Spokane’s Step-by-Step Approach to Repealing Parking Mandates
(Image courtesy of the Parking Reform Network.)
“What's more important to you: your neighborhood looking the way it looks or your grandkids having a place to live here?”
It’s not a question Spokane native and council member Zack Zappone asked his constituents outright, but it’s one that informed how he broached the many land-use policies that restricted how Spokane could adapt for decades. The people of Spokane knew that they were in a housing crisis, and Zappone knew that keeping these decades-old policies on the books would only exacerbate that crisis. The next step was figuring out how to communicate that mandatory parking minimums were part of the problem.
Parking minimums, also known as parking mandates, have long shaped Spokane. A dental office was, by law, required to provide one parking spot per 500 square feet of interior. Bars needed to supply double that: one spot per 250 square feet. Arcades and bowling alleys could be refused an opening date if they didn’t produce one parking spot per 330 square feet of interior. Even at a glance, these ratios seem arbitrary — why 330 square feet and not just 350? There’s no satisfying answer, and the randomness is, if anything, a testament to the pseudoscience that underpins minimums. What’s worse is that, given the average size of a parking spot ranges between 250 and 350 square feet, the space dedicated to parking has easily eclipsed the size of the establishments themselves.
(Image courtesy of the Parking Reform Network.)
During a “Lunch and Learn” webinar hosted by the Parking Reform Network, Zappone pulled up a map of Spokane he’d likely shown dozens of times before. It was awash in red, all of which represented the city’s surface parking. At a glance, you could see just how much of the downtown was exclusively available for car storage. According to a city-led study, all of that red added up to approximately 30% of the downtown area, not counting metered and unmetered curb space. Yet, under the regime of parking mandates, any new restaurant, duplex or barbershop would have to add more asphalt — even though, as it turns out, almost half of those parking spaces sit empty at any given time.
I'm so happy that Spokane's city leaders are addressing the parking situation. Especially when you have a Downtown that is 70% parking lots. https://t.co/Gyy1MDmWpW pic.twitter.com/j0FGs6vtmf
— CoolDiamondsFTW (@ftw_cool) May 15, 2024
All of this parking takes up space that could otherwise be occupied by housing. But it wasn’t just a spatial issue. Zappone found that subsidizing this surplus parking was also driving up housing costs. "A study has shown the cost of development can increase by up to 15% that is then passed on to owners and renters," he said during a press conference. "That can be about $20,000–45,000 per unit or per house."
All of this data gave credibility to his campaign to repeal mandates — people couldn’t argue against parking’s wastefulness — but for the message to break through, there needed to be greater political buy-in. Luckily, Zappone found an ally across the aisle, so to speak, in council member Jonathan Bingle.
The push to end subsidies on parking became a bipartisan effort — and a visible one, at that. At the press conference announcing a pilot program to temporarily suspend the mandates, Zappone and Bingle proverbially cut the ribbon together. “And we used language that appealed to all sides — arbitrary government mandates, free-market choice, affordability, and reduction in car emissions,” Zappone added. It helped Spokane residents realize that, if both the liberal and conservative contingents could come to an agreement, perhaps there was something to the abolition of parking mandates.
Aside from a public showcase of unity, the political coalition was able to bring corporate and nonprofit stakeholders that were commonly pit against one another into dialogue instead. The realtor’s association, which was traditionally more conservatively aligned, may have had its own motivations that were of little interest to the environmentalist and housing rights groups, but the elimination of mandates was something they could all get behind.
The bipartisan teamwork softened the ground for the true test: a pilot program. On July 17, 2023, Spokane voted to remove parking mandates for a year within a half mile of any transit stop. “Not just frequent or high performance,” Zappone underscored during his webinar. “But all transit stops.”
Public transportation is somewhat comprehensive across Spokane, he noted, so by framing the pilot this way, the city effectively got to experience a lift on parking mandates citywide. A year later, the city didn’t look too different than it had before, dispelling misconceptions that eliminating mandates was the same as eliminating parking. “The biggest thing we learned from the year-long pilot was that removing mandates does not mean removing parking altogether,” Zappone told me. “There were no major dramatic changes to neighborhoods and developments. Rather, we have seen some new projects take advantage of the new code, building less parking or doing more infill.”
Maps from The Urbanist show the area covered by Spokane’s new ordinance (left) and the area that would be covered if Spokane instead adopted Seattle’s ordinance (right). (Source: Spokane Rising/Anthony Gill.)
The pilot project expired in the summer of 2024, and the city of Spokane voted on whether or not to extend the reform. It passed 4-to-1, making Spokane the largest city in Washington to have eliminated parking mandates and a national leader in housing-focused reforms.
“My advice to city leaders interested in parking reform is to change the narrative but be okay with incremental change,” he told me. “I usually want good policy implemented immediately; however, we had to go the speed that our community wanted to go. I think piloting changes and being willing to address concerns of members shows that you’re listening to their concerns and willing to adjust course in the future.”
The city’s repeal of parking mandates is the latest in a string of policy wins. In 2022, Spokane issued an interim ordinance that legalized fourplexes citywide. A year later, “the city one-upped itself again, going further than any other city in Washington, and maybe even further than any other city in the country in legalizing new housing,” The Urbanist reported. It permanently adopted the “missing middle” ordinance, as it became known, expanding the language to include townhomes, cottages and small apartment buildings of varying sizes. In other words, it lifted many of the arbitrary restrictions that dictated where and how current and future Spokanites could live.
Learn more about abolishing parking mandates and subsidies.
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.