Most local governments’ off-street parking requirements promote quantity over quality, focusing on ensuring an ample supply of parking. This has undesirable consequences for the built environment. Parking lots and parking structures routinely overwhelm the architecture and urban design of even the best buildings and neighborhoods. We argue that planners should worry less about the quantity of parking, and pay more attention to its quality. Through examples of zoning reforms adopted by some cities, we show how regulating the quality of parking has the potential to improve urban design.

As San Francisco and Oakland have endured critical affordable housing crises over the last decade, both cities have observed increases of proscribed, non-permitted living arrangements. The reconfiguration of informal housing landscapes has been evident in the reliance of not only low-income and immigrant residents, but tech workers, teachers, and college students, on cheaper housing units found in converted garages, basements, and warehouses. Informal housing, operating outside the bounds of municipal zoning and land use regulations, has been an integral component of the Bay Area housing market for the last century but has emerged as an urgent public policy priority in recent years. While most municipalities have tacitly ignored such arrangements, San Francisco and Oakland have reconfigured local planning agendas to more aggressively identify and regulate informal housing units.

This thesis examines how San Francisco and Oakland have attempted to intervene into informal housing markets and analyzes the efficacy of such policy approaches. I evaluate whether patterns of increased enforcement reflect the informal housing markets of these cities by conducting analyses of building permit records, code violation complaints, and rental market data. I further consider whether life-safety conditions of buildings have been improved and investigate the extent to which tenants have been impacted through interviews with tenant advocates and organizers. Finally, I draw upon extensive interviews with planners, code enforcement officers, policymakers, and tenant advocates to elucidate both the motivations and challenges of attempting to regulate informal housing.

These analyses illustrate the geographies of housing informality in San Francisco and Oakland and identify uneven secondary unit policies that prioritize formalized ADU typologies over the preservation of existing informal units. While rental market, code enforcement, and building permit data reveal the prevalence of informal units across both cities, ADU development has been concentrated among higher-income property owners and remain prohibitively expensive for the moderate and low-income communities that have long relied on garage, basement, and backyard conversions.

In the Coachella Valley, issues of water access are spatial in nature. Residents of the Eastern Coachella Valley experience water insecurity, while residents and visitors of the Western Coachella Valley have access to water for both potable and non-potable purposes. My dissertation takes the spatial inequality of water access between the two regions as a foundation for inquiry. I ask: How did the Coachella Valley’s spatial inequality in water access develop, deepen, and become exacerbated? I answer this question using the extended case method with water access in the Coachella Valley as my case. I use spatial analysis to examine the geographic patterns of water access over time, situating them within the institutional and water source context of the Coachella Valley. I analyze policy and archival documents to understand three conjunctural eras of spatial inequality in water access. I start with early United States settler colonialism in the late 1800s in the Coachella Valley. I then examine regional government formation for water management from the early 1900s to mid-century. Finally, I analyze contemporary land and water use policies that currently exacerbate spatial inequality in water access. I find that United States settler colonial policies were used by early settlers to dispossess Coachella Valley Indigenous communities of land and water, developing spatial inequality in water access. This spatial inequality, first presented as a racialized checkerboard spatial pattern between Indian/public and non-Indian/private land, deepened with the 1918 formation of a regional government to manage water provision and distribution, the Coachella Valley Water District. The water district, designed to grow the agriculture industry, established a center/periphery pattern of water access based on use where access to agricultural water was found in the periphery and access to domestic water was built in the region’s urban core. Today, regional county land use and water district regulations exacerbate both spatial patterns. Their growth for growth policies (that require new private development to expand public infrastructure provision) pursue peri-urbanization through luxury tourist developments. In doing so, they increase socio-economic disparities and decrease geographic proximity between those who have access and those who lack access to water.

Owner-Drivers in the Tro-Tro Industry: A Look at Jitney Service Provision in Accra, Ghana

This study focuses on the motivations of owner-drivers who participate in the tro-tro industry. Using in-depth interviews, I analyze who drives and owns tro-tros in Accra, Ghana, and why. Owner-drivers were asked to discuss why they participate in the tro-tro industry by offering mass transport services, their attitudes about it, the competition from other transportation options, and why they chose to operate their business where they do. This research examines policy debates about local vehicle travel, privatized transit, informal transit, and informal employment. This study contributes to understanding about the diversity of owner-drivers and how this small, locally-controlled informal private mass transport service (tro-tro) industry is regulated by local and central government agencies in Accra. This research project clarifies the range of entrepreneurial involvement in the supply of tro-tros in Accra by focusing on routes, fares, and vehicle types. The goal of the project is to clarify who operates tro-tro businesses, and the barriers to entry that they face. The results inform policymakers and researchers about the reasons why this informal service industry continues to thrive in Accra, and highlights the conflicts between tro-tro civil society organizations and government agencies over the proposal to expand public sector rapid bus transit systems.