In 1923, the city of Columbus, Ohio, enacted the first known off-street parking requirement for new apartment buildings.

The city’s rules got stricter over time. In 1954, a Columbus apartment building with 100 one-bedroom units had to have at least 100 parking spaces; by 2022, the minimum was 150. For a 2,500-square-foot restaurant, the mandate grew from nine parking spaces to 34.

But in recent years, housing shortages have prompted Columbus and other cities and states to scale back or even eliminate minimum parking requirements. The need to provide parking makes projects more expensive, raising costs for developers that they often pass on to residents. In some cases, the rules prevent projects from ever being built.

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Since 2019, at least 14 states have enacted 34 laws reducing or eliminating parking minimums, according to the Parking Reform Network, a coalition of groups that opposes minimums. Since 2017, 116 cities, including Baltimore, Buffalo, Denver, Hartford, Minneapolis and San Francisco, have removed all parking minimums citywide.

Catie Gould, a senior researcher at the Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank that is part of the Parking Reform Network, said the idea of repealing parking mandates used to be confined to urban planners’ policy debates. Now it’s become mainstream, she said, as the need for more affordable housing has risen to the top of the national agenda.

“I don’t think parking reform would be happening if we weren’t having a housing crisis,” Gould said, adding that many parking minimums aren’t based on any rational formula or proof of demand.

“We know people still drive, and if you drive, you need parking, and nobody’s arguing about that,” she said. “The question is who decides how much parking you should need.”

Drive for more housing sparks rare bipartisanship in statehouses

In some cities, residents have pushed back against the changes, arguing that eliminating on-site parking lots merely creates more congestion and crowding on public streets. Opponents also have questioned whether developers will simply pocket the savings, rather than make units more affordable. And they note that older people and those with disabilities will have the hardest time coping with an absence of off-street parking.

But the growing movement has unified some groups, such as developers and environmentalists, who are typically at odds.

“From the developer’s side, parking is the big thing that has to be solved early on to determine feasibility of a project,” said Matthew Fitzsimmons, an architect and project manager at the architectural firm HCM Design who been involved in building more than 11,000 residential units, including a project in Baltimore.

Eliminating or reducing parking minimums, Fitzsimmons said, allows developers to use land and money that would have be devoted to “very expensive structured parking” for better amenities or design features for a project.

For Ryan Carter, policy director for Catawba Riverkeeper, which is dedicated to preserving and protecting the Catawba-Wateree River Basin in North and South Carolina, fewer parking lots means less water pollution: Carter noted that even one inch of rain on a single acre of impervious parking surface can generate 27,000 gallons of storm runoff into the river basin.

California goes first

In the fall of 2022, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed the first statewide ban on parking minimums. The law, which went into effect at the beginning of 2023, prohibits city and county officials from imposing parking requirements for housing developments or businesses within a half mile of a transit station.

California, which consistently ranks among the worst states for affordable housing, has followed up with additional measures, including a law reducing parking requirements in areas zoned for residential development and a law restricting local governments from increasing minimum parking requirements for renovations and additions to single-family homes.

The state also has instituted a cap on parking requirements for multifamily housing developments and approved a measure allowing developers to use shared parking spaces to meet parking minimum requirements.

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Oregon has also taken sweeping action, enacting a law in 2023 that prohibits or restricts parking minimums in 48 cities and three counties located in the state’s eight metropolitan regions with populations of at least 50,000.

In the past three years, states including Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maine, New Hampshire and Washington also have enacted laws that restrict or prohibit parking minimums, with many of them focusing on developments near mass transit hubs.

In April, Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger signed legislation that prohibits localities from imposing parking minimums within a half mile of mass transit stations. And just this week, North Carolina Democratic Governor Josh Stein signed a measure that eliminates minimum parking mandates in most of the counties in his state.

“This bill gives North Carolina another tool in the toolbox to build more homes and make housing more affordable,” Stein said in a news release. “This change will lower rents for people.”

Local authority

Some local leaders have bristled at state efforts to limit local zoning authority.

Betsy DeGara, executive director of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, testified against the legislation in her state, arguing that “municipalities are in the best position to determine whether eliminating or modifying minimum parking requirements will pose any public safety or other issues in their community.”

In written testimony, DeGara noted that on areas without sufficient off-street parking, vehicles may be parked haphazardly on the street, potentially blocking emergency vehicles and snow plows and limiting access to fire hydrants and loading docks.

But Virginia Democratic Del. Irene Shin, the sponsor of the legislation in her state, said the shortage of affordable housing has become so acute that state lawmakers had to act.

Shin said that in her hometown of Herndon in Fairfax County, parking minimums requiring multifamily buildings to provide 1.5 parking spaces for each one-bedroom unit and two for larger units have inhibited much-needed residential development.

Forty-five percent of renter households in Fairfax County spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, meaning they are “cost-burdened” under federal housing standards.

“We’ve come to a point where the state is much more interested in stepping in to increase housing because the localities on their own just haven’t been doing enough,” Shin said.

Gould of the Sightline Institute acknowledged that the elimination of parking minimums will place additional burdens on cities, which will have to manage curbside parking for residents and businesses with strategies such as residential parking permits, parking meters and loading zones.

She pointed to her own Portland, Oregon, neighborhood, where a 12-story subsidized affordable housing building is under construction near the city’s light rail. She supports the project, but worries that the city has not done enough to proactively manage street parking before the new residents arrive.

“Many cities and towns aren’t really prepared for that scenario,” she said.