YIMBYs Should Prioritze Parking Reform

This one weird trick builds lots of housing, and maybe lots of power

This post originally published with a map of downtown Houston, which never had minimum parking requirements. Dallas did, however, but has been pursuing reform.

As a political movement with growing influence and a decent first crop of policy wins, we YIMBYs face an essential question of which policy changes to actively fight for. I want to make the case for parking reform, meaning abolition of government-mandated minimum parking requirements. Parking reform is:

• Effective at enabling more housing

• Feasible for local YIMBY groups

• A way to subsidize driving much less

• A natural vehicle for coalition building

The organization Parking Reform Network is dedicated to the cause and actively seeking partnerships with YIMBYs. I have met the executive director and one or two board members a few times at various events, but have no affiliation with them. My endorsement of PRN and its cause is freely given. As I was winding down my involvement in YIMBYs of NoVA, my last personal goal was pushing my leadership teams in Arlington and Alexandria to prioritize parking reform, due to favorable political conditions and the policy’s huge short-term upside.

Parking reform is exciting because it offers YIMBYs a feasible path to immediate impact on the housing shortage, while enabling more efficient land use and helping us build power for the policy campaigns that await us in the years and decades ahead. If you are a YIMBY hungry for results, you should prioritize parking reform.

We must first define minimum parking requirements and explain to any civilians reading this that, yes, U.S. local governments have traditionally dictated how many parking spaces a new development will have, like a bad satire of Mao’s China.

Though not as destructive as ordering the eradication of the sparrows that eat bugs that eat crops, requiring a new apartment building to include one or two parking spots per unit adds significant cost, around $28,000 per spot. An underground parking stall can cost around $50,000. And remember, that is for each unit in a building: 100 parking spots could mean about $5 million of mandated cost. That is more than enough to blow up a residential project’s pro forma (financial projections). In this way, minimum parking requirements are a significant, binding constraint on housing production. Remove that one constraint and boom: a place will build more housing.

Admittedly, financial institutions sometimes impose parking requirements, refusing to invest in projects without lots of parking. Though slow to change and prone to status quo bias, banks like making money and will eventually react if they realize they can make a lot more money from real estate with less parking. Moreover, banks doing something destructive is a weak argument for government to keep doing it too.

Building More Housing

Minneapolis is famous as the first U.S. city to eliminate single-family-only zoning but, somewhat infamously, saw little new construction of multiplexes after that 2019 reform. Economists have attributed this dearth to the continuation of other zoning restrictions, limiting the dimensions of multiplexes in line with single-family homes. Yet Minneapolis rents have fallen while other Midwestern cities’ rents rose.

Reason journalist and friend of the blog Christian Britschgi investigated Minneapolis’s experience in 2022, finding that parking reform had likely enabled the construction of many new apartment buildings, which otherwise would not have penciled (been financially feasible), placing downward pressure on rents. Minneapolis enacted parking reform in 2021, attracting far less attention than missing middle reform had.

Another friend of the blog, Mercatus Center housing economist

Emily Hamilton

, recommends parking reform as an effective measure to boost housing production.

I need to emphasize what a huge deal this is. Most individual zoning changes do not move the needle on housing production, at least not in the first few years. This attribute of parking reform is by itself sufficient reason to aggressively pursue it.

A recent New York Times article finds that parking reform does indeed result in lots of housing construction — Hallelujah! — but also chronicles resident complaints about parking scarcity. Some of the worst fears appear to be hypothetical. Many complaints predate any parking reform: ‘I have to drive around downtown to find street parking and this will make that worse.’ Folks complain that their street has too many cars parking on it, so they struggle to even access their driveway. These broad issues are both, on balance, easier to solve than endemic homelessness: Price public parking and create a simple permitting system for parking in residential areas. I grant that this may be a nontrivial undertaking for a local government, especially one with limited capacity, but again, the solutions are rather simple. As the Times reported:

Christof Spieler, a structural engineer and urban planner at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston … 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.

Local government folks, if you cannot figure out street parking then I am not sure how you will tackle bigger issues like high truancy rates and dangerous arterial roads.

Locally Feasible

A growing parade of local governments have enacted parking reform, showing that it is within the Overton window for local YIMBYs and their allies. If you are going to spend political capital on the issue, you might as well go for full repeal. So far 99 places in 8 countries have enacted parking reform, including (by population):

• Mexico City

• London

• New Zealand (yes, the entire country)

• Toronto

• Austin, TX (which might be the real YIMBYtown)

• San Jose, CA

• San Francisco, CA

• Vancouver, BC

• Portland, OR

• Sacramento, CA

• Raleigh, NC

• Minneapolis, MN

• Durham County, NC

• St. Paul, MN

• Anchorage, AK

• Buffalo, NY

• Richmond, VA

• Spokane, WA

• Birmingham, AL

• Newport News, VA

• Gainesville, FL

• Ann Arbor, MI

• South Bend, IN

• Roanoke, VA

Below is part of¹ PRN’s map of places that have fully repealed parking mandates:

The regional and, I would argue, political diversity of cities and counties that have abolished minimum parking requirements is encouraging. College towns seem to be overrepresented, but there are also plenty of extremely car-dependent examples like Newport News in my state, Virginia. It is in the car-dependent Hampton Roads region, where local governments have a history of bickering and failing to cooperate. Your city or county as a self-contained political unit can make parking reform happen.

Roanoke, a southwestern Virginia city in the Blue Ridge mountains, is small, fairly conservative, and about as car-dependent as you can imagine. (It does include the excellent, rail-heavy Virginia Museum of Transportation, which is worth a visit.)

Richmond introduced the world’s first large-scale electric streetcar system in 1888 and today boasts a BRT (bus rapid transit) Line but, like Roanoke, struggles with car dependency. YIMBYs and transit advocates in Northern Virginia were amused and slightly annoyed that Richmond got rid of parking mandates before we even tried.

Local elected officials are, I hope, realizing that “people want things,” as my pal

Dan Reed

likes to say — things such as a home for their family, good schools, and nice parks. Free parking spaces are pretty far down the list. The political risk or cost of land use reforms has been clear and salient for decades (NIMBYs, etc.). But abundance also has political benefits, and the housing crisis is always growing more painful.

Local governments want things too, starting with tax revenue. They are leaving significant money on the table by not charging for public parking, especially in their downtown districts where traffic congestion is exacerbated by drivers trolling for a free curbside spot. Moreover, privately owned surface parking generates less property tax revenue than, say, a building. The housing directly enabled by parking reform tends to be a clear fiscal winner: apartments and condos with many young residents who consume few local services. Not to say that I would object if parking reform sparked a baby boom. Less parking will give us more housing, and that is a great start.

Less Mandated Parking, Less Subsidized Driving

I will keep this section simple, borrowing from my essay arguing that transit-oriented development is overrated and, at worst, creates a false pretense to limit density.

The assumption that rail transit uniquely enables car-lite density is worth examining. “Does TOD Need the T?” asked a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Author Daniel Chatman concluded: not really.

“Auto ownership, commuting, and grocery trip frequency were substantially lower among households living in new housing near rail stations … but rail access does little to explain this fact,” stated Chatman. “Housing type and tenure, local and subregional density, bus service, and particularly … parking availability, play a much more important role.”

UC Berkeley scholar Robert Cervero’s “5 Ds” of VMT (vehicle-miles—or kilometers—traveled) tell a similar story. His analysis of several U.S. studies, summarized below, shows that job accessibility by car alters driving much more (by a coefficient of -0.20) than distance to transit (-0.05) or even household and population density (-0.04). Intersection and street density also has a sizable effect (-0.12) on VMT. Both studies indicate that reducing minimum parking requirements and underpriced parking would significantly reduce VMT.

Mandating private parking or providing free public parking is a de facto government subsidy of driving, creating more traffic, pollution, and so on than we would see if developers could choose how much parking to build or government embraced radical new technologies such as the parking meter and residential parking permits. If we are not going to price congestion can we at least stop subsidizing gridlock?

Parking policy is a huge driver of land use, including land use patterns that are designed around cars and hostile to people outside of them. The two big levers I see for creating walkable urbanism at scale are enabling denser development and removing subsidies for driving, creating room for bikes and buses and kids who want to play outside — which I can tell you is something they need the way a songbird needs to fly. Parking reform directly, powerfully addresses both of those issues.

To be clear for new readers, I am not anti-car, far from it. The problem is, when we treat driving like the only practical way to go anywhere, everywhere ends up looking like a highway. Car-centric land use is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it is not destiny, and parking reform is a huge step to giving people more ways to go from place to place, and to making those places more productive and suitable to human habitation.

Building Broad Urbanist-Aligned Coalitions

This final point is speculative but also a big motivation for prioritizing parking reform in my backyard. In Arlington our YIMBY group worked in the background to assemble and coordinate a coalition for missing middle housing reform that featured local branches of the NAACP and Sierra Club and an interfaith social justice network called VOICE. Advocates of subsidized housing were part of our coalition too, but parking reform would have a much bigger impact on their mission. YIMBYs building a coalition around parking reform would be able to fully engage “smart growth” advocates who heavily focus on high density near train stations and transit hubs, as well as street safety advocates, plus maybe even more environmentalists, etc.

So you bring together this big coalition and, if you win the reform, within a few short years you may well have hundreds of new homes to point too, plus less traffic. That sets you up for your next big campaign, maybe at the state level.

Two Notes of Caution and Lots of Hope

Parking reform does carry a couple of risks for housing advocates. The biggest one I see is scope creep. When I was getting into urbanism and land use, I realized that you cannot fully separate housing and real estate from transportation, which is to say the places where we spend time and the means we use to travel between those places.

However, I did conclude that my YIMBY group could not delve into transit issues. Focusing on our mission of housing affordability has been one of our four core values and helped us stay consistent and effective. We advocated for BRT because it would politically enable denser development, but I cannot imagine us getting involved in the wrangling around the Metrorail budget, for example. Curbing the dominance of cars in the U.S. is an uphill fight and, frankly, our country’s transit agencies do themselves no favors with incompetent administration or bloated payrolls. For me at least, being the most effective housing advocate requires sacrificing my interest in other issues. Folks may not want to hear that, but activism at its worst is sloppy and self-indulgent.

Parking reform also plays into the concentration of density in places already zoned for it and the economic and racial segregation of American cities and neighborhoods. I suspect smart growth advocates talk so much about how to make TOD equitable in a social justice sense because their vision narrowly prescribes housing and concentrates economic activity. The opposite of smart growth is organic growth, not dumb growth.

As for missing middle, it is more feasible without parking requirements but still faces other barriers, not all of them legal. The YIMBY vision and agenda must normalize and disperse dense development throughout a city and region. Some places will still be much denser than others for financial and economic reasons. I would never advocate for parking reform by saying, “This will not put apartments in single-family neighborhoods.” That might simplify the politics, but it is not the end of the story.

I do think parking reform is the end of the beginning of a bigger story, the story of how YIMBYs build more housing. So I hope you will advocate for parking reform where you live, if your city or county has not already enacted it. Email Parking Reform Network at “info@parkingreform.org”² and feel free to tell them that Luca says, “Hi.”

Thanks to my 811 subscribers, especially my 12 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

1. Thank you, dear wife.

2. Dear Substack, please fix email address links on your site.