Hexel Colorado remembers a meeting he helped host at Dallas Neighbors for Housing last fall. The grassroots advocacy group and their guest speakers spent most of the hour talking about parking.
“You wouldn’t think that parking has a lot to do with housing, but it really has an immense impact,” Colorado said.
Parking — and the rules cities have around it — plays a role in everything from housing costs to architecture. It’s prompted Dallas and other cities to rethink parking requirements often baked into city code.
The codes create parking ratios that require a specific number of spots per square foot of development for most areas of the city, such as one spot for every 333 square feet of an office building. Take downtown Dallas’ tallest skyscraper, the 72-story Bank of America Plaza tower. It has about 1,336 spaces in its garage.
Dallas leaders have been flirting with eliminating minimum parking requirements since 2019. The conversation gained momentum last month when a committee of the City Plan Commission voted 6-2 to recommend abolishing them.
Reform proponents say eliminating parking requirements brings Dallas closer to being a more walkable and affordable city. Opponents fear it will mean taking a step back in terms of traffic flow and quick, easy access to the places Dallasites visit most. Both groups agree the outcome will help define what the city looks like a few decades from now.
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A car-centric plan
In 1955, the Dallas area’s population was rapidly approaching 1 million as newcomers filtered into city suburbs. The Dallas Citizens Traffic Commission, tasked with improving road safety, feared the growth would create traffic bottlenecks and curbside congestion since most parking was street parking at that time.
“Even a schoolboy could figure out that downtown streets can’t be used at the same time for both car storage and traffic movement as the load increases,” the commission argued in the 1955 video Report to Dallas.
That vision carried over to the city code established in 1965. Like other cities across the country, Dallas required developers to plan for parking when they built.
It seemed a common-sense solution to an obvious problem: developments would bring more cars, and those cars would have to be stored somewhere.
Six decades later, many developers, urbanists and architects think rigid parking standards create as many problems as they purport to solve.
First, it’s expensive to build parking. It costs as much as $10,000 to construct a parking spot in a surface lot once land value is factored in, estimates show, and up to $50,000 in a garage.
That means many developments end up not being built. In a region like Dallas-Fort Worth, which is expected to balloon to 8.5 million residents by 2028, advocates say parking minimums will continue to worsen the housing deficit by slowing or outright halting some new builds. Dallas is expected to be short more than 80,000 units for people who make between $50,000 and $60,000 a year by 2030.
“Unfortunately, the discussion around the development of attainable housing begins and ends with parking,” Swede Hanson, a residential real estate developer and Dallas resident, said at the plan commission committee’s Jan. 30 meeting. “Speaking from experience, one additional unnecessary parking space is one less high-quality, affordable unit that we can add to the market.”
About 75% of the time it takes to assess a zoning application is spent determining the required parking, city staff estimate.
When new developments are eventually built, parking costs are passed onto the public. Parking costs translate to an average $225 a month in additional rent. A study by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on improving transportation planning, estimates parking reform would lower housing costs by 10% to 20%.
Reform backers say parking minimums undermine the growing desire of many city leaders and residents to live in dense, walkable areas by encouraging sprawl. More than a quarter of Dallas’s downtown is used for parking, according to the Parking Reform Network.
“A commercial requirement of one parking space per 300 square feet means developers will put new retail in a car-friendly, pedestrian-hostile strip mall. And a requirement of one parking space per 100 square feet for restaurants means the typical eating establishment will devote three times as much space to parking as it will to dining,” Michael Manville, an associate urban planning professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, wrote for The Atlantic.
At a time when American cities are committing to green initiatives to combat climate change, experts say parking minimums push the places people visit every day — schools, stores, restaurants — further apart, discouraging walking, biking and public transit use. That forces people to drive everywhere in the interest of practicality.
“Minimum parking requirements directly subsidize cars,” Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor at the UCLA Department of Urban Planning, told the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “We drive one place to do one thing and another place to do another thing and finally drive a long way back home, parking free almost everywhere.”
In addition to eliminating off-street minimums, Shoup, who wrote a book on parking reform, advocates for cities charging just enough for on-street parking to encourage turnover and using those funds for infrastructure improvements.
Dallas is considering, in a separate amendment, increasing the cost of meter parking, though some say they already pay too much for all-day metered parking at their place of business. Monthly parking garage permits average about $70 to $80 in Dallas.
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Divergent visions of Dallas’ future
Of course, the thought of doing anything that could result in less parking is not celebrated by most drivers.
“We are a car city. We don’t have the type of public transportation we need to make no parking minimums everywhere work,” City Plan Commissioner Melissa Kingston told the committee that voted to drop requirements.
Taking public transit can be cumbersome, requiring transfers and extending travel times in many cases. But planners say that’s partly because cities are designed around cars, not people, and that non-car alternatives can only be made better by implementing policies that improve walkability.
Bishop Arts resident Laura Palmer said her neighborhood, which is bordered by two planned developments with reduced parking, already lacks adequate accommodations.
“I can show you areas in which we have commercial businesses that are operating — and because of reduced, not eliminated, parking — we have them parking on sidewalks, we have them parking in front of fire hydrants, we have them parking up and down our streets so that not even a fire truck can get down there,” Palmer said. “We need to have parking minimums to help ensure a plan in order to have different uses within an area.”
Some also fear an economic impact, predicting would-be customers who can’t find parking will not patronize local businesses.
“Customers vote with their wallet,” Dallas resident Ed Zahra told the committee. “If parking has a perception that it’s difficult or expensive, they go elsewhere.”
Jason Roberts, who owns a handful of small businesses in Bishop Arts, takes a different view. Roberts has reduced parking in front of his storefronts, adding more cafe seating and other “irresistible” spaces, as he puts it. Roberts is the founder of the nonprofit urban design firm Better Block Foundation.
“If you design your spaces based on cars, people don’t like to be in those places,” Roberts said. “In one car space, I can easily fit three tables and think about the revenue I could generate off those tables versus one car. I consistently take parking away and my numbers don’t go down.”
Data from the North Central Texas Council of Governments shows that, in general, Dallas has enough parking, city staff say.
“Conclusions from NCTCOG’s work match those found by Dallas City staff: Parking for local districts, main street-like corridors, and transit-oriented developments tends to be either adequate for auto demand, or to even far surpass demand,” a staff report reads.
Most parking in transit-oriented developments exceeds requirements, and affordable housing and office uses are particularly overparked, according to a study by Dallas Area Rapid Transit.
It’s an issue that’s come up often in municipalities. Granite Properties requested reducing future parking during its redevelopment of Plano’s Granite Park by about 2,600 spaces in 2018. Developers said more than 2,000 spots among the existing 13,000 in its garage and surface lots sat empty.
Some residents suggest incremental changes to parking minimums, such as cutting the required number of spaces in half. But city staff say that would leave the “cumbersome” permitting process in place, continue to incentivize driving if too high, and that even the proposed elimination of minimums will only “produce slow, incremental progress toward city goals,” according to a staff presentation at the Jan. 30 committee meeting.
“It still keeps us in the world of throwing a dart and hoping it’s in the right ratio,” senior planner Michael Wade told the committee.
Advocates stress abolishing parking minimums doesn’t mean eliminating parking. If the staff recommendation to amend the parking code is adopted by Dallas City Council members, who have the final say, no existing parking will be removed.
It essentially puts the free market system in charge, transferring the parking decision to the people putting up office buildings, apartment complexes and shopping centers. If projects reach a certain threshold, developers will be required to submit a transportation demand management plan to incentivize reductions in the amount of single-occupant vehicle trips it generates.
Most residential and commercial developers will continue to build parking to meet the needs of tenants. Without blanket minimums, they can be more flexible, considering proximity to public transit and other factors to determine how much to build, experts say.
“If the city just eliminated a parking requirement for an office building, they [developers] would still develop parking — there’s still the drivers of what tenants would need,” said Deeg Snyder, co-managing director and partner at design firm Gensler Dallas. “They’ll take into consideration work-from-home trends and they’ll take into consideration ride-share and public transit if it’s an area with high walkability, but rarely would they do just no parking because it would be a marketing limitation for them.”
Eliminating minimums could present new opportunities for repurposing buildings, as well as ease the parking burden on restaurants and bars, Snyder said.
Staff recommendations for parking reform will come before the 15-member City Plan Commission in the coming months. If the commission agrees with the changes, they’re expected to be considered by Dallas City Council this summer.