The Parking Problem

For years I have been complaining about the poor quality of most staff reports. They often don’t have the appropriate data, make unsupportable conclusions, and often ask the wrong questions. This lack of quality in reports makes the job of the City Council more difficult. How can you make the right decision when you have the wrong information in front of you?

So imagine my joy this week when I read one of the finest report I’ve ever seen from City staff. It’s about the parking problem in Lake Forest and it’s on the agenda for the Planning Commission meeting Thursday night.

Parking is one of our biggest problems in Lake Forest. It often gets subsumed under “Traffic” and, of course, the two are related, but they are not the same. Both suffer from the fact that the numbers of cars in the City have increased as a result of the rapid growth of new homes, but they are clearly separate problems and require separate solutions.

The report is 20+ pages long, and it’s not casual reading. But it is well written and highly informative, and should be the basis for our new parking permit regulations. As I understand it, a recent court opinion is forcing us to change our permit parking regulations, so this report sets the stage for us to make the revisions.

Click Here to access the report. It is item 3 on the Planning Commission agenda.

You really should read this report for yourself. Here is a very brief summary

ANALYZING THE PROBLEM

(FWIW – I covered this issue several times in the recent past. Click Here and Here.)

According to the city staff these are the factors that likely contribute to the availability of street parking:

• · Vehicles Per Household
• · Household Size
• · Land Use Patterns
• · Garages Not Used for Parking
• · Business Uses in Residential Areas
• · Residential Parking Standards

The report goes through each of these factors in detail. Here are some highlights -

· Lake Forest has 2.1 vehicles per household, slightly higher than the 2.0 average for OC cities with 50,000 or more people. But staff suspects that in areas where parking is a problem, the number is larger. In any event, it is not so much the number of cars per household as it is the number of cars per household for the available street frontage. Because Lake Forest has so many people living in HOAs, and many of these HOAs have extremely limited parking on the HOA streets, we may have more cars looking for fewer spots than is true in comparable cities which have less HOA concentration.

· Lake Forest has 3.03 persons per household, with an increase of 4%+ from 2000 to 2015. That boils down to 83,395 people living in 28,443 units.

· Household size is largest in the Southerly part of the City, at 3.97 people per household. These areas have the highest complaints about parking problems. The areas are –

• o 320.27 – South of El Toro, between Jeronimo and Trabuco
• o 524.11 - East of train tracks, between Ridge Rte and El Toro
• o 524.16 – West of train tracks, between Ridge Rte and El Toro

· Generally speaking, and quite unexpected, average household size is higher for renters than for owners in 10 of the 16 precincts. The greatest discrepancies are in areas already identified above, and also include 320.14 (South of El Toro, East of Jeronimo). These areas tend to have small apartment buildings, containing 8 or fewer units. This is worrisome because it means more people are congregated in areas where there is less space.

· The large multi-family apartments range from 40 to 390 units.

· Between Sept 2015 and 2016 staff received 2,200 parking enforcement related calls. The majority of these calls came from the 4 areas already highlighted, and in addition, sections of the City near Lake 2, in FHR North of WalMart, in the Southern tip of PH, and around Osterman and Normandale.

· About half the major parking problem concentrations are in areas where multi-family units are adjacent to SFRs.

· To date the City issued parking permits to restrict parking on 35 streets.

· 17 of 34 OC cities have permit parking procedures.

· The city receives about 15 complaints per year about people living in their garages.

SOLVING THE PROBLEM

The staff report discusses some of the ways in which the City could help resolve the parking problems, although much of the staff discussion is weighed heavily on why something can’t be done. I don't agree. In any evenbt, the areas for consideration include

· Better enforcement of the ordinance that restricts vehicles from parking for more than 72 hours without moving.

· Better enforcement of the ordinance restricting inoperable vehicles on City streets.

· Stopping commercial vehicles from being stored in residential areas instead of on the premises of the commercial business.

· Better enforcement of the street sweeping policies to identify inoperable, abandoned, or illegally stored vehicles.

· Better enforcement of the Boarding House Ordinance to reduce household size in some cases.

· Better relationships with multi-family apartment owners to mitigate parking problems inside the apartment complexes.

The report is on the Planning Commission agenda for Thursday night. This is your chance to provide input.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be in November at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.