Reduce Parking to Increase Housing
Cities and towns should review codes and ordinances to provide flexibility against minimum parking requirements
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Reduce Parking to Increase Housing
In many cities and towns across the country, housing developers are required to build and maintain two off-street parking spots for each residential unit. An apartment building with five units, for example, would typically require ten parking spaces. But rigid code requirements such as these can sometimes lead to a surplus of unnecessary parking spots when the space could be used for other things, like actual housing.
Some cities and towns are starting to look at easing or actually eliminating minimum parking requirements in an effort to increase the amount of available housing in their communities. Other municipalities should follow their lead, especially if matched with investments in public transportation and walkable infrastructure.
Why Does It Matter?
Throughout the country right now, we have a housing crunch. There are pressure points all along the housing spectrum from transitional housing for people experiencing homelessness, affordable workforce housing for young professionals, housing for families, or housing for seniors looking to downsize or simply get by on a fixed income. The obvious way to ease this pressure is by creating new housing.
Big ideas about changing density restrictions, building vertically, and subsidizing the construction of new housing are all worthy of consideration. But there are also relatively easy incremental moves that cities and towns can make (and indeed, some already have) that could help to create new housing.
One of those changes would be to reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements for residential properties. Requiring fewer parking spaces would mean there would be more physical space for actual housing units. A parking space is usually about nine feet wide by eighteen feet long. That is space that can’t be used for an extra apartment, gardens, landscaping, or other uses that would be less environmentally impactful than the paved concrete of a typical parking spot.
Moreover, many real estate parcels are simply too restricted by their physical boundaries to have enough surface area for the required number of off-street parking spaces. So for a lack of space for parking, fewer housing units are built.
Consider a two-story apartment building with four apartments in it, which would typically require eight parking spaces. Let’s say the developer wants to build a four-story apartment building instead on the same site. This proposed four-level property might have eight apartments overall, which would typically require sixteen parking spaces.
There are two potential pitfalls for both the tenants and the developer in terms of parking in this example. First, parking spaces actually do cost money to create (e.g. paving, striping, seal-coating, lighting, not to mention winter maintenance costs, etc.). Those costs typically get passed along to tenants in the form of higher rent or added parking fees whether they drive a car or not. There are also the opportunity costs of what that surface area could have been instead of parking that might have made the apartment building a more enjoyable place to live, which could be anything from a pool or exercise area to something that is simply more visually pleasing than a parking spot like gardens, trees, or just grassy open space that provides a buffer between neighboring buildings.
Second, a given parcel of land might simply not have enough physical space for sixteen off-street parking spots. Maybe there is enough space for eight parking spaces for the four-unit apartment, but there is not enough space for sixteen parking spaces on that same site. If off-street parking can’t be found and secured in a nearby lot, the developer wouldn’t be able to build eight units, resulting in a net loss of potential housing. Multiply this example out across an entire city, state, and nation, and you can see how these strict parking space requirements can inhibit the construction of thousands upon thousands of additional apartments.
Create any hypothetical you want: two parking spaces per residential unit are, in many cases, one or two spots too many. A young professional who lives near a bus line or train and does not own a car, for example, might not necessarily need two parking spots allocated to her apartment; she might not even need one. A couple who shares a car and lives in a walkable, bikeable community might not need two parking spaces either. Ten condos that are occupied primarily by senior citizens might be in the same category especially if those condos are surrounded by walkable sidewalks and nearby amenities. But two parking spots per unit are exactly what many cities and towns across the country require. Not only that, but some communities actually require “guest parking spots,” that can require 25% more spots in addition to the amount required per the number of units! So much parking!
What Can Be Done?
Cities and towns across the country have started to look at ways to reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements, sometimes doing so in pretty creative ways. I’m proud to say that my own hometown of Bangor, Maine, completed a major housing study in 2019 that, among other things, called for a closer look at minimum parking requirements, particularly near public transit. Tanya Emery, the City of Bangor’s Director of Community and Economic Development, told me this week that she and her team hear from developers all the time who would like more flexibility with parking requirements and that they are are keen to learn more and potentially make further adjustments with a goal of opening up more housing opportunities.
In Portland, Maine, the typical ratio of off-site parking spaces per unit is just 1:1, which is more attractive than many communities around the country. But still further, significant exemptions are noted in Portland’s Land Use Code, including, “No off-street parking shall be required within 1/4 mile of fixed route transit service.” Leeway is also granted to the Planning Board to require fewer parking spots, noting, “The Planning Board may establish a parking requirement that is less than the normally required number of spaces upon a finding of unique conditions that result in a lesser parking demand.”
In 2017, policymakers in Buffalo, New York eliminated minimum parking requirement altogether. In a subsequent study of 36 projects that took place after the change, it was calculated that there were 502 fewer parking spaces created than would have been previously required. Some developers in Buffalo who owned adjacent properties actually started sharing parking lots with one another rather than each creating their own. And according to Eric Jaffe, who has studied the Buffalo example:
Two mixed-use projects along the Main Street transit corridor created hundreds of units of student housing. The rise of two such projects — which the researchers describe as “previously uncommon in Buffalo” — suggest that the added cost of the old parking requirements had served as a deterrent to new development in transit-friendly areas.
One small-scale mixed-use development near a light rail station rehabilitated an old structure into 10 new apartments with ground-floor retail space. Despite the close proximity to transit, the project wasn’t feasible under the old parking regime — which called for 10 spaces on the site — because the physical structure occupies nearly its entire parcel. With the new rules, it could finally move forward.
In Colorado Springs, not only does the city require just one spot per rental unit instead of the more typical two, there are no requirements at all for single-family dwellings. And even more creatively, Colorado Springs has defined two areas of the community that have no minimum off-street parking requirements at all: the Central Business District and the Old Colorado City District.
New Orleans has similarly waived all minimum parking requirements in its historic districts and provided significant flexibility for smaller single-family and two-unit dwellings throughout the city.
Bend, Oregon requires just 0.5 spaces per multifamily rental unit and has significant exemptions available in its own historic district.
Minneapolis, Minnesota already had an attractive one-spot-per-unit ratio in place, but several years ago they reduced it even further. According to Jeffrey Spivak:
The usual ratio of one parking space for every one unit [in Minneapolis] was cut in half for larger apartment projects and was eliminated entirely for projects with 50 or fewer units located near high-frequency transit. Lo and behold, the market mostly responded in the exact ways planners had predicted. Apartment developers proposed projects with fewer parking spaces. That lowered the cost of construction. So, such projects began offering rents below the market's established levels. New studio apartments, which typically went for $1,200 per month, were being offered for less than $1,000 per month.
Communities like these are finding success all over the country. So why aren’t more cities and towns taking a look? Well, we still live in a very car-centric society, and code requirements, many of which were written decades ago, are not looked at very frequently with an eye towards modernizing them. This is despite massive changes in society over the years let alone the last twelve months.
What’s Next?
Code requirements matter. No one would doubt the need for commonly accepted building standards by which all developers must abide plus the need for inspections over time to address the structural integrity of buildings, particularly residential ones. The recent collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida provides a particularly tragic recent example that confirms as much.
But off-street parking should be a different conversation than, say, requirements for concrete support structures to a high-rise apartment building. The examples above provide evidence that when cities and towns start to take a look at something as simple as minimum parking requirement a few tweaks can make a big difference.
To be most successful, changes in parking requirements should be married with investments in public transportation and walk/bike/roll/pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. Doing so could not only stimulate the addition of new housing units, which could help counteract the prevailing upward pressure on rents, but it could help promote better environmental wellness in a community by supporting people who want to live a car-free lifestyle. And as noted above, there are all kinds of more environmentally friendly things that can be done with the area around an apartment building rather than pave it for parking.
It’s no use waiving minimum parking requirements and encouraging people to live car-free if they then have to deal with all manner of hazards walking down the street, however. Traffic calming measures, pedestrian-friendly infrastructure like highly visible street signs and crosswalks, and neighborhood development that promotes mixed-uses and aging in place should all be part of the conversation.
Finally, if eliminating parking requirements altogether is a bridge too far for some local policymakers, they should at least empower Planning Boards and code officers to have the discretion and flexibility to provide exemptions to developers if a case can be made the minimum parking requirements should not apply. This is what is done in Portland, Maine, as noted above. And it should be an easy process with the default option being fewer required parking spots and not a strict minimum. Developers should not have to get bogged down in the slog of too many meetings and too much paperwork for what could potentially be a pretty simple question. Exemptions could be tied to the proximity a development has to buses and trains or how walkable a certain neighborhood is, which could encourage communities to develop “walkability scores,” like some have already done that are tracked and improved upon through policies and investments. Perhaps in exchange for building fewer parking spaces, developers could be required to at least install bike racks or bike storage space within their buildings.
Whatever the motivations and whatever the process, reducing or eliminating minimum off-site parking requirements is a policy discussion worth having in cities and towns across the country. As Gen Z comes of age, changing consumer habits may further necessitate the need to look at these things. Fortunately for those embarking on this question, there are already communities that have experimented and the results so far seem to be quite positive.
Author’s Note: thank you to Tanya Emery from the City of Bangor and Jessica Grondin, Christine Grimando, and Nell Donaldson from the City of Portland for engaging with me on this topic and for providing helpful information.
Ben Sprague lives and works in Bangor, Maine as a V.P./Commercial Lending Officer for Damariscotta-based First National Bank. He can be reached at ben.sprague@thefirst.com or bsprague1@gmail.com. Follow Ben on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and subscribe to this weekly newsletter by clicking below.
Weekly Round-Up
Here are a few things that caught my eye around the web over the past week:
Per Rich Mueller of Sports Collectors Daily, from January to March 2021, 139 sports cards were sold on eBay per minute, with prices popping amid the pandemic: https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/ebay-trading-card-sales-first-quarter-2021/
The International Monetary Funds suggests the Fed may need to start raising interest rates in 2022, which is earlier than the consensus view that rates will stay where they are until 2023: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-01/fed-likely-needs-to-raise-rates-as-soon-as-late-2022-imf-says
Japan is selling homes for $500 as an incentive to get people to move to rural “ghost towns:” https://www.insider.com/japan-ghost-towns-population-vacancy-rates-akiya-banks-2021-6
Photographer Andy Feliciotti shows his set up and shot for the Fourth of July:
Have a great week, everybody.
Got news tips or story ideas? Email me at bsprague1@gmail.com.
Hey Ben - great article! Have you read up on "middle housing"? https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
Seems like a lot of the concepts you're going through here. May be a good way to drive residential interest in certain Maine towns for younger homeowners moving to the area (Rockland comes to mind).
Every high-density street that I travel on has so many cars that it's almost impossible to navigate through. A single-family house may have 4 or 5 cars. A two or three-bedroom apartment could easily give us 5 or even 6 cars. We have several apartment houses near my church and all of the off-street and on-street spots are taken, all the time. Reducing required parking is a grave mistake, in reality, they should increase the number to alleviate the street parking on often narrow streets. Then, what do you do with snow emergency days?