Be a fast follower. Other communities are already doing it
Our cities are facing a lot of challenges today. Affordable housing. Dispersion. Social unrest and inequities. I get asked what’s the one thing that we could do to accelerate development in our community.
Easily the answer is to reduce and eliminate minimum parking requirements.
Big Cities That Have Already Done This
Don’t worry about proposing this idea in your local communities. Big cities are already doing this and reaping the benefits (see below)
Why Eliminate Parking Requirements?
1. Speed up development
Acquiring control of the property is the cornerstone of any development. When you need to acquire space for the building and for the cars. It usually means you need more land. This increases the number of parties and transactions involved.
2. Lower development costs
Time is money. If less time is spent acquiring land and negotiating. Development costs start to go down. If you need less land, development costs go down. If you don’t need to build that underground parking garage, development costs go down.
3. Build more housing
If we lower the cost of development and increase speed we free up capital for additional projects. If we use less than for parking (see point 5) we have more land for additional projects as well.
4. Reduce the cost of housing
Affordable housing is a supply and demand issue. If we build more housing, supply will increase. Supply increases, demand decreases. When demand decreases, price decreases.
Whenever the developer pays less, the end-user will also pay less.
5. Increase density
Parking takes up space and significantly contributes to sprawl. Sprawl requires the use of a car. The use of a car means more roads. Which means more cars. Which means more parking.
The land in a community is limited. Communities reach economies of scale with infrastructure projects when they don’t have to go as far.
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