Parking Minimums are Worse than Useless: Every Level of Government Should Push to Eliminate Them
(Photo/Unsplash/White Car Parked in Parking Lot/Freerange Stock)
by Ari Rickman
I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse: pay for parking you don’t want or need. Now what if I told you all this extra parking also makes housing more expensive and worsens the environment? This is the rotten deal that minimum parking requirements currently force on most Americans. Because of these laws, America is drowning in extra parking, with nearly 2 billion spaces - the equivalent of around eight parking spots for every car. Local governments everywhere should ditch these rules, and bi-partisan lawmakers at the national level should nudge them along.
As the name implies, parking minimum laws generally require developers to include a minimum number of parking spaces when they update an existing building or create a new one, often at differing levels depending on the type of building. The code in Washington, DC for example requires 1.33 spaces per 1,000 square feet for most retail establishments, but only 0.5 spaces for hotels. This may sound very precise and scientific, but studies since the 1970s have shown that these numbers are basically made up – parking minimums are generally arbitrary bureaucratic decisions. As is usually the case with central planning, parking minimums do not allow individuals the flexibility to make the right decisions for their own circumstances.
Ending parking minimums would not eliminate parking that consumers actually want. In 2017, Buffalo, New York ended parking mandates citywide. Since then, some developments have included more spaces than were required under the previous rules. However, developers are now also able to build many new homes with fewer spaces than the old parking minimums allowed. In both Buffalo and Seattle - which also ended most parking minimums in 2012 - over 60% of new homes would have been illegal under those cities’ now defunct parking mandates. In Seattle’s case, this meant more than 35,000 new homes in five years. If we extrapolate these numbers to the thousands of other cities and towns across the country that still have parking mandates, we can assume these laws are currently preventing millions of homes from being built across the country.
In addition to artificially limiting the supply of new housing, parking mandates also make homes more expensive because developers pass the cost - which averaged around $23,700 per space across the country in 2022 - on to consumers. Scrapping these unnecessary rules would help tame one of the most unaffordable housing markets in American history.
The negative effect of parking minimums on the environment is even more straightforward. Minimums make it difficult to develop greener forms of transportation, like subways, bus-routes, and bike-lanes. Electric vehicles (EVs) are unlikely to solve this problem in time to prevent catastrophic climate change, which even EV manufacturers admit. Minimums also encourage less dense land use, pushing cities and suburbs to encroach on natural and agricultural land.
More local governments should follow the lead of Buffalo and Seattle, especially in large, transit rich cities like Chicago, DC, and New York, all of which still have some form of parking minimums. In fact, New York has a chance to get rid of parking minimums citywide, if the city council approves the mayor’s “City of Yes” plan. State governments should also pass laws overturning local parking minimums, as California recently did.
The federal government also has a role to play. The Biden-Harris administration has already announced new rules for how several federal agencies decide which cities to award with competitive grants that fund transportation, housing, and other infrastructure improvements. These agencies will now give priority to cities which reform their land-use policies to promote density, which has the potential to start a virtuous cycle of private investment in housing to match the public investment in infrastructure. The administration should make clear that ending parking minimums will help cities qualify for these grants, and do a better job of publicizing these opportunities.
However, to truly unlock the benefits of ending parking minimums on the scale and timeline necessary to fight both climate change and the national housing crises, Congress needs to step in. Fortunately, some forward-thinking members of congress have already introduced legislation that would end parking minimums near transit stations nationwide. The bill would use federal authority over interstate commerce and 14th amendment imperatives to protect individual rights; these are the same legal justifications the federal government has used in the past to preempt local bans on cellphone towers and to encourage states to raise the minimum drinking age.
Unfortunately, congress is unlikely to pass important legislation in an election year. However, many eventually successful good ideas took years to become law. We now take for granted how many lives seat-belt requirements save, but it took over a decade to implement these laws. And there is reason to hope common sense parking reform can rise above partisan squabbles - support for doing so is gaining traction from both environmentally focused Democrats and Republican defenders of property rights.
Policymakers across the political spectrum and at all levels of government are realizing that parking minimums provide little benefit while threatening our environment and making housing increasingly unaffordable. Parking minimums have made our lives much worse than they have to be. We should end these wasteful laws as soon as possible.
Ari Rickman (MPA '25) is an Urban Policy student. He has a BA in political science from the University of Maryland and is a Boren Scholar alumni of Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique.