A recent story in the New York Times examined the impacts of the elimination of parking minimums on the construction of new housing and its affordability.  Bottom line?

… some studies show that more housing has been built as a result of the repealed rules. In New York, Seattle and Buffalo, for example, reducing or eliminating minimums has encouraged housing development that would not have been possible under the former mandates.

The story cites a couple of studies.  One, a study by the Regional Plan Association of New York, says,

We found that where parking minimums have been abolished, it has not only encouraged overall new housing production, but yielded a greater number of affordable units annually compared to geographies where parking minimums remained in place.  In other words, amending zoning codes toward the citywide abolition of minimum parking requirements can enable more robust housing production, both affordable and overall.

This demonstrates that the elimination of parking requirements in the Transit Zone under ZQA (Zoning for Quality and Affordability) has unlocked more possibilities for mid-size parcel development. Before ZQA, in order to make a development financially feasible, affordable housing developers needed to acquire parcels large enough to accommodate parking facilities and zoned highly enough to allow for high-unit count design. After ZQA, mid-sized lots have become developable as well. In this way, ZQA has been especially effective in incentivizing the construction of mid-sized … buildings and lots.

A report by the Sightline Institute on studies in Buffalo and Seattle found,

Sightline asked both research teams to look through their numbers to see how many homes were in buildings that would have been illegal before the reforms. Both datasets yielded a strikingly similar answer: more than half of new homes.

(In Buffalo), the market … ended up building 20 percent fewer parking spaces than the previous code had required.

In Seattle, whose reforms were concentrated in the most urban parts of the city, new buildings provided 40 percent less parking than would have been required before the reform. While that sounds like a dramatic drop, the change merely right-sized parking to match existing demand. In fact, it was exactly in line with a separate 2012 study that had observed 40 percent of the parking spaces in King County, where Seattle is located, never get used.

The benefit, according to the Times, is,

“The problem is when you require a bunch of parking the market doesn’t want, it just adds to the cost of development,” said Jenny Schuetz, until recently a senior fellow at the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution, whose focus was on housing and land-use policy. And often, those costs are passed on to tenants, she said.

While all this sounds very encouraging, the Times story notes that neighborhood resistance to such changes can be challenging enough for some elected officials to overlook.

But despite the benefits, eliminating the rules can be difficult. Even in cities like Seattle, where many residents are concerned about the environmental effects of driving, public comments submitted in response to development plans are telling. In 2022, multiple residents objected to a proposal to build nine residential units with five parking spaces on a vacant parcel.

“The vehicles associated with this housing,” one resident wrote, are “not welcomed on my street. Our parking is already extraordinarily constrained.”

Reality vs. perception, a continual issue in dealing with new public policies.