Two billion parking spaces fill the country, according to some estimates. That’s about seven seats for each car, totaling an area roughly the size of West Virginia.
For some people, it’s too much.
Freeing up space, housing advocates, environmentalists and real estate developers say, can make room for desperately needed housing development and help make cities more walkable and less dependent on cars.
“Having some parking is important,” said Dirk Aulabaugh, head of global advisory services at Green Street, a real estate analytics firm. “But does it have to be what we’ve had historically? I think the answer is no.”
Hundreds of cities and municipalities have scaled back or dropped requirements for real estate projects altogether since the nonprofit organization Strong Towns began tracking a decade ago. In 2022 alone, 15 of them, including San Jose, Calif., Raleigh, N.C. and Lexington, Ky., eliminated parking rules. At the end of 2023, Austin became the largest US city to eliminate parking minimums. And in December, New York lawmakers enacted policies that reduced or eliminated parking requirements for new homes in some parts of the city.
What has happened to those places?
Many of these cities have only recently implemented the changes, so data is limited, but some studies show that more homes have been built as a result of the repealed rules. In New York, Seattle and Buffalo, for example, lowering or eliminating minimum limits has encouraged housing development that would not have been possible under the previous mandates.
But like most policy changes that affect the daily lives of a large segment of people, the change to the parking rules has received backlash from residents who worry that lowering the requirements will lead to less parking overall and, as a result, an influx of traffic from guides hunting for places on the street.
Those fears of inconvenience and congestion are not unfounded, said Christof Spieler, a structural engineer and urban planner at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston.
“I think you definitely often end up in a situation where people have to walk farther to get to a parking spot, circle more before finding a parking spot, plan a little bit more 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 complaining about spending time and burning gas while looking for a parking spot or having to park several blocks away from their destination. One person said, “parking in Austin is a nightmare and the street I lived on was so parked all the time we had trouble getting out of our driveway.”
However, Mr. Spieler argued that imposing a potentially arbitrary amount of parking also did not address people’s dissatisfaction with available spaces. “This is not just about quantity, it’s also about management,” he said. “A huge part of that is managing on-street parking well,” something he says many cities fail to do.
A sea of asphalt
When automobiles became the dominant mode of transportation after World War II, cities began adding parking requirements to ease traffic congestion. By 1969, almost all municipalities with a population of at least 25,000 had minimum parking requirements for many buildings, including beauty salons and bowling alleys.
Housing advocates, developers and urbanites who have visions of less car-centric urban landscapes say the rules have little to no effect on actual parking demand. For example, the Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit that supports the final 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 critics say wildly inflates the minimums, as many families have children too young to drive.
A 2022 study by the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit group focused on the New York City area, found that more low-income housing was built in city neighborhoods where parking requirements were reduced.
Seattle, considered a pioneer in parking policy, has taken an incremental approach. In 2012, the city relaxed the minimums in central neighborhoods and areas served by public transit. Then in 2018, it expanded the reach to more locations and development types. About 60 percent of the housing developed in Seattle since the changes went into effect would not have been possible under the old rules, according to a 2023 study by the Sightline Institute, a think tank that advocates for sustainability in the Pacific Northwest .
“The problem is when you require a bunch of parking that the market doesn’t want, it just increases the cost of development,” said Jenny Schuetz, until recently a senior fellow in the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution, whose focus has been on housing policy and land use. And often, those costs are passed on to tenants, he said.
Daniel Hess, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, found in a 2021 study that about half of the new developments built since the city eliminated parking minimums in 2017 included fewer parking spaces than previously required . And Sightline’s study found that nearly 70 percent of homes built in Buffalo after 2017 would be illegal under the old parking regulations.
“It helps unlock land that was previously parking spaces,” said Mr. Hess. “It’s the simplest zoning reform you can do. Minimum parking requirements have done a huge disservice. We have so much asphalt.”
Excessive asphalt and concrete surfaces have been shown to contribute to increased temperatures and flood risks.
A particularly intense match
In November 2023, Austin, Texas became the largest US city to end parking mandates. Supporters of the move hope it will have a dual effect, freeing up developers to build more and looking at land currently used for parking with fresh eyes. One parcel being considered for development is a half-acre lot in downtown Austin currently used as an overflow parking lot for a Lutheran church.
“It’s very important to me that we, as a city, stop forcing developers to build parking that they don’t want to build — it’s an unnecessary burden,” said Zo Qadri, an Austin city councilman who wrote the proposal for the removal of the parking lot. very little.
But despite the benefits, eliminating rules can be difficult. Even in cities like Seattle, where many residents worry about the environmental impact of driving, the public comments submitted in response to development plans are telling. In 2022, many residents objected to a proposal to build nine residential units with five parking spaces on a vacant lot.
“Vehicles associated with this home,” one resident wrote, “are not welcome on my street. Our parking space is already extremely limited.”
Another wrote: “Parking in this neighborhood continues to deteriorate and increasing on-street parking or spilling more parking needs onto neighboring streets is dangerous.”
In other cities and in response to other proposed developments, the choruses are similar: Residents express concern about cars constantly driving through their neighborhoods looking for parking spaces, or their own inability to find convenient parking. Concerns can be heightened in neighborhoods with high concentrations of seniors or families with young children. Some residents complain that their streets will be blocked by illegally parked cars or that the increased traffic will lead to unsafe conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.
The struggle for parking is particularly intense in historic or revitalized neighborhoods, where Narrow streets that front cars don’t always have parking, and parking spaces are less likely to be part of the existing design.
Chad West, a Dallas city councilman who supports removing minimum parking restrictions there, said cities could use the parking policy as an incentive. The city, said Mr. West, could offer to ease parking requirements in exchange for preserving historic or architecturally significant structures. (A zoning commission voted in January 2024 to advance a proposal that would eliminate minimum parking rules in Dallas.)
There is also the desire factor. When people visit places to shop, dine and sight-see, the demand for parking increases.
“We want that easily available parking, that easy diagonal spot, but we still want that cute, small-scale space with historic buildings,” said Mr. Spiller from the Rice School of Architecture in Houston. “We have to recognize that there are trade-offs here.”
