How To Build More Housing With Less Parking
June 24, 2026
Parking is one of those topics that delivers such an emotional charge for people. There’s never enough of it, and it’s expected to be free and available directly in front of your destination. Yet, we have such an overabundance of it everywhere, and it's typically subsidized by the public or private landowner, not by the person actually parking there. Henry Grabar captures this paradox so well in his book Paved Paradise.
The reality is that parking, and the oversupply of it across the American landscape is precisely what prevents us from building great places. You know the great places I’m talking about - they’re walkable, comfortable, picturesque, and not covered with asphalt.
If dedicating so much of our American landscape to parking is a problem, then there must be profit-driven motives behind all this space dedicated to parking, right?
Wrong.
For most real estate developers, parking has been for years accepted as the cost of doing business. If the zoning code says it has to be built, then most developers have not questioned these outdated mandates. Until now.
Parking policy reform is picking up speed everywhere. Now 115 municipalities in the U.S. have removed parking mandates, with hundreds more instituting some level of reform, especially around transit. This is not only common sense, but essential for transit-oriented development site success. Denver, Buffalo, Austin, and Baltimore are a few of the larger cities that are leading the charge.
What does this mean for the real estate development industry?
Since 2012, parking construction costs have risen 50% faster than inflation. Above-ground structured parking now averages $52,000 per space and underground parking averages $73,000 per space. A 400-space garage is going to run up a bill of $21M - $29M to construct.
As the parking policy landscape shifts and developers feel the multilayered squeeze of higher land costs, higher materials costs, and higher labor, parking is the single lever that deserves a finer tuned review. It can singlehandedly be what makes or breaks a project, and prevent new housing from breaking ground.
Are we prioritizing housing people or housing cars?
Many writers, advocates, and public leaders have written on how parking has negatively impacted our landscape (and how to fix it). Meanwhile, another pressing issue has emerged - a shortage of affordable housing. The question for this moment in time is are we prioritizing space to house people or house cars? If it’s the latter, the increased construction costs end up getting passed on to renters, and everyone pays more.
If we flip the script instead and reduce the amount of space for parking, we can create the places that people desire, even if the process is messy. Reduced parking has a cascading effect that delivers benefits to all stakeholders:
Reduced parking
→ reduced construction costs
→ more projects pencil
→ more housing built to ease supply shortage
→ lower or more stabilized rents
→ more space built for what we all value (housing, parks, retail)
The alternative is that an overabundance of parking feeds a behavioral feedback loop. It creates an expectation of easy car access everywhere. It makes communities more car dependent over time, encourages more people to use cars for daily trips that would otherwise be possible with transit, walking and cycling, and leads to higher demand for even more parking.
How do you right-size parking?
Parking needs to be your strategic variable. Answering the following questions are essential.
What does the site actually demand?
What transit network can we leverage?
Are we designing with multimodal transportation in mind?
What combination of carrots and sticks can help reduce the demand of people driving to and from our site?
How much money can we save?
For most sites, a reduced parking supply does not mean zero spaces. However, if a developer comes to the table with a detailed parking and mobility analysis, it will show internal and external stakeholders that capital and land is being saved and repurposed for better uses.
Still, if developers build less off-street parking in their developments, neighbors will still want to know that parking does not spillover onto their neighborhood streets. To alleviate this, cities are requiring or encouraging that a developer has a TDM (transportation demand management) plan in place to justify this strategy. Lenders still see too little parking as risky in certain locations also. Coming forward with a comprehensive vision and strategy on how to build with reduced parking is essential. If done right, it will deliver longer term value, and strengthen the surrounding community.
How to apply this in the Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia regions?
Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, three of the oldest, densest cities in America, is where I’ve spent the most of my adult life. These 3 cities have some of the least amount of land area in their cities dedicated to parking, due to their design before the automobile, yet they are laggards on the parking policy reform movement. Each city's challenges and attempted reforms are unique. The common thread is too little affordable housing and too much affordable parking.
Boston has loosened its parking requirements for affordable housing and around transit, and a proposal is being considered for eliminating mandates. Meanwhile, neighboring Cambridge, Somerville, and Salem have eliminated all parking minimums. Affordability is a major problem in the region, as only 1 in 7 households who rent can actually afford to buy. The MBTA Communities Law is an essential piece of policy to help fix this problem. It requires municipalities across the region to zone for transit-oriented multifamily housing. However, municipalities keep local control over their zoning rules and can still require parking. Meanwhile, almost 1/3 of off-street parking spaces at multifamily apartments in the region sit empty during peak demand. Right-sizing parking is essential for making projects pencil in the 177 municipalities that are now required by law to zone for denser housing. If parking continues to be oversupplied, the MBTA Communities Act will not succeed.
New York City is the largest and most dense city in the country (by far), with more than half of residents living without a car. Congestion pricing is a landmark and successful policy to price driving a car in the central city during peak hours. The next frontier is to tackle the city's 3 million on-street parking spaces - a staggering 97% of them are free. The battle for free parking in the city is a way of life for many. Off-street parking requirements however have been eased, especially in transit accessible neighborhoods. Though parking minimums have not yet been removed. Developments in the outer boroughs is where a reduced parking strategy can have an outsized impact in making a mixed-use housing project feasible.
Center City Philadelphia, a wonderfully walkable downtown that I lived in for many years, still has more than 25 surface parking lots, including full-block sites that have been sitting idle for many decades. Each block could accommodate hundreds of apartments, ground-floor retail, and green space. The problem in Philly is that vacant land is under-assessed for property taxes, there are no restrictions on parking at surface lots, and many lot owners are content to collect their parking revenue and wait. There is hope. Mayor Cherelle Parker is launching an $800 million initiative to build and rehabilitate 30,000 units, and has introduced legislation to eliminate parking requirements for high-density development near SEPTA stations. The neighborhood spillover still needs to be mitigated and alternative transportation strategies can be boosted in the city.
What's next?
Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and many other American cities are ripe for reform. Redesigning our streets and communities to be a little less car-oriented will deliver more great places. Parking, and the overabundance of it, is the crux of the issue. The cost of free parking was always hidden. Now the numbers are in the open. The question is what you're going to do with them.
