Cambridge Eliminates Parking Minimums, Reduces Development Costs

Vanessa Brown CalderWith the City Council ’s recent vote, Cambridge, Massachusetts becomes the latest city to reform parking requirements. Cambridge is unique among Massachusetts cities in that it is the first tofully eliminate parking minimums citywide. But it is not unique among U.S. cities more generally, and comes as a  wave of other locations, including San Francisco, California; Lexington, Kentucky; andSt. Paul, Minnesota; have made sweeping parking reforms.Parking minimums are a  type of urban regulation that require developers to provide a predetermined number of parking spaces for a certain number of residential units or a given developed square footage. These mandates centralize decision making and impose uniformity, rather than leaving parking decisions to developer s or property owners who are likely to understand the needs of residents and appreciate how these needs vary across geography and over time.As such, parking mandates are a  great example of an urban regulation that reduces efficiency and unnecessarily increases costs. Parking mandates also compel vehicle‐​centric transit in what is—or would otherwise be—urban areas. Because land is expensive, especially in urban and development constrained areas, the costs of parking mandates can be substantial.For instance,one paper found that the construction cost of a  parking space ranged from $17,000 (aboveground, in Phoenix) to $48,000 (underground, in Honolulu). But even these estimates underesti...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 8, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Vanessa Brown Calder Source Type: blogs