Communities across the county are now struggling with state-mandated requirements to increase housing density as a fix for a housing shortage. 

State level-elected officials figure that cramming more people into existing neighborhoods is the way to go; but they haven’t looked at existing examples that clearly demonstrate their plan creates some serious problems.
 
Down south the tiny, but compact high-density community of Isla Vista is the local poster child to demonstrate why high-density development crates chaos.
 
In a recent public hearing, the Board of Supervisors were told by their staff that “Isla Vista already suffers from parking demands that exceed parking availability, and this has been a recognized issue for the past several decades.”
 
The item they were discussing was a project to convert two garages into dining rooms for an Isla Vista duplex.

In other words, it was a project that would increase density on an existing property, which is exactly what Sacramento politicians envisioned when they mandated new community planning requirements.
 
One requirement of the new mandates was that local agencies could not use “parking” to limit high-density projects. Their theory was that the additional occupants could just park on the street. There — problem solved.
 
This project currently requires 12 parking spots to accommodate residents. Noozhawk reported that “Board chairman Das Williams noted that there would be no way to physically fit 12 parking spots on the property, which currently has only four.” He was right.
 
If you have ever been to Isla Vista, you know that for decades the ability to find a parking spot has been nearly impossible.

Cars are parked on every square inch of available space including sidewalks, what were once lawns, driveways, and anywhere else they can fit. Many of these cars are damaged as others try to either park in a space that’s too small, or accidentally dent a fender as they try to leave a parking spot.
 
Emergency vehicles and service trucks have difficulty trying to maneuver through the area for fires, medical emergencies, or just to fix the plumbing.
 
Are there solutions to this problem? Yes, but they will cost millions to implement.

For example, all new projects could be required to provide onsite parking by building high-density housing over a parking garage. Of course, this sounds great until a vehicle fire exposes the residents above to dangerous smoke and fire conditions.
 
Added to this a future need to convert to all electric vehicles. In a recent edition of Firehouse Magazine, Douglas LeValley states:

“Concerns in the fire service about EVs and open and closed parking garages are increasing as a result of what has occurred in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

“These incidents involved hundreds of automobiles, injuries, severe structural damage, and structure collapse.

“One video of an EV fire in a parking garage revealed that a significant fire that involved three vehicles developed in no more than three minutes. The fire was too large to extinguish with any portable fire extinguishers as soon as it self-vented from the vehicle of origin.”
 
The National Fire Protection Association states: “The lithium-ion (or similar) batteries inside of these vehicles fail and burn in a much different way than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

“When lithium-ion batteries fail, they go through a process called thermal runaway, where a single cell failure can cause the production of heat and oxygen as well as flammable and toxic gasses. This then spreads to adjacent cells causing potential rapid-fire growth or explosion.”
 
If the politicians in Sacramento gave much thought to what they are mandating, instead of trying to micromanage local land-use policy, they would soon figure out their ideas fail when they are put into practice.

The problems range from highly congested streets, absence of parking, and too-hard-to-control fires in parking garages, which outweigh the benefit of what they are trying to accomplish.
 
Sacramento’s mandate for high-density housing creates predictable problems. We need leaders who can think, not those who create problems with their “solutions.”

References:
https://www.noozhawk.com/parking-study-to-steer-isla-vista-toward-solutions-to-longtime-shortages/
 
https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/article/53063898/challenges-during-electric-vehicle-fires-in-open-closed-parking-garages
 
Batteries: https://www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-and-articles/blogs/2022/11/28/evs-and-parking-structures