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To help increase housing production at a time when it is desperately needed, some state lawmakers want to cut off-street parking requirements for new homes.
They may end up following Spokane’s lead.
The Spokane City Council there last week passed a temporary measure to remove minimum parking requirements for all housing built within a half mile of a transit stop. The policy is a pilot project that will expire in July 2024 unless the Council decides to make it permanent.
“This is about reducing barriers to affordable housing and cutting housing costs,” Councilman Zack Zappone, one of the sponsors of the ordinance, told the Council last week. He emphasized that the plan does not prohibit parking, but that it is no longer mandated.
Most local jurisdictions require new homes to be built with a certain number of parking spaces. Critics of these parking minimums say that they make it more expensive and complicated to build housing, while also taking up limited space in dense cities.
Meanwhile, the requirements have left many U.S. cities with an abundance of parking compared to buildings and people.
Seattle, for example, has 5.2 parking spaces per household, a 2018 study from the Research Institute for Housing America found. The city has just under 30 parking spots per acre, compared to about six households per acre, according to the report.
Oregon and California both rolled back many minimum parking mandates last year, leaving Washington the lone West Coast state to still have widespread requirements.
Even so, the road to prohibiting parking requirements at the state level may be a long one.
State Rep. Strom Peterson, a 21st District Democrat from Edmonds who chairs the House Housing Committee, said policies to do so remain “super controversial.”
“Local city officials get a lot of pressure about parking,” he said. “It’s just a political reality.”
But he added that the issue is an important piece of solving the state’s housing shortage. “It’s not about parking. It’s about housing,” Peterson said. “We’re in a housing crisis. We’re not in a parking crisis.”
Rep. Andrew Barkis, R-Olympia, who is the top Republican on the housing committee, also believes the Legislature has work to do on the issue.
“You now have added a myriad of layers of requirements on builders,” he said.“That makes it more difficult to build and ultimately more expensive.”
Tough finding a spot on the agenda
State lawmakers did pass a few pieces of parking policy in this year’s session, limiting off-street parking requirements when building so-called middle housing, such as duplexes or triplexes, and accessory dwelling units near transit.
Attempts to push through more sweeping changes failed.
One bill would have required local jurisdictions to allow multi-family housing near transit. It would have also removed off-street parking requirements for developments near transit stations.
The bill passed the state Senate with bipartisan support but never came up for a vote in the House.
Another bill that died in committee would have removed parking requirements for cities and counties that plan under the Growth Management Act. It also would have prohibited minimum parking requirements within a quarter-mile of transit for all new residential and commercial developments. Off-street parking would have been allowed for people with disabilities.
Opposition against removing parking minimums was strong throughout the session.
The Association of Washington Cities and the Washington State Association of Counties both testified against the bill prohibiting parking minimums, saying there needed to be more consideration for seniors or families with kids and in neighborhoods already short on parking.
Paul Jewell, at the Washington State Association of Counties, testified in January that the bill was “prescriptive” and horned in on land use decisions normally left to locals.
Despite the pushback, Barkis said there was some willingness from cities to have broader conversations about when it might make sense to limit parking, like with middle housing.
He acknowledged that it is challenging to balance sweeping reform at the state level with local implementation.
“We’re going to have to navigate how that works,” Barkis said. “It is not a one-size-fits-all approach.”
Peterson said he thinks parking minimum prohibitions may come up again in pieces of other housing bills, as opposed to legislation specifically targeting the requirements statewide.
The Sightline Institute, a research nonprofit, found that more than a dozen states proposed bills in 2023 to reduce or eliminate parking minimums, though most did not pass.
Researcher Catie Gould said in a statement that she was aware of a handful of parking policy changes last year but didn’t realize how many proposals came up across the country.
“This idea suddenly has quite a bit of traction,” Gould said.
— By Laurel Demkovich, Washington State Standard
Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on Facebook and Twitter.
Any politician who favors no off-street parking should be required to live in a place with no off-street parking, and obliged to shop and visit friends in areas with no off-street parking.
The trend to electric cars (EVs) has begun and appears unstoppable. But EVs require a dedicated electrified parking spot to recharge, almost always at the owner’s home. Eliminating off-street parking requirements just complicates matters. Edmonds already has one 9-unit apartment building downtown with no off-street parking~ pity the tenant who wants an EV but can’t recharge at home.
The lesson is for decision-makers to Think Things Thru before deciding; don’t get caught up in a particular ideology (cars are bad and should be discouraged, therefore parking should be discouraged). Maybe the wiser action would be to *require* one parking space per dwelling unit and that it be electrified.
Some friendly advice to Rep. Peterson and Sen. Liias: please consider very carefully whether to co-sponsor a bill that preempts the cities’ ability to determine parking requirements. This is clearly a political land mine in regard to your careers in Olympia.
Amen Brother Teitzel. These two have lost any of my support and/or meager financial contributions they might have ever had.
Hey, why don’t we just go all the way and pass a law that anyone can live in a tent or trailer/motor home anywhere they want and a free shopping cart and tent available on request from the state. Affordable housing problem solved with the ultimate Progressive solution!
Agreed Mr. Teitzel. Peterson and Liias are well on their way to be inducted into the Edmonds Hall of Shame. Courtesy of your forgotten residents.
Do our legislators really believe that all people who live close to a transit station don’t own a car and use transit for everything? Have these legislators ever done grocery shopping using public transportation. Have these legislators ever done all of their evening entertainment using only public transportation. Have these legislators ever looked at a bus schedule? How does it help housing if you have a car and can’t find a place to park? And are these legislators the same ones who also want to eliminate parking by providing bike lanes?
Isn’t this all wonderful? We are saving the planet with “minimal” parking. Ten to fifteen years from now we will find the planet has not changed’. the planet will be the same.
But for the moment we can be smug with that sanctimonious feeling of saving the world with minimal parking in the name of providing mass housing that is not needed.
Another bad idea being pushed on the public by Democrats like Strom Peterson. They first elimanate single family zoning and now want no required off street parking. More congestion will result with people having to circle the block searching for parking like in large swaths of Seattle. Strom says we have no parking crisis. I guess since his sandwich shop closed he hasn’t tried parking in downtown Edmonds. We can only stop these crazy state mandates, which overule local control, by voting the proponents of them out of office.
Always left out in the conversation on parking – it seems to me – is what the impact on those with mobility issues, our “wounded warriors,” our families with wee ones with mobility issues that require mobilized devices. We seem to like to assume that they can just find housing somewhere else where there is parking. But that is the very essence of a discriminatory thought process. So, please, when discussing choosing to not require parking – think of the impact on housing availability for those with unique needs for mobility. It is not simply a matter of using a stick [not requiring off-street parking for housing] to get everyone to quit driving a car and use transit instead. Some just really need their own personal means of transportation and a safe place to park them for ingress and egress from the vehicle.
What better way to screw up paradise?
If you want to see what this ridiculous idea will look like, go to West Seattle and attempt to drive through the neighborhood streets. It is a nightmare, as vehicles of all types are parked on the streets, bumper to bumper barely leaving enough room for people to get in and out of their driveways. In addition to that problem, the streets are so cluttered with vehicles, that only one car can get down an entire block at a time. So, if you meet an oncoming car halfway down the street, someone either has to pull into another family’s driveway, or one of you backs down the street. I don’t want to see that happen in our town. What is the matter with our legislators?
Dawn, “the matter with our legislators” is that they’ve all drunk the cool-aid of either the economic Socialist Bernie Sanders or the economic Fascist Donald Trump. There are no middle ground, common sense, bipartisan attempts to solve our real problems with real solutions at any governmental level. Every idea has to pass a political party litmus test, rather than just be judged on the merits of it being a good idea or a bad idea. A political party is even trying to control our local city government politics (again). It’s all a recipe for chaos and dysfunction.