How Parking Minimums Hinder Small-Scale Developers
“When you cannot use these old small buildings that are perfectly good for being repurposed, the big developer’s going to come in. There is no room for the small local developers.”
This Friday is our annual #BlackFridayParking event — a nationwide action drawing attention to the harmful nature of minimum parking requirements. Each year on Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year, people across North America are invited to snap photos of the (hardly full) parking lots in their communities to demonstrate how unnecessary these massive lots are. Participants then upload those photos to social media with the hashtag #blackfridayparking. Get more info about how to participate here.
In this podcast, Chuck Marohn interviews Monte Anderson, owner of Options Real Estate and founding member of the Incremental Development Alliance, based in the Dallas area. Monte discusses the challenges that parking minimum laws create for developers, and how these requirements especially exclude small-scale developers. He also discusses how to approach parking needs in a more auto-centric region of the country and how to find the right amount of parking that's truly necessary to serve a commercial or residential development.
Monte Anderson
(Top photo source: Options Real Estate)