Why ‘Parking Minimums’ Ruin Cities
A few weeks ago, the big news in New York City was that the “City of Yes,” a proposal to build 100,000 new housing units over the next few years, didn’t pass in its original form. Because of city council opposition in New York’s more car-dependent areas, the end result looks more like the City of… Maybe, as Gothamist put it.
The specific hold-up was something called “parking minimums.” So let’s talk about what these are and why they ruin cities.
What is a Parking Minimum?
Parking minimums are zoning rules that require developers to build a certain number of parking spaces with every new housing unit, retail space, or office.
It forces us to build more parking than necessary.
Outside of Manhattan, most of New York City has parking minimums.
The Problems with Parking Minimums
I believe cities shouldn’t have parking minimum requirements. Here’s why.
Less Housing Gets Built for More Money
Parking takes up space and costs money to build. That’s space and money that could go to creating more housing.
This means the end result is less housing space built for more money. These added costs get passed on to renters and buyers, making housing more expensive and less accessible.
Limits Housing Around Transit Stations
Building parking makes sense where places lack transit. However, parking minimums prevent cities from fully capitalizing on transit-rich areas. Instead of building dense, walkable communities near subway or bus stops, developers are forced to allocate space for parking. This undermines public transit systems, which thrive when surrounded by high-density development because more people live closer to them.
Encourages Sprawling Cities
By limiting the amount of housing we can build around transit, parking minimums mean more people will need to own cars.
This in turn will promote sprawl, which leads to the perfect storm of problems including traffic, pollution, negative health outcomes, and less vibrant cities.
Makes Displacement and Gentrification Worse
This depends on the specific context. In the case of New York, by maintaining parking minimums in many parts of the city, less housing will get built where there are more parking requirements.
This means the responsibility for building new housing continues to fall on areas that have already absorbed significant development.
For example, rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn will now bear even more burden to build more housing.
Removing parking minimums would distribute development more evenly across the city.
Parking Minimums Don’t Eliminate Parking
One common misconception is that eliminating parking minimums means parking won’t get built and that people are “taking your cars away.” That’s not true. Without parking requirements, you can still include parking. Developers will build parking if they think the people who live there will want them, and if this outweighs the costs of building it and the space parking takes up.
Eliminating the requirements only means nobody is forced to overbuild parking where it’s unnecessary. Fewer requirements don’t take away options—they create more. It means more housing that prioritizes proximity to transit, affordability, and walkability.
Rethinking Cities Priorities
While there’s lots of nuance in the discussion around parking, transit, housing, and all of these huge topics that influence all of our lives, I think the guiding questions can be simple: are we going to build our cities for people, or for cars?
By building more parking where we could instead build more housing, we’re literally building for cars.
Other Problematic Zoning REgulations
I think these are the four that keep us from building the most housing.
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