MISSOULA — Mandating parking with new development comes with negative consequences including a reduction in housing, higher home costs and an increase in congestion, a planner told members of the Missoula City Council on Wednesday.
The city this week adopted its new land use plan and is now poised to begin crafting new zoning and development codes. As that process plays out, some are looking to reduce or eliminate the city's current parking mandates, saying the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.
Tony Jordan, president of the Parking Reform Network, said more than 80 cities across the U.S. have already eliminated their parking requirements. The results have included an expanded tax base, attainable housing and increased densities, which benefit transit and pedestrian-oriented development.
“I no longer see a parking space as just a place to park a car. I see it in terms of how much it costs and how much space it takes up,” Jordan said. “After years of requiring parking, we've created places that are difficult to get around without a car, and places that cost more. It's led to less housing and more traffic.”
Among other things, Jordan said parking requirements are expensive, and those costs are often passed on to renters or customers. Surface lots required with new housing or commercial projects can cost around $10,000 per stall to develop, a figure that can add to higher rents and home prices.
Parking provided in a garage runs even higher, Jordan said, with costs creeping into the tens of thousands of dollars. The space required for parking also results in poor urban planning and wasted space.
“This is a decision we make that has real-world impacts around how we spend our money,” Jordan said “Parking takes up space, around 300 to 400 square feet per stall. When you require all this parking, it really pushes everything apart. It's a big difference between pedestrian-oriented development and auto-oriented development.”
Along with the costs, parking mandates also drive up the cost of housing. The Parking Reform Network suggests that conventional parking minimums can increase the rent or mortgage required for an apartment or house by $200 to $500 per month.
Parking mandates also serve as a tax on those who don't own a car or who travel by other means, Jordan said.
“You're creating a cost burden on households. And you're not going to get as many homes in a new development, because the parking spaces are going to limit the number of homes that can be built,” he said.
To park or not to park?
The debate around parking has grown in Missoula in recent years. The city's new land-use plan calls for infill development and increased densities in certain areas. But the city's current parking requirements run contrary to those goals, some contend.
Among other things, infill development may have limited space, and dedicating it to parking is a waste. The city's parking mandates may also limit the density a project could achieve if parking wasn't required.
Jordan said parking should be left to the private market.
“Cities should mind their own business when it comes to parking and quit telling every builder, every tenant, every entrepreneur and every customer how much parking they need for a specific land use,” Jordan said. “When you get rid of the mandates, the person with skin in the game and who is spending the money has the incentive to try and decide how much parking they need.”
But some contend that parking should not be left to the market. This week, city planners told the City Council that parking requirements serve as a powerful incentive to achieve other benefits, such as attainable housing or greater densities.
“When you leave parking up to the market, what you often see is that parking is build and then charged for as an amenity. Or there's no parking built at all,” Eran Pehan, the city's director of development, said this week. “There's this balance of what the market can provide and what the market typically doesn't provide when left to its own devices.”
The city's dive into code reform is expected to explore the pros and cons of parking and whether the mandates should be kept as is, reduced or eliminated altogether.
Jordan said eliminating mandates comes with other benefits. Among them, it allows for greater densities resulting in more taxable value. It also enables a municipality to invest in other needs.
“You take any money you're getting from parking management and invest it into better sidewalks and crosswalks, better lighting, transit passes, bike lanes, bus shelters, or whatever your constituents want,” said Jordan. “You get a bit more of what you want and less of what you don't want.”
The Parking Reform Network was invited to Missoula by Pro Housing Missoula in early November. Wednesday's presentation to members of the City Council serves as a prelude to the parking debate that's likely to play out during code reform and zoning.
“There's a lot of data and information and interesting ideas that are really relevant, as we just finished passing our (land use) plan and are going into specific code reform,” said council member Kristen Jordan, who sponsored Wednesday's hearing with three other council members. “This is timely information as we talk about ways to address climate change and housing affordability.”
