortably step back from trying to dictate how much parking every single property owner provides on their property and that in stepping back, they will make cities more efficient, more equitable, and more environmentally sustainable. Car ownership didn't start to become the defining feature of life in Los Angeles until the 1920s. Then Los Angeles automobile ownership actually started to explode because this was actually a great place to own a car because of the mild weather and so forth. Michael Manville is a professor of urban planning at UCLA where he studies parking. Well, what happened here is what happened in a lot of places when auto ownership started to grow, which is that people would buy them but they didn't actually have houses with garages or driveways or off-street parking. And so most people would park on the street. And so the concern was that as more people got cars and as more people moved to neighborhoods with cars, the street parking would get congested. And so the policy response that seemed easiest to solve that problem was to pass a law saying that whenever you built anything new, you had to supply off-street parking. The city first imposed minimum parking requirements in the 1930s. By the 50s, they were part of the zoning code not just of Los Angeles, but of every major American city. What they have done in Los Angeles because so much of the city has been built since then is that they have quietly transformed the entire city into a built environment oriented around owning and operating automobiles. Parking requirements for new buildings were intended to prevent new residents from competing for curb space. What planners didn't anticipate is that they would make cars and parking the defining characteristic of the urban landscape. Someone was gonna build a building on my street and I was worried that it was gonna screw up the parking on the curb where I put my car. And so we passed a law. And because of that law, I got the building I wanted. It had a parking lot next to it. And then we kept doing that for 70 years. And everybody got the building they want. And nobody got the city they wanted. Parking lots and garages proliferated in American cities and especially in Los Angeles where the number of parking spaces grew decade after decade. The requirements were such a big part of city life that allowing developers to build less parking than required by the zoning code became a bargaining chip between city planners and developers. And so the way this might work would be developer has a plan for an apartment building with 50 units or something like that and either through the state government or the local government strikes a deal where the developer can take some combination of extra density, they can build more units, reduced parking, some more height. If, for instance, they set aside 15% of their units as affordable housing for lower income people. This concern is misplaced. We know that parking requirements do a lot of damage. The way they encourage driving, the way they reduce density, reduce walkability, debase the built environment, undermine walking and so forth, we shouldn't just keep them on the books because occasionally we get some affordable housing out of it. Reducing unnecessary parking requirements would allow all developers to build more housing, creating more supply and reducing the cost of housing for everyone. When developers need a special arrangement or variance to diverge from the official zoning code, rules aren't consistently applied. Same goes for restaurant commercial spaces. Most restaurants in LA don't have onsite parking that satisfy zoning code. The Taco Bells, the McDonald's, the Sizzlers, those are the ones that satisfy parking code. Matt Smith, whose company rents out commercial kitchen space, is also a member of the Council of Infill Builders and advocates for easing parking requirements for restaurants. Everybody else is either going into a grandfathered space or they're getting a variance. And if you wanna know why food is expensive and why it's hard for restaurants to survive, this is a reason number one is that we make them comply with these way outdated parking requirements. It's a system of insiders and outsiders with consultants for hire that help restaurants navigate the red tape. Meet Fast Eddie. So Fast Eddie comes from me playing music. I grew up in Los Angeles. I was a young musician. Playing in clubs I wasn't even allowed to get into at the time. And that was, had a lot of energy. He's paid a lot of speed metal and punk rock. And then once I got inspired into helping restaurants, I went back to help bars and night clubs with getting their permits. And so they always knew me as Fast Eddie and so kind of carried on as a person to be called for in these types of situations where they needed permits. Eddie Navarrete began helping restaurants almost 25 years ago obtain city permits, including those for parking requirements. The permitting process is especially hard for smaller restaurants. The kind Navarrete says make up an important part of LA culture. And I like helping those types of people. I like defending them. And I kind of look at it at this way of like using my street skills and using them for the forces of good to help these folks against, you know, getting through the permitting process. An LA's permitting process is among the most complicated. A lot of my friends are restaurant owners and what they have to deal with on a daily basis is inconsistency from regulatory, you know, folks, whether it be the city or county officials, right? You need a permit for having over 50 people. You need a permit because you put an awning up. You need a permit because you change this piece of equipment underneath your hood and your kitchen. Ice machine, you need a permit for that. There are just so many requirements out there, whether it be state requirements, county requirements, or city requirements. There's just how are you supposed to know what those things are? If all you've known in going to this business is how to make biscuit sandwiches. Minimum parking requirements are the most challenging obstacle that new restaurants have to contend with. This is the hardest thing for a restaurant to have to comply with. Then the world turned upside down. The World Health Organization has declared coronavirus a global pandemic. We have no immunity to this virus. We have no vaccines for the virus. Currently, we have no approved treatments for the virus. The lockdowns meant that LA restaurants had to close their doors to dining customers. Local businesses are the ones that were most hurt by the pandemic, the ones that had the smallest runways, the smallest reserves. And when the shutdown happened, a lot of them tanked. I mean, the job losses in the restaurant industry in particular were just absolutely catastrophic. The city didn't know what to do. In March 2020, their first attempt was an $11 million emergency loan program for restaurants. But that would have been a drop in the bucket for LA's almost 30,000 restaurants. The city had to think differently and come up with low-cost or no-cost plans. LA city councilman Bob Blumenfield wrote a motion directing city regulators to hold meetings with restaurant professionals to help understand what the city could do to help businesses. Navadete and Smith sat in on the meetings and talked to many of the city departments that demand permits from restaurants. Building and safety officials, city planning officials, fire department, health department. In that, the main number one thing that we needed was the removal of parking requirements. The city came up with an emergency ordinance that temporarily suspended minimum parking requirements, which allowed restaurants to serve food outdoors on a larger portion of the sidewalk and in the street itself. Everyone started to scramble. I think that you saw that outdoor patio furniture was gone, two by fours, anything and everything, chairs, heat lamps, all those types of things were snapped up right away just because people had to invent on the fly. We started with astral turf and card tables. A new world of activity was born on LA streets. Everywhere across LA, people are having this experience where they're seeing other human beings on the street and they're seeing these parking lots that were these awful desert heat islands next to places they wanted to go and they're full of tables and chairs. They've got the market lights above. It's turned on the vibrancy of the city in a way that people couldn't have even imagined as possible. As parking spaces disappeared to make way for tables, plants, artwork and creative lighting, restaurants discovered the customers figured out their own arrangements for how to get there or for where to store their cars. People are figuring out the parking situation. It's not like there's been parking armageddon because these parking lots are not dining areas. They're full. Diners took Uber and Lyft or public transportation or relied on valet services to park offsite as they do at the Golden Bull restaurant. Once we got our rhythm, once we got things kind of in motion, it was like we were back inside but we just had a bigger ceiling to work with. People started walking more allowing them to see the city from new angles. As you pull away from the restaurant in your car going 40 miles an hour, one, you're less likely to notice something interesting on the street. And two, if you do, you have to think about like, oh, now I have to put the car somewhere. Whereas if you're just walking down the street and you might start chatting with someone next to you who says, well, you should go in here or you might just notice something in a window because you're only going by a walking speed, you can see it. And then if you do see it, all you have to do to check it out is pivot and walk in. You don't have to circle the block four times. A pedestrian city is in many ways a city that allows many more people to be more spontaneous and that of course is good for commerce, it's good for culture and so forth. More foot traffic makes the streets safer. We feel that because there's more folks on the streets, because there are more eyes, that we're not alone. In New York, shed dining has taken over the city and offered up some eye-catching architecture on curbs. The same is true in St. Paul and San Francisco. This isn't the first time the city has rolled back minimum parking requirements in Los Angeles. In 1999, developers looked for ways to repurpose downtown's abandoned office buildings. Most of these buildings were built before minimum parking requirements were in place. So the city passed a law suspending the rule for converted structures. Though many were skeptical it would work without parking, residents figured it out. The Efresco emergency order has been extended into 2022, though it may not become permanent. The hope is that the order's popularity will make reverting back politically unfeasible. That language is still very vague. It's the city still somehow manages to not make the language as it was intended for. And so it's a major problem. Even the planners who helped to write the ordinances, once it gets to the city attorney's office, it becomes something completely different. Then by that time, we're so exhausted, we're just like, can you just pass the damn thing? And then now we have this ordinance that's language that's kind of makes sense, but then there's a lot of like, does it apply here or does it apply there? And so that's the problem with the city of LA and especially the county of LA. There's just not a lot of transparency in the process. Efresco dining, I believe, is the future of Los Angeles. To have been in a situation where Efresco dining wasn't something that we did well was always just kind of like a mystery. So I think we've kind of solved the mystery. I think that moving forward, I think restaurants will build with patios in mind, especially as the restrictions and permitting become a little bit easier. It's not clear whether the change will be limited to restaurants or whether Efresco dining will serve as the linchpin that leads to a broader rollback of LA's parking requirements. A proposed bill in the California legislature would move the city another step in the direction of abolishing local requirements for new residential and commercial developments near bus or train stops. Doing this from the state level makes some sense because it probably won't get solved another way. This is an appropriate place for the state government to step in and say, enough. The bill that was supposed to ease parking requirements statewide, AB 1401, died in California's Senate Appropriations Committee after it wasn't brought up for a vote, meaning it's up to cities like Los Angeles to deal with parking on their own. If everyone could vote on the parking requirements of the city two towns over, we'd have no parking requirements. From a distance, you understand the harm they do, right? It's just that right in front of you, you're like, well, no, I want some more parking on my street.