Two billion parking spots dot the country, by some estimates. That’s roughly seven spaces for every car, adding up to an area about the size of West Virginia.
For some people, that’s way too many.
Getting rid of spaces, housing advocates, environmentalists and real estate developers say, can give space to desperately needed housing development and help make cities more walkable and less reliant 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 need to be what we’ve historically had? I think the answer is no.”
Hundreds of cities and municipalities have rolled back or completely thrown out requirements on real estate projects since the nonprofit organization Strong Towns began keeping track a decade ago. In 2022 alone, 15 of them, including San Jose, Calif., Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky., repealed their parking rules. In late 2023, Austin became the largest U.S. city to eliminate parking minimums. And in December, New York City lawmakers put policies in place that reduced or eliminated parking requirements for new housing in some parts of the city.
What has happened in those places?
Many of these cities have only recently put the changes in place so the evidence is limited, but some studies show that more housing has been built as a result of the repealed rules.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 encouraged housing development that would not have been possible under the former mandates.
But like most policy changes that affect the everyday lives of a wide swath of people, changing the parking rules have received backlash from residents who are concerned that reducing requirements will lead to less parking overall and, as a result, an influx of traffic from drivers hunting for on-street spaces.
These 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 longer before they get a parking spot, 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 air grievances about spending time and burning gas while they hunt 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 in was so constantly parked up that we had trouble getting out of our driveway.”
But Mr. Spieler argued that mandating a possibly-arbitrary quantity of parking also did not address people’s gripes about available spaces. “That’s not just about quantity, it’s also about management,” he said. “A huge bit of this is managing street parking well,” which he says many cities fail to do.
A sea of asphalt
When cars became the dominant mode of transportation after World War II, cities began adding parking requirements to ease road congestion. By 1969, nearly all municipalities with populations of at least 25,000 had minimum parking requirements for many buildings, including beauty salons and bowling alleys.
Housing advocates, developers and urbanists harboring visions of less car-centric cityscapes say the rules have little to no bearing on actual demand for parking. For instance, the Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit that supports ending minimums, notes that parking minimums for bowling alleys in three California towns of similar size and within 25 miles of one another 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 minimums, since 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, took an incremental approach. In 2012, the city relaxed minimums in central neighborhoods and areas served by public transit. Then in 2018, it expanded the approach to more locations and types of development. Roughly 60 percent of the housing developed in Seattle since the changes were put in place would not have been possible under the old rules, according to a 2023 study by Sightline Institute, a think tank that advocates sustainability in the Pacific Northwest.
“The problem is when you require a bunch of parking the market doesn’t want, it just adds to the cost of development,” said Jenny Schuetz, until recently a senior fellow at the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution, whose focus was 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 the new developments built since the city eliminated its parking minimums in 2017 have included fewer parking spaces than were previously required. And the study by Sightline found that nearly 70 percent of the housing built in Buffalo after 2017 would have been illegal under the old parking regulations.
“It helps to unlock land that was formerly parking spaces,” Mr. Hess said. “It’s the simplest zoning reform you can have. Minimum parking requirements have done immense harm. We have so much asphalt.”
Excess asphalt and concrete surfaces have been shown to contribute to rising temperatures and flooding risks.
An especially fraught fight
In November 2023, Austin, Texas, became the largest U.S. city to end parking mandates. Supporters of the move hope it will have a dual effect, freeing developers to build more and to look at land currently used for parking with fresh eyes. One parcel being eyed for development is a half-acre lot in downtown Austin currently used as overflow parking for a Lutheran church.
“It’s really important to me that we, as a city, stop forcing developers to build parking they don’t want to build — it’s an unnecessary burden,” said Zo Qadri, an Austin city councilman, who wrote the proposal to eliminate the parking minimums.
But despite the benefits, eliminating the rules can be difficult. Even in cities like Seattle, where many residents are concerned about the environmental effects of driving, public comments submitted in response to development plans are telling. In 2022, multiple residents objected to a proposal to build nine residential units with five parking spaces on a vacant parcel.
“The vehicles associated with this housing,” one resident wrote, are “not welcomed on my street. Our parking is already extraordinarily constrained.”
Another wrote: “Parking in this neighborhood continues to get worse, and increasing street parking or having more parking needs spill into the neighboring streets is unsafe.”
In other cities and in response to other proposed developments, the refrains are similar: Residents express worry about cars continuously driving around their neighborhoods looking for parking spaces or their own inability to find convenient parking. The concerns can be heightened in neighborhoods with high concentrations of older people or families with young children. Some residents complain that their driveways will be blocked by illegally parked cars or that increased traffic will lead to unsafe conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.
The fight over parking is especially fraught in historic or revitalized neighborhoods, where narrow streets that predate cars don’t always accommodate parking, and parking lots are less likely to be part of the existing design.
Chad West, a Dallas city councilman who supports the elimination of parking minimums there, said cities could use parking policy as an incentive. The city, Mr. West said, could offer to ease parking requirements in exchange for preserving historic or architecturally significant structures. (A zoning committee voted in January 2024 to advance a proposal that would eliminate minimum parking rules in Dallas.)
There is also the desirability factor. When people visit places to shop, dine and sight-see, demand for parking increases.
“We want that readily available parking, that easy-to-pull-into diagonal spot, but we still want that cute, small-scale space with historic buildings,” said Mr. Spieler of the Rice School of Architecture in Houston. “We need to recognize that there are trade-offs here.”
