End the Parking Mandates and Subsidies That Are Hurting Our Cities
(Source: Unsplash.)
Building community wealth is difficult. There’s a lot of hard work involved, there are tough calls, there is risk. In even the best of circumstances, there’s always a chance your investment (in dollars, time, and energy) won’t work out. But often it does. Ultimately, this is how cities grow, how wealth is accumulated, how communities prosper, and how the chance to pursue a good life is made available to more people.
What’s wild is how often cities get in their own way. Case in point: the parking mandates and subsidies that are probably hobbling your city’s strength and resilience right now.
This member week, we are sharing insights into our new strategic plan, including our five priority campaigns. The goal of the End Parking Mandates and Subsidies campaign is to end the practices that cause productive land to be used for motor vehicle storage. You can support this campaign by becoming a member of Strong Towns.
Parking minimums—local laws that require private property owners to provide and maintain a certain number of off-street parking spaces—increase costs for home builders and entrepreneurs. They cost the public, too, in the form of extra infrastructure (roads, pipes, etc.) that must service all that parking, but without the taxable value to recoup public investment. Parking mandates and subsidies also create incentives for landowners to become land speculators, often with some of our community’s most valuable real estate.
In addition to the actual costs, there are huge opportunity costs. By one estimate, the amount of space dedicated to parking in the U.S. is the equivalent of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Think of what we could be doing with all that land. Think, too, of all the would-be entrepreneurs and developers who never even get into the game because of the added financial burden of providing the number of parking spaces dictated by a zoning code. Maybe that’s what’s most insidious about parking mandates: they take away the flexibility and agency that homeowners, developers, business owners, and residents deserve.
Parking mandates and subsidies are so universally bad that getting rid of them is one of the few one-size-fits-all-communities recommendations we make at Strong Towns. What’s exciting is that, over the last few years, Strong Towns has been able to help dozens of communities make this common-sense change.
When we started our annual #BlackFridayParking campaign in 2014, the thesis—that we are overbuilt on parking, even on the busiest shopping day of the year—was outside the mainstream; now it is becoming accepted wisdom. Last year, we collaborated with our friends at the Parking Reform Network to create a map of cities in North America who have reduced or eliminated parking minimums. San Diego, Atlanta, Raleigh, Bridgeport—new cities are being added to the map all the time.
We’re going to build on this momentum by making parking reform one of our priority campaigns. All this week, we have introduced the five campaigns that will receive special attention from us. These include campaigns to increase the transparency of local government accounting practices, end highway expansions, make our streets safer and more productive, and allow incremental development everywhere.
To that list add: End Parking Mandates and Subsidies.
We seek an end to the mandates and subsidies that cause productive land to be used for motor vehicle storage.
The End Parking Mandates and Subsidies campaign will free up vast swaths of land that can now be used more productively. This one, reasonable change to our approach will unlock opportunities for more housing, more businesses, more outdoor seating, more parks and other public spaces, better public transportation systems, more pleasant places to walk and bike, and stronger and more financially resilient cities.
You can support the Strong Towns campaign to End Parking Mandates and Subsidies, as well as our other efforts to make cities stronger, by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
John Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. In this role, he works with advocates in hundreds of communities as they start and lead local Strong Towns groups called Local Conversations. John is the author of two books, most recently Slow Church (IVP), which takes inspiration from Slow Food and the other Slow movements to help faith communities reimagine how they live life together in the neighborhood. He also co-hosts The Membership, a podcast inspired by the life and work of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer, and activist. John and his family live in Silverton, Oregon. You can connect with him on Twitter at @johnepattison.
Want to start a Local Conversation, or implement the Strong Towns approach in your community? Email John.