Let Renters Choose: The Case for Pricing Parking Honestly
San Mateo faces a once-in-a-generation opportunity: add housing while limiting added traffic. Two projects proposed at El Camino Real and 17th Avenue can do exactly that, but only if the city gets the parking right.
What's Proposed
1700 El Camino Real: Two eight-story buildings, one with 253 market-rate units and 353 parking spaces and another with 188 affordable senior units with 103 spaces.
1655 El Camino Real — the Safeway site: 396 units (55 low-income), a larger Safeway, 396 residential parking spaces, and 136 retail spaces.
Combined: 837 new homes and ~850 residential parking spaces
For context, the two sites today have a combined 519 surface parking spaces. These proposals would replace them with ~850 residential spaces plus 136 retail spaces, nearly doubling the parking footprint on a corridor the city says it wants to make more transit-oriented.
Neither project is required to build a single parking space. AB 2097 has prohibited parking minimums near major transit stops since 2023. Yet both developers are choosing roughly 1:1 ratios anyway, with one telling exception: the senior building at 1700 El Camino is designed at just 0.55 spaces per unit, because the developer already knows many seniors won't need a car. Unbundling would extend that same logic to every unit across both projects.
What the General Plan says
San Mateo's 2040 General Plan Circulation Element (warning, large PDF!) strongly supports better walking, biking, and transit access throughout San Mateo, especially along ECR.
The General Plan goes further: Action C 2.8 specifically recommends unbundling parking from housing costs. These two projects are the moment to apply it.
The Problem with "Free" Parking
Usually the cost of parking gets included in rent. The developer builds the spaces, rolls the cost into the lease, and every tenant pays whether they own a car or not. This quietly undermines what AB 2097 was meant to achieve. For a city whose own General Plan targets better transit access along corridors like El Camino Real, we shouldn't be forcing every resident to subsidize a parking space they may not need.
The fix is unbundling: pricing parking separately so residents who want a spot pay for it explicitly and residents who don't aren't forced to subsidize it.
The research is clear on what happens when you do this. Bundled parking adds an average of 17% to a unit's rent. Households with bundled parking are roughly 60% more likely to own a car. A San Francisco study found that buildings with unbundled parking and car-sharing had 25% lower vehicle ownership.
In short: unbundling lowers rents, reduces car ownership, cuts vehicle trips, and boosts transit use. Those aren't four separate arguments. They're one chain of cause and effect that supports the goals of the 2040 General Plan.
Estimated Cost Comparison
Why It Matters Here Specifically
This isn't an abstract policy debate. El Camino and 17th is an important and busy intersection with real stakes.
Safety: A driver recently killed pedestrian Veronica Vasquez at this intersection. Adding 837 households with prepaid parking baked into their rent means more car trips through a crossing that's already failing. Both projects will pay Transportation Improvement Fees but no fee undoes the incentive of a parking space that feels free.
Transit: The SamTrans ECR bus runs 15-minute headways up and down El Camino. Caltrain has 30-minute headways a short ~10 min walk away. This is exactly the kind of location where renters should be able to choose to live without a car and pay less for it.
Affordability: A $200/month parking charge hidden in rent is a $200/month pay cut for every renter who doesn't own a car.
The Ask
Both projects are in early review. The city should require three things as conditions of approval:
- Unbundle all residential parking. Spaces must be offered and priced separately from unit leases and sales.
- Require on-site car-share for both residential buildings to further attract residents that won't add to the traffic and congestion at this already busy intersection.
- Update the existing residential parking permit zone around both sites so non-driving residents don't simply shift the problem onto neighborhood streets. There is already permit parking near the Safeway. The updated program should aim to manage demand better than the current system does.
The inevitable objection is that this is the suburbs and everyone needs a car. But the senior building's own parking ratio already acknowledges not every resident needs a space and a family deciding whether to give up a second car will notice $200/month in savings. Unbundling doesn't eliminate parking; it prices it honestly.
AB 2097 told cities they can't force developers to overbuild parking. It didn't say cities can't ensure the parking developers choose to build is priced transparently. San Mateo's development pipeline now exceeds 6,500 units. The conditions set on these two projects will set the precedent for everything behind them. We need smart and balanced growth of the number of cars we're inviting into our city.
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