Willmar, MN, Joins Other Cities Across the U.S. in Repealing Parking Minimums
(Source: Unsplash/Matt Seymour.)
“Obviously the ordinance isn’t working,” Justice Walker, planning and development director of Willmar, Minnesota, said of Willmar’s mandatory parking minimums during a June city council meeting. Later that meeting, the city of approximately 20,000 situated halfway between Minneapolis and the South Dakota border eliminated its parking requirements.
Before the change, Willmar based the minimum number of parking spots required on the square footage of a property, regardless of the property’s use and the owner or developer’s preferences. Willmar’s Central Business District, however, has long been exempt from parking minimums, and served as a key example of the benefits of eliminating the requirements citywide.
In advocating for eliminating mandates, Walker was also able to point to communities of similar sizes that did the same. “This is not just a big city thing where people have these built-out transit facilities,” he told the West Central Tribune. “This is something that small towns across the nation have been doing.”
Walker is right. In just the last few years, places like Bastrop (population: 9,242), Texas, have joined larger cities like Buffalo (population ~250,000), New York, and Nashville (population: ~690,000), Tennessee, in repealing their parking minimums. In general, parking reform is snowballing. More and more cities are confronting how parking has interfered with affordability, housing production, and even compliance with municipal comprehensive plans.
Like with many reforms, eliminating mandatory minimums won’t preclude the ability to construct parking in Willmar. Instead, developers, business owners, and even homeowners can tailor parking to their needs, rather than conform to an outdated blanket policy.
In addition to providing more flexibility, in a place like Willmar, repealing minimums became a matter of common sense. In Walker’s department, parking variances are the most requested petition. “Generally speaking, if you have that many variance requests around a single ordinance, you should change the ordinance,” he suggested.
Each Black Friday, we invite people to participate in the Strong Towns movement by sharing pictures of parking in their communities that is excessive or underused — even on the busiest shopping day of the year. But with parking reform gaining momentum across North America, what comes after #BlackFridayParking?