Eliminating Parking Requirements is Not the End of Parking

Many places are eliminating parking requirements to help make it easier and cheaper to build more housing and reduce their carbon footprint. Interestingly, some see these attempts as the beginning of the end for the future of parking, but that’s not the case at all. It is simply an opportunity for a more demand-based parking approach that also helps to improve housing affordability and promotes more sustainable urban development.

The high cost of housing is a real issue in California and it can't be solved without increasing the supply of new housing. However, building housing in California is not cheap. In fact, Donald Shoup, the dean of parking studies at UCLA and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking, recently told Slate: “The way you really get affordable housing is to get rid of parking requirements. That reduces the price of housing for everybody, not just low-income residents.” We agree with Shoup, outdated and onerous parking requirements make it more expensive to build new housing. Parking policies need to be updated to account for how increased public transportation access and transit-oriented development helps offset future parking demand.

If you're wondering how parking makes building housing more expensive, here's the short of it: parking costs a pretty penny to build, especially when it involves underground parking or building a parking structure. One underground parking spot can cost between $50,000 to $60,000 to build, not to mention the opportunity cost of using the space to build parking spaces instead of more housing units.

The California state legislature along with some cities across the Golden State have started to eliminate parking requirements to help reduce the cost of building more housing. The cities of San Francisco, San Diego, Emeryville, Berkeley, Alameda, Sacramento and Culver City have also eliminated parking requirements to help bring down the cost of new construction. Below is a timeline of the updated parking requirements policy progress in California:

This year on January 1st thanks to AB2097 (Friedman, D-Glendale) the state of California now "prohibits minimum parking requirements for new housing, commercial and other developments located near transit to reduce vehicle emissions and promote denser, more affordable housing closer to people's destinations." With the passage of AB2097, California became the first state to broadly eliminate parking zoning requirements to promote more transit-oriented development; ironically, California was also the first state to implement minimum parking requirements in the 1920s.

The idea of removing parking requirements is to incentivize builders to use the saved money and space to build more housing. However, some are taking the "no minimum parking" requirements to mean no more parking will be built, and it's creating some strong opposition even among groups that agree reducing the cost of building new housing is essential to making a dent in the housing affordability crisis. Removing parking requirements for new housing does not eliminate parking demand. It simply means developers will have to study real-time market conditions to identify the needed parking spots for new housing developments; this is by no means the end of parking.

In a state that was primarily built around the automobile and neglected to upkeep or build more complimentary public transportation, it is no surprise that some are taking the elimination of minimum parking requirements as a personal attack on their way of life. Since I've moved back to San Diego from New York City 10 years ago, I have observed the gradual progression to increase density in an effort to tackle affordability and sustainability challenges in the Golden State. Yet, as much as everyone wants more housing and to protect the environment, taller buildings with less parking is not how many locals think of their beloved California and it is taking time for some to warm up to the idea of less urban sprawl and slightly taller buildings. The key thing to remember is that parking is not going away. Minimum parking requirements will simply no longer be an obstacle to build more housing.