{"id":346896,"date":"2026-06-04T19:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T19:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/346896\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T19:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T19:22:12","slug":"san-jose-apartment-towers-parking-shortage-tests-californias-push-for-less-parking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/346896\/","title":{"rendered":"San Jose apartment tower\u2019s parking shortage tests California\u2019s push for less parking"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fay apartment tower in downtown San Jose was built to draw residents back to the city, a sleek high-rise with rooftop views and luxury amenities. But two years later, the building is 60% vacant, and city officials say one key reason stands out: not enough parking.<\/p>\n

Two years after it opened with fewer than one parking spot for every three apartments, The Fay has plunged into foreclosure, changed hands and become part of a city plan to lease its empty units as discounted housing for public employees. The catch: Many of those workers may have to leave their cars at City Hall, seven blocks away.<\/p>\n

The Fay\u2019s parking problems provide an early test of a 2022 statewide law that erased parking requirements on housing developments within a half mile of a major public transit stop. Some Bay Area cities went a step further: San Jose is eliminating parking requirements<\/a> throughout the city regardless of transit stops. Oakland and Berkeley are easing their rules, too, as are numerous other cities across the U.S., including Austin, Minneapolis and Kansas City.<\/p>\n

Housing, environment and transportation advocates have been cheerleaders for the parking reforms as a way to ease the housing crisis by lowering developers\u2019 construction costs \u2014 underground garages can cost roughly $100,000 per stall \u2014 as well as reach ambitious goals to reduce pollution and encourage more use of public transit. But those policies are colliding with California\u2019s deep-rooted car culture \u2014 and in pockets around the Bay Area, the signs of pushback are starting to show.<\/p>\n

\u201cGovernment officials sometimes think, okay, we want less driving in California, so we won\u2019t give people parking spaces, and therefore they won\u2019t be able to have cars \u2014 and it just doesn\u2019t work,\u201d said Paul Zeger, president of Polaris Pacific real estate company with projects around the Bay Area. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to legislate personal behavior, especially things that are important to people. And if you grew up in California, having a car is one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the Bay Area, tenants living in housing projects with limited parking are finding themselves running up parking fines and doing battle with neighbors over street parking. At some affordable housing projects, where parking requirements were eased as early as 2015, the frustration is mounting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have 20 parking violations,\u201d said Candy Sandoval, a custodian and single mother of four who lives at Quetzal Gardens low-income housing in East San Jose, \u201cplus my car was vandalized because of parking on the street.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her fellow tenants are so exasperated without enough parking \u2014 there are 42 spots to accommodate 70 apartments \u2014 some of them park in silent protest directly in front of the building, smack in the middle of a designated bus stop.<\/p>\n

But in the heart of downtown San Jose, the same developers who purchased The Fay last month are doubling down: at the landmark Bank of Italy building on Santa Clara Street being converted to apartments, they\u2019re offering zero onsite parking.<\/p>\n

\"CarsCars are parked on Beverly Boulevard near the Quetzal Gardens housing complex in East San Jose, March 26, 2026. (Dai Sugano\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have some of the best weather in the U.S. Walking a few blocks is healthy and connects you to the city and community,\u201d said Gary Dillabough of Urban Community in San Jose, a partner in both projects. \u201cLook at European cities \u2014 they show minimal parking can be very successful and enjoyable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"QuetzalQuetzal Gardens housing complex resident Candy Sandoval talks about the parking situation around her apartment in East San Jose, March 26, 2026. (Dai Sugano\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because the statewide law was passed during the COVID-19 pandemic and housing construction has been slow and more expensive ever since, data is scarce about whether the reforms are making headway on their lofty housing, transit and pollution goals. UCLA\u2019s Center for Parking Policy, which has pioneered research on the subject and published a report in February about the parking laws, called the impacts on the housing supply so far \u201cmodest rather than dramatic.\u201d But an interesting pattern is emerging: developers are building less parking, but mostly for affordable and low-income housing projects, the study found. When it comes to the luxury market, parking continues to abound.<\/p>\n

In the Los Angeles and Seattle markets, for instance, the UCLA report found that \u201chigher-end apartments frequently included two parking spaces, while more affordable housing options were created with no on-site parking.\u201d In San Francisco, housing developers told researchers that stripping away parking requirements enabled them to increase the unit count in their buildings, and make them cheaper to build.<\/p>\n

The study did not mention how limited parking affected tenants and their neighbors.<\/p>\n

When The Fay celebrated its grand opening in 2024 on the outer edge of downtown, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan called it an \u201cexceptional building\u201d that would have a huge impact on the community.<\/p>\n

The city had lured the London-based developer and its affiliate Morro real estate with nearly $10 million in tax and fee waivers \u2014 all in pursuit of attracting more people to live and work downtown and to justify more investment in public transportation, a strategy touted by Mahan and taken advantage of by several developers<\/a> over the past several years.<\/p>\n

The incentives weren\u2019t enough to forestall foreclosure at The Fay, however. By January of this year, with rising interest rates and a 40% drop in the property\u2019s value, the developer defaulted on a $182.5 million construction loan, and lender Madison Realty foreclosed on the property. By then, some 197 of the 336 units remained vacant. The new owners purchased it for $175 million, with the same lender providing $133.5 million in financing.<\/p>\n

San Jose\u2019s housing director Erik Soliv\u00e1n said that \u201cthe property was certainly hampered by limited parking.\u201d<\/p>\n

While acknowledging the headwinds limited parking can create for projects, he nonetheless said the tradeoff is still worthwhile.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnytime you are advancing a number of goals \u2026 the first one through the door always takes the first couple punches,\u201d Soliv\u00e1n said. \u201cSome of those who are willing to move an initiative forward maybe get a little ahead of their time and they learn their lessons \u2014 and we can still continue to advance our work around populating the downtown area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dillabough, the partner in both The Fay and the Bank of Italy, brushes off parking issues\u00a0at both buildings and is confident that the ubiquity of ride-sharing services and Waymo will quickly usher in more urban pioneers \u2014 and make parking garages \u201cstranded assets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy belief is that \u2018mobility\u2019 is going to fundamentally change in downtown San Jose much faster than we think,\u201d Dillabough said in a message. \u201cWe need to be leaders on this topic \u2014 the costs and timing to build parking factor in as to why we barely build housing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some 93% of California households own cars, and in Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties, most households own an average of two. In San Francisco, an urban city that\u2019s home to the ubiquitous Muni bus system and the birthplace of Uber and Lyft, about 30% of households are car-free. That leaves sprawling cities like San Jose with the special burden of convincing downtown dwellers they can survive without a vehicle.<\/p>\n

Even housing projects built around BART stations in Oakland and Fremont, for instance, are facing the same concerns: just because people may take transit doesn\u2019t mean they are giving up their cars. City officials in Fremont established a parking patrol to respond to complaints around new housing developments in the Warm Springs area near a BART station, where some three-bedroom apartments have as few as 1.25 parking spaces each.<\/p>\n

In West Oakland, an old Greyhound terminal on Market Street converted to 102 apartments nearly a mile from a BART station relinquished the building back to the lender last year. While numerous market challenges contributed to its failure, limited parking forced the developer to dramatically lower rents.<\/p>\n

Just because developers are no longer required to build parking, however, doesn\u2019t mean they won\u2019t. Lenders \u2014 fearful of losing their investment if the project doesn\u2019t attract tenants \u2014 often require at least some parking.<\/p>\n

But advocates who showed up to San Jose City Council meetings to support the repeal of parking requirements, groups including the Greenbelt Alliance, Silicon Valley Bike Coalition and Save the Bay, say they would rather build more spaces for people than cars. And recent local studies evaluating parking policies that date back to the 1940s show there are too many unused parking spaces already.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0 \u201cBay Area Parking Census\u201d study conducted by SPUR, a regional think tank, found that the 15 million parking spaces it counted across the Bay Area amounted to 2.4 spaces for every car and approximately 1.9 parking spaces for every person living here. With easy access to parking, it found, residents are more likely to drive, worsening climate impacts and traffic congestion. Another parking survey, conducted by environmental group Transform, found that 28% of parking spaces at 80 multifamily residential buildings around the Bay Area were unused.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a significant cost in housing development and many sit empty,\u201d said Lori Droste, SPUR\u2019s housing and planning policy director who, as a former Berkeley city councilwoman, drafted an ordinance in the 2010s getting rid of minimum parking requirements there. \u201cWe have a housing shortage crisis. We have a climate crisis and legislators are trying to address it in the best way that they can. If that means that we are creating spaces for people and not cars, then that\u2019s the direction I believe that California should be moving in.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some cases, the issue isn\u2019t supply, but cost. Even when developers build enough parking, some tenants are balking at an \u201cunbundling\u201d trend that charges extra for parking spaces. At Alameda\u2019s old Del Monte canning plant converted to Star Harbor apartments, spaces in the garage and surface lot are often empty, while neighboring streets are full.<\/p>\n

\"VehiclesVehicles park along Clement Avenue near the Star Harbor apartment complex on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, in Alameda, Calif. The Star Harbor housing development converted an old Del Monte packing warehouse and offers tenants free passes for the ferry and bus, but still has more parking spaces — 460 — than apartments — 414. The complex charges tenants for parking at the property. (Aric Crabb\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re parking in front of people\u2019s houses, on the side streets, anything not to pay to park here,\u201d said Wendy Travis, who pays $4,000 a month for her one-bedroom apartment, plus $300 for two parking spaces in the garage. Neighbors on city streets \u201cput up cones in front of their houses, but these people are brazen. They\u2019ll just move them.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Quetzal Gardens in East San Jose, where Sandoval racked up 20 parking tickets, Danny Garza, the head of the Plata Arroyo neighborhood across the street, says his neighborhood is overrun with tenants\u2019 cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have people parking on the sidewalks because there\u2019s no parking in front of their house,\u201d Garza said. One of his neighbors, who uses a walker and whose driveway is already full with the cars of family members, resorted to parking across the base of his driveway \u2014 and had his truck towed as a result. He paid $800 to get it back.<\/p>\n

\"CarsCars drive past the Quetzal Gardens housing complex in East San Jose, March 26, 2026. (Dai Sugano\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

At The Fay in San Jose, Emily Berry and her partner waited three months before they got off the waiting list to snag a coveted parking space in the garage. She barely considered taking the bus to her marketing job at Intel in Santa Clara, preferring instead the 15-minute drive in her own car. Until a parking spot opened up at The Fay, however, she parked in a lot under the adjacent Interstate 280 overpass.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was kind of creepy and scary,\u201d Berry said. \u201cWe definitely wanted a space in the building to make us feel more safe when we\u2019re coming back from work, especially at night.\u201d<\/p>\n

After The Fay\u2019s foreclosure, the city of San Jose swooped in to master lease<\/a> all the empty apartments \u2014 197 of them \u2014 rescuing the distressed building and earning an equity stake to recoup its $11.2 million investment plus interest in return. The subsidy will come from voter-approved Measure E funds earmarked for affordable housing. It\u2019s a financial model city officials are considering using at other distressed projects. To lure new tenants to The Fay, however, the city plans to dramatically reduce the rent and market the units to public employees who work downtown and \u201cwalking is a reasonable means of transportation,\u201d Soliv\u00e1n, San Jose\u2019s housing director, said.<\/p>\n

Some of those with cars will be encouraged to park their cars overnight at City Hall seven blocks away, where they already pay discounted monthly rates for a spot in a city garage, a solution that he and city planners said will \u201csubstantially mitigate the challenge of parking at the building.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soliv\u00e1n is betting that cheaper rent will be worth it. It doesn\u2019t appear they are rushing for the opportunity. Over the past three months, two dozen city workers have expressed an interest in renting one of the nearly 200 empty units there.<\/p>\n

Dillabough, meanwhile, is hoping the city invests in better streetscapes, so that the residents of his downtown buildings \u2014 like New Yorkers \u2014 will enjoy walking even 10 or 20 blocks.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole goal is that there\u2019s going to be activation within downtown,\u201d Solivan said.<\/p>\n

Whether more Californians are ready to trade parking spaces for lower rents and walkable neighborhoods remains uncertain.<\/p>\n

At least one commenter on a Reddit renters forum made it clear when he decided against The Fay:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d feel so confident to go ahead if it weren\u2019t for the parking situation,\u201d he wrote, \u201chonestly feel like they didn\u2019t plan this very well.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, Zeger from Polaris Pacific said, \u201cthe consumers\u2019 demand is really what governs what works and what doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CarsCars travel past The Fay apartment building March 26, 2026, in downtown San Jose. (Dai Sugano\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0(Dai Sugano\/Bay Area News Group)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Fay apartment tower in downtown San Jose was built to draw residents back to the city, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[184,387,7,8,383,643,1011,1336,1337,181,23,100,2426,388,385,88,90,89,198,94685,200,1967],"class_list":["post-346896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-bay-area","tag-business","tag-california","tag-california-news","tag-economy","tag-environment","tag-housing","tag-housing-crisis","tag-housing-development","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-parking","tag-real-estate","tag-regional","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara-county","tag-social-alert","tag-south-bay","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}