- Rep. Robert Garcia, a freshman Democrat from California, is a self-described urbanist.
- The former mayor of Long Beach has crowdsourced ideas for urbanist legislation.
Rep. Robert Garcia, a freshman Democrat from California, has embraced a bunch of titles, including Congress' first openly gay immigrant member and president of his congressional class. One title he's especially proud of is "urbanist," with his emphasis on making cities like his native Long Beach denser, more walkable, and better places to live.
The 45-year-old former Republican most recently served for eight years as the mayor of Long Beach. In that role, he became a vocal advocate for denser and more climate-friendly cities. He focused on boosting his district's housing supply — overseeing the construction of a "historic amount of housing units," he told Insider — and improving mass transit and bike infrastructure.
"I think a good city, good urbanism, is a dense core, it's walkable, it's bikeable, and there's also a focus on public transit," Garcia said in an interview. "My experience as mayor has really informed my whole worldview in Congress."
He wants to bring policies that have worked in Long Beach and California to the entire country.
"I think that focusing on reducing those housing barriers around parking, allowing units to be smaller, not forcing a certain amount of space for construction, encouraging biking, and public investments in public transit — all of those have been really successful in the city and I think needs to be discussed more at a federal level," he said.
In May, the congressman introduced a bill to ban parking minimums near transit hubs — a way to decrease housing prices and construction costs and promote density near mass transit by making it easier to build denser housing without leaving excessive space for cars. Mandatory parking increases construction costs and housing prices and incentivizes driving over transit, among other ills. Garcia got the idea from his home state, which last year banned local governments from requiring that developers build a certain number of parking spaces for every project.
But Garcia argued Congress could also take tips from the nation's capital, which he called "one of the best examples of urbanism."
"There's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a decent bike network, it's very walkable, there's a lot to see for pedestrians, and so I think that DC has come a long way, certainly from ten years ago, and is a much more urbanist place," he said.
Garcia has also been crowdsourcing ideas for urbanist legislation. He says he's working on a bill to fund the electrification of public transit and another to require "the Department of Transportation to focus more funding on projects that are sustainable and communities that actually have climate action plans."
Garcia said he's made connections with fellow Democratic members who see eye to eye on housing, transportation, and other related issues. He named Reps. Jake Auchincloss and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Greg Casar of Texas, and Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii as allies.
He hasn't gotten any Republican support for his parking bill yet, but said he's working on it.
"A lot of Republicans I've talked to so far, there's interest, but I think that many of them are focused on other issues, like taking away the right of women's health care and attacking LGBTQ+ people," he said. "We expect hopefully in the next year to get some Republican support. There are honestly some conservatives and libertarians that don't believe we should be mandating parking or anything else, so they're kind of interested in that bill."