By some estimates, there are two billion parking spaces spread across the country. That's roughly seven places for each car, which amounts to an area about the size of West Virginia.
For some people that is way too much.
Getting rid of spaces, say housing advocates, environmentalists and real estate developers, can provide space for much-needed housing and help cities become more walkable and less dependent on cars.
“It's important to have some parking,” said Dirk Aulabaugh, head of global advisory services at Green Street, a real estate analytics firm. 'But does it have to be what we have historically? I think the answer is no.”
Hundreds of cities and municipalities have rolled back or completely eliminated requirements for real estate projects since the nonprofit Strong Towns began tracking them a decade ago. In 2022 alone, 15 of them, including San Jose, Calif., Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky., have rescinded their parking rules. At the end of 2023, Austin became the largest US city to abolish parking minimums. And in December, New York City lawmakers introduced policies that reduced or eliminated parking requirements for new housing in some parts of the city.
What happened in those places?
Many of these cities only recently implemented the changes, so the evidence is limited, but some studies show that more housing has been built as a result of the repealed rules. In New York, Seattle and Buffalo, for example, reducing or eliminating minimums has stimulated housing development that would not have been possible under previous mandates.
But like most policy changes that affect the daily lives of a large group of people, changing parking rules has also drawn backlash from residents concerned that reducing requirements will lead to less parking overall and, as a result, , to an influx of traffic from motorists. looking for places on the street.
This fear of nuisance and traffic congestion is not unfounded, says Christof Spieler, a structural engineer and urban planner at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston.
“I think you certainly often find yourself in a situation where people have to walk further to get to a parking spot, have to circle around longer to get a parking spot, have to plan a little bit longer about where they're going to park,” he said. , especially during periods of peak demand.
In response to an article about Dallas moving closer to eliminating parking minimums, Facebook users are voicing their grievances about spending time burning gas while looking for a parking spot, or having to drive several blocks have to park away from their destination. One person said, “Parking in Austin is a nightmare, and the street I lived on was so constantly parked that we had trouble getting out of our driveway.”
But Mr Spieler argued that mandating a potentially arbitrary amount of parking also did not address people's complaints about available parking. “That's not just about quantity, it's also about management,” he said. “A big part of this is properly managing on-street parking,” which he says is not possible in many cities.
A sea of asphalt
As cars became the dominant mode of transportation after World War II, cities began implementing parking requirements to reduce traffic congestion. In 1969, almost all municipalities with at least 25,000 residents had minimum parking requirements for many buildings, including beauty salons and bowling alleys.
Housing advocates, developers and urban planners who harbor visions of less car-centric city streets say the rules have little to no impact on actual parking demand. For example, the Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit that supports terminal minimums, notes that parking minimums for bowling alleys in three California cities of similar size and within 25 miles of each other range from two to five spaces per lane. Residential parking minimums are often based on the number of bedrooms — a practice that critics say vastly inflates minimums because many families have children too young to drive.
A 2022 study by the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit organization focused on the New York City area, found that more low-income housing was being built in city neighborhoods where parking needs were reduced.
Seattle, considered a pioneer in parking policy, took a step-by-step approach. In 2012, the city relaxed minimum fares in central neighborhoods and areas with public transportation. It then expanded the approach to more locations and types of developments in 2018. About 60 percent of the housing developed in Seattle since the changes were implemented would not have been possible under the old rules, according to a 2023 study by the Sightline Institute, a think tank that advocates sustainability in the Pacific Northwest.
“The problem is that if you need a lot of parking that the market doesn't want, that just increases development costs,” says Jenny Schuetz, until recently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, whose focus has been on on housing and land use policy. And often those costs are passed on to tenants, she said.
Daniel Hess, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, found in a 2021 study that about half of new developments built since the city eliminated parking minimums in 2017 included fewer parking spaces than previously needed. And Sightline's research found that nearly 70 percent of homes built in Buffalo after 2017 would have been illegal under the old parking rules.
“It helps open up land that used to be parking lots,” Mr Hess said. “It's the easiest zoning reform you can make. Minimum parking requirements have caused enormous damage. We have so much asphalt.”
Excess asphalt and concrete surfaces have been shown to contribute to rising temperatures and flood risks.
A particularly charged fight
In November 2023, Austin, Texas, became the largest U.S. city to end parking mandates. Supporters of this move hope it will have a dual effect: giving developers the freedom to build more and taking a fresh look at land currently used for parking. One parcel being considered for development is a half-acre site in downtown Austin that is currently used as an overflow parking lot for a Lutheran church.
“It's really important to me that as a city we stop forcing developers to build parking lots they don't want to build — it's an unnecessary burden,” said Zo Qadri, an Austin city council member who wrote the proposal to remove the parking lots. to eliminate. minimums.
But despite the benefits, it can be difficult to eliminate the rules. Even in cities like Seattle, where many residents worry about the environmental impact of driving, public comments on development plans are telling. In 2022, several residents objected to a proposal to build nine residential units with five parking spaces on a vacant lot.
“The vehicles associated with this home,” wrote one resident, “are not welcome on my street. Our parking is already extremely limited.”
Another wrote: “Parking in this area is getting worse and increasing the number of on-street parking spaces or having more parking requirements on adjacent streets is unsafe.”
In other cities and in response to other proposed developments, the refrains are similar: Residents express concerns about cars constantly driving through their neighborhoods looking for a parking space or about their own inability to easily find a parking space. Concerns may be greater in neighborhoods with a high concentration of elderly people or families with young children. Some residents complain that their driveways will be blocked by illegally parked cars or that increased traffic will create unsafe conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.
The battle for parking rages mainly in historic or revitalized neighborhoods narrow streets that are older than cars are not always suitable for parking, and parking lots are less likely to be part of the existing design.
Chad West, a Dallas city council member who supports eliminating parking minimums there, said cities can use parking policies as an incentive. The city, Mr. West said, could offer to relax parking requirements in exchange for preserving historic or architecturally significant structures. (A zoning commission voted in January 2024 in favor of a proposal that would eliminate minimum parking regulations in Dallas.)
There's also the desirability factor. When people visit places for shopping, dining and sightseeing, the demand for parking spaces increases.
“We want that easily available parking, that easy-to-move-in diagonal spot, but we still want that cute, small-scale space with historic buildings,” says Mr. Spieler of the Rice School of Architecture in Houston. “We have to recognize that there are trade-offs here.”
