Denver study shows removing parking requirements results in more affordable housing being built

Removing parking requirements for new buildings could help thousands of Coloradans who struggle to afford housing There is a shortage of over homes across Colorado according to a current scrutiny by the Colorado State Demography Office Nearly of the lowest-income households in the state spend over one-third of their pretax income on rent or mortgage payments That means they pay more on housing as a percentage of their income than is considered affordable The cost of providing parking borne by developers and passed on to residents helps push prices up Parking minimums may be mandated by city ordinances or demanded by lenders Selected renters prefer apartments that come with dedicated parking Structured parking can cost as much as per parking space according to Denver s Society Planning and Maturation office Off-street surface parking though cheaper to construct requires dedicating valuable urban land to parking lots We are a law professor and urban planning scholar who worked with material scientists at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation to model how parking requirements affect the evolution of multifamily residential housing in the city and county of Denver Related Minneapolis to change critical parking rules as city tries to get people to drive less Cutting parking boosts construction We revealed that cutting minimum-parking requirements would likely boost housing construction in Denver by about translating into roughly more homes per year This is a surprisingly high-impact outcome for a single relatively simple framework change We published our findings as a white paper with the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute in July In August the Denver City Council eliminated parking minimums for new buildings Denver followed the lead of other cities such as Boulder Longmont Austin and Minneapolis that have all in recent weeks abolished parking minimums In the Colorado legislature also removed parking minimums near transit hubs statewide in order to increase housing supply However that effort has been challenged in court on the grounds that the state mandates infringe on local cabinet prerogatives This legal tug-of-war underscores the importance of Denver s decision Parking can be expensive Before the protocol change market-rate apartments in Denver were required by law to provide as several as one parking space per unit In a -unit building parking could add millions of dollars to the developer s costs Parking requirements are often determined by a formula Based in part on an outdated view that modern cities should be car-oriented cities around the country including Denver passed zoning codes in the s and s that created legal requirements for the number of parking spaces that new housing projects must include Land is expensive in high-demand cities like Denver Dedicating part of a building s footprint to parking imposes both a direct cost because developers must pay to build the parking and an indirect cost because it leaves less space for housing These maturation costs are passed along to renters and owners decreasing affordability Reducing parking requirements lets developers build only the parking spaces that residents want or need Eliminating parking minimums We built a simulator that estimates the total number of apartments expected to be built in multifamily market-rate rental developments in Denver in one year It then allows for a comparison of attainable outcomes based on changing approach assumptions Our predictions factor in Building size and allowable unit counts for parcels The type of evolution and corresponding number of units that are likely to be financially feasible The probability that parcels might in fact be developed in the future based on a statistical analysis of historical Denver expansion statistics Following guidelines developed by the Lincoln Institute of Land Approach we modeled scenarios They included five promising parking policies tested across five economic environments and three sets of assumptions for developer-driven parking inclusion Changes would bring hundreds of housing units Our prediction that eliminating parking mandates in Denver could outcome in approximately additional multifamily units per year is based on three assumptions Somewhat unfavorable economic conditions including high interest rates and relatively low margins for developers Elimination of all regulatory parking mandates Voluntary construction of spaces per unit near light rail and spaces per unit away from light rail We find that eliminating parking minimums creates more options for developers and renters Developers will still build parking where needed or demanded by city residents Eliminating mandatory parking requirements offers several additional benefits The city will save labor costs associated with enforcing parking requirements reducing housing costs Related Minneapolis zoning code s centennial is the perfect time for the state to intervene and prevent escalating housing problem The strategy change frees up land for more economically productive uses and for desired civic infrastructure such as sidewalks or green space Developers freed from building parking are also more likely to invest in beautifying their building for residents and pedestrians Removing parking minimums can increase the flexibility to use small undeveloped or underdeveloped parcels for missing middle forms of housing such as duplexes or triplexes These forms of housing provide gentle density meaning they do not significantly alter neighborhoods but still make them more affordable for lower- and middle-income people and increase the city s overall housing supply It can also allow for the adaptive reuse of historic buildings that may have been built before the city required on-site parking And at last eliminating a requirement for surplus parking spaces allows more compact efficient forms of maturation which results in more walkable cities and more connected neighborhoods Susan D Daggett is a professor of the practice of law at the University of Denver Stefan Chavez-Norgaard is a teaching assistant professor of society protocol at the University of Denver This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license Read the original article The post Denver inquiry shows removing parking requirements results in more affordable housing being built appeared first on MinnPost