Eliminating parking minimums could lower pollution. Will more cities buy in?

Apr 25, 2024

If there’s a building in America, a local government has decided the number of parking spaces it needs.

San Jose at one point required miniature golf courses to have 1.25 parking spaces per golf tee. In Seattle, bowling alleys needed five spaces per lane. Dallas, meanwhile, determined a sewage treatment plant must have one parking space for every million gallons of sewage treatment capacity.

The first parking minimum was implemented for an apartment building in Columbus, Ohio, in 1923. By the 1950s, with the expansion of the suburbs and personal automobile ownership, they were a nearly universal feature of new urban development.

But these rules not only overestimated the amount of parking that was needed, they created a society that virtually demanded a car to conduct daily life, says Catie Gould, a senior climate and transportation researcher at the Sightline Institute, a sustainability think tank in the Pacific Northwest.

“Most people have no idea these rules exist,” says Gould. “It’s why the suburbs look the way they do. It’s not that everyone loves to drive.”

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Parking minimums shape your entire life even if you don’t realize it, from the size of your rent check to the length of your commute to how many friends live nearby. Requiring businesses to include copious parking spots raises the cost of construction and the amount of land needed, codifying sprawl.

Over the long term, parking minimums can raise vehicle carbon emissions for generations. But unlike coal power plants and internal combustion engines, minimums are easier to scrap. There is no billion-dollar lobbying machine for parking minimums.

In many cases, a few determined citizens and a city council willing to listen are all that’s needed to overturn them. From Anchorage to Richmond, people are doing just that.

America has a parking problem. We’ve built millions of parking spaces we don’t need. Each one costs us.

Donald Shoup, a parking researcher from the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, estimates the United States has about three spots per vehicle, a vast parking lot that could cover at least half of Rhode Island.

Shoup isn’t opposed to parking. He opposes cities requiring arbitrary amounts of it, and then giving away so much street curbside parking. That has made Americans addicted to free parking, a bad habit that harms our health, businesses and cities. The main beneficiaries are cars, not people.

“I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain,” Shoup told Los Angeles magazine in 2011. “How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance — all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions.”

His 800-page book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” argues minimum parking requirements raise housing costs, subsidize car ownership and congestion, increase homelessness, deter transit and pollute the air. Instead, he proposed letting builders decide where to build private parking, encouraging cities to charge fair market prices for curb parking and reinvesting this revenue in public services in metered areas.

Parking spots themselves cost $5,000 to $80,000 to build depending on whether they’re on surface lots or in garages, says Gould. But those costs seep into everything. For example, season ticket holders to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, pay for at least 128 performances each year. It turns out that number doesn’t have anything to do with musicians’ availability or demand for shows, reports Los Angeles magazine. It’s the minimum number needed a year to pay for the $110 million, six-floor underground garage built to meet city parking requirements. The number “128” is even inscribed in the symphony’s lease.

It’s not just Philharmonic fans picking up the tab. Everyone in the city pays for the possibility of parking so many cars. Developers slash the number of units to meet parking mandates. Landlords raise rents to recoup expenses. Businesses like restaurants and gyms never move into existing buildings because parking isn’t available.

In cities like New York and Los Angeles, this can tack on hundreds of dollars more per month to apartment dwellers’ bills. One study of 23 Seattle-area multifamily housing developments by the Sightline Institute found landlords’ parking losses added up to 15 percent, or $246, to each apartment’s monthly rent — even for those who didn’t own cars.

“The fact is we already pay for parking,” says Gould. “It’s spread out on everyone whether you own a car or not in ways we can’t really see. By forcing these costs onto every single new development in the city, it’s an enormous waste of money.”

But opposition is building, led by people like Tony Jordan.

In 2010, Jordan was a software engineer living across the street from a bar with a huge parking lot in Portland, Ore. When he read a blog post about Shoup’s work, “it changed the entire trajectory of my life,” he says.

He had never paid much attention to parking lots. But soon, he couldn’t avoid thinking about them. Everywhere he went in Portland, he saw how unused parking spaces were crowding out all the things that made the city attractive, from clean air to parks to affordable housing and accessible transit.

“I looked around and said, ‘What have we done? This is crazy,’” he says. “Once you see this as a problem at all, you see it touches on so many issues we care about.”

By 2015, Jordan had organized Portlanders for Parking Reform. In 2019, he founded the national nonprofit Parking Reform Network, which helps communities change parking policies to create more livable cities.

His pitch is straight out of Shoup’s playbook: Businesses and housing complexes — instead of city officials — should decide how much on-site parking they need. Cities, which often charge nominal or no parking fees for street parking outside the busiest districts, can then increase rates. That would encourage developers to build the “missing middle” of housing — small, multifamily buildings rather than skyscrapers or suburban sprawl — while reinvesting in districts and small businesses accessible by multiple forms of transport.

In fact, it’s already happening.

At least 35 cities or towns in North America have eliminated citywide parking mandates since 2017, reports the Parking Reform Network, more than one-third of them in the past year or so.

Nationally, the average number of parking spots per new residential unit in the United States has fallen to its lowest point since the 1950s, to 1.1 parking spots per unit, reports Yardi Matrix, a commercial real estate data company.

Despite fears from neighbors and city officials, parking shortages do not appear to have materialized. After Seattle eased or eliminated parking requirements in transit-accessible neighborhoods in 2012, researchers found developers built 40 percent less parking, saving nearly half a billion dollars. But 70 percent of developments still included some parking.

After ditching parking minimums, Hartford, Conn., and Buffalo, both cities with declining populations, saw their downtowns rebound as they attracted more residents and affordable housing.

And data from two cities — Seattle and Buffalo — show nearly 70 percent of the new homes built after parking reforms would not have been allowed under the previous rules.

Not every city has stayed the course. After Portland neighbors objected to new units without parking, the city compromised by requiring one parking space for every three or four units in larger buildings. Miami reimposed parking minimums last year.

But the trend seems clear: more housing, less parking — even in Anchorage.

Anna Brawley wasn’t a parking crusader when she got a call last summer. A group of citizens was backing an ordinance to repeal parking requirements in the state’s largest city, and they needed help shepherding the proposal through the city council.

“I’m interested in seeing us grow up and become a more mature city,” says the Anchorage resident and urban planner. “Let’s get rid of these barriers in code so people can build what they want.” Working alongside two dozen residents, the updated ordinance landed on the city council’s agenda that fall and passed unanimously Nov. 22.

The Parking Reform Network is supporting this kind of initiative in cities across America.

The steps are simple. First, search for the name of your city and “parking ratios” or “parking code” to find your local zoning code. Talk to others interested in easing the restrictions. Approach the city council.

“In every community, there are people whose business idea or housing project never got off the ground because of parking requirements,” says Jordan. “Your planning department will know those people. Developers will know them.”

For Brawley, parking was just one step toward redesigning Anchorage for people rather than cars. This year, she ran for a seat on the city’s assembly and was elected in April. “With climate change, people think about federal policy or U.N. policy,” she says. “That’s all important, but the best impact you can have is where you live.”

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