Vermont Activists Help Abolish Parking Minimums in Burlington
Last month, Burlington, Vermont, became the latest community to abolish its costly parking mandates. By a margin of 10–1, the Burlington City Council voted to replace its minimum parking requirements with parking maximums. The decision extended citywide an earlier ordinance that had previously applied only to Burlington’s downtown. “We will still have parking in the city,” city councilor Ben Traverse said. “It’s just that we’ll have the parking we need.”
In the council chambers for the vote were about 15 members of Vermonters for People-Oriented Places (VPOP), a new grassroots organization in Burlington advocating for “more livable, lively, and resilient cities” in the Green Mountain State. Still other VPOP members joined remotely. Ryan Thornton, a VPOP member who helped start the group, was one of a dozen people who spoke in favor of the ordinance that night. He talked about some of the decisions Burlington has made—some as far back as the 1920s—that prioritize cars over people, and how policies like minimum parking requirements go against many of Burlington’s own stated goals and values.
“The feeling at the meeting was overwhelmingly that the community is in favor of this,” Thornton told me. He remembers the councilors being enthusiastic about the tenor of the public comments. A few city councilors discreetly applauded. After the meeting, Burlington’s mayor, Miro Weinberger, who has been working on passing these reforms for many years, came over to express his gratitude to VPOP members. He even invited the group to join him soon to discuss other zoning reforms that are on the table in 2023.
Ryan Thornton has a background as a transportation journalist, and he’s now the communications and outreach coordinator for the Vermont Employee Ownership Center. Though he has a lot of experience in communications, he remembers being nervous in front of the city council. Now on the other side, he has advice for people who want to advocate in front of their local leaders. “Don’t be nervous,” he said. “These folks often don’t have the power and authority we ascribe to them, and most are just trying to do the right thing.”
You also don’t have to have all the relevant data and information at hand, he said. Speak from the heart, as a member of your community. “The most important thing is to share your perspective in a genuine way. Describe how the issue impacts your life.”
Ryan Thornton.
Vermonters for People-Oriented Places is one of more than 130 Local Conversations around the United States and Canada. A Local Conversation is a group of people in a particular place who are coming together to talk about how a Strong Towns approach can be used to make their communities stronger and more resilient.
A number of Local Conversations across North America have identified parking mandates as one core issue they want to tackle with their groups. Minimum parking requirements hurt residents and city budgets alike. What would otherwise be a bespoke decision—how many parking spaces to provide—based on the market and individual use case, is instead mandated wholesale, with little or no deference to context and circumstance. The high cost of providing unnecessary parking drives up rent, stymies small-scale developers (or even homeowners who want to add an accessory dwelling unit to their property), and is an extra burden for small businesses.
Due to parking mandates, most communities have too much parking rather than too little. Excess parking expands the physical space of a town, driving up infrastructure costs and making it less walkable. There are opportunity costs, too. Land that could be used for something communities really need—like more housing, or revenue-generating small businesses—is instead locked up as vehicle storage.
Parking mandates are so universally bad that abolishing them is one of just a couple reforms Strong Towns recommends for every community, regardless of size or stage. (Another is allowing, everywhere, the next increment of development by right.) Ending parking minimums and subsidies is also one of Strong Towns’ five core campaigns.
Ryan Thornton says he doesn’t see Vermonters for People-Oriented Places as a protest group. “We don’t want to be for or against anybody,” he told me. With parking minimums, for example, Thornton knows that when many people hear something about ending parking mandates, they think, “The city is getting rid of all parking. All these parking lots are going to be ripped up and you can’t park anymore.” But ending parking mandates isn’t the same as ending parking. What VPOP tries to do is to inform and to strengthen communication between different neighborhoods and different interests. This is a more effective way to make change, he said, than going in and yelling at city councilors, a lot of whom aren’t responsible for the underlying problems.
Another issue on everyone’s mind in Burlington right now is housing. In summer 2022, Vermont had the second-lowest rental vacancy rate in the nation, at 2.4 percent. Burlington’s rental vacancy rate is even smaller today, at 1.4 percent, and the homeowner vacancy rate is just 0.2 percent. Much of the existing housing stock is aging, in need of renovations, and unsafe by modern standards.
There is a high demand for housing, but Vermont has a lot of restrictions on development. Some of those restrictions are important for conservation reasons and quality of life, Thornton said, but they also get in the way of meeting the basic demand for good and diverse housing. One of the biggest challenges people in VPOP face, especially younger members, is whether they will be able to afford to stay in Burlington. For many, buying a home in Burlington isn’t an option.
“Housing comes up in so many conversations,” Thornton told me. “You hear about it no matter what you’re talking about. There is such a demand for housing, and we have so much catching up to do, that figuring out how to meet that demand will be one of the big challenges of the next decade.”
People gather for VPOP’s community launch party, and to screen The Street Project. (Source: VPOP.)
About 90 people attended VPOP’s community launch party in early December. In addition to introducing new people to VPOP, Thornton and the other members screened a short documentary called The Street Project. The film covers safe streets advocacy across the United States, but especially in Phoenix, Arizona, and New York City.
Though it launched only recently, VPOP is growing quickly. Nineteen people showed up to a recent working group meeting. They also have weekly social meet-ups at a soda lounge/cocktail bar, and there are about 60 people in the VPOP Discord server. “I think there was a lot of demand for [the group],” Thornton said, “but no one had taken the initial step to just do it.”
Members also come from all walks of life. “It’s not a bunch of planners. And it’s not a bunch of people who study these issues full-time. It’s people with all kinds of jobs, with many different interests and hobbies. But, for a variety of reasons, they’ve identified these issues as important to them. That’s one thing that’s interesting about the Strong Towns philosophy: people can come to it from so many different perspectives and motivations.”
Other local community groups helped get the word out about VPOP’s launch party. Existing organizations have introduced themselves and asked how they can help. For all Burlington has going for it—its traditional development pattern, its relative walkability, and now its freedom from parking mandates—Ryan Thornton sees this culture of cooperation as Burlington’s greatest asset.
“That spirit is how we’re going to push through the challenges we have coming up in Burlington,” he said. “I hope VPOP can be a catalyst in unlocking that cooperation in terms of affordable housing and sustainable transportation.”
Katy Clagett is a commercial real estate appraiser and activist. She joins the podcast today to talk about the ways that bottom-up projects can build community, as well as her experiences with spearheading this kind of project.