Downtowns and Main Streets are the economic engines of their regions. When allowed, they grow vertically — making room for more industry, more business, more capital, and more of everything we value, all within the same footprint.

Cities and towns have forced themselves to sprawl by creating excessive parking minimums and height limits. These policies keep development down and forces growth outward. Low density sprawl eats up the American wilderness that we cherish. And keeps us all stuck on the highway in the process.

Ever feel like your Main Street is almost there — just waiting to come alive? Zoom out on a mapping site and you’ll see the culprit: seas of parking lots.

Parking minimums eat up valuable land, making it nearly impossible for businesses to expand or new buildings to fill the gaps. Remove them, and those empty spaces can become shops, cafés, apartments, and gathering spots.

Height limits are the other barrier. Even just a few more stories in your downtown can kick-start infill — especially with mixed-use buildings where ground-floor businesses have customers living right upstairs. For a coffee shop, restaurant, or bar, that’s the dream: a built-in crowd, all within walking distance.

To force the market to only build half of a city, you would have to mandate no one build over a minimal height. You would also have to demand every development waste a certain amount of space. This would put downward pressure on the market, forcing the city to sprawl out to meet demand.

Unfortunately, this is the reality for many cities. Excessive parking minimums force development to either be vastly limited from surface parking or outlandishly expensive due to having to build a garage on site. Further, height limits can be so extreme that even three stories is outlawed in many areas.

Building the infrastructure for an entire city, while only allowing half to be built, is inescapably inefficient. The return on tax dollars invested will never reach its potential. Worse, the opportunity cost of asphalt cuts down the public bottom line. The tax burden is then carried disproportionately by the suburbs instead of the downtown that should be the city’s economic powerhouse.

Warning: when you see this, you can’t un-see it. You will forever be on the lookout for these four types of development in cities with excessive on-site parking minimums.

1. The surface lot. This one is obvious. With height limits and excessive parking minimums, the upside to development is massively constrained. In Jacksonville FL, people actually consider purchasing parking lots as long-term investments. Low overhead, automated cash flow. Investing in your city shouldn’t cause people to see dollar signs in asphalt.

2. The mini-development on surface lot. Also straightforward. On any given lot, a development of X square feet requires X parking stalls. Since each parcel is finite, you can only build a certain combination of X square feet of building space and X parking stalls before you are site-limited. The only way to further maximize the lot’s building square feet is to build a parking garage. Larger versions of this exist with townhouse or apartment buildings surrounded by parking.

3. The Maximized Lot. The developer decides to go all-in. The architect determines what the maximum square feet of building space can be built by also building a parking garage. The garage can be under, over, within, or next to the building. Due to parking minimums, it must be on the site or within the group or parcels being developed. Which leads to the final boss of parking-minimum-burdened development.

4. The Cruise Ship. Likely a larger parcel or group of parcels. These are popping up in cities, often in the core downtown or in suburban areas where larger lots prevail. A massive apartment or condo complex is built with a massive integrated parking garage. This is the beast that found a way to be compliant while also making you hate its facade.

Honorable mentions include the Building-On-Stilts-Over-A-Parking-Lot, where the parking minimum is met by completely elevating the building. Other cousins of the Cruise Ship and Maximized Lot include the Donut-Seen-From-Space where a layer of apartments hug the border and a massive garage sits in the middle of the lot. Would be a great spot for a park or pool, but massive car shelving will have to do. Don’t forget the Podium Behemoth, where a few levels of parking sit above ground-floor retail (or not) and below layers of apartments.

For every area of a city, town, or county, there is zoning (or some form of land development regulation, don’t throw Houston at me). Zoning provides the framework for what type and scale of development can take place. For example, Residential-1, -2, and -3 pertain to increasingly higher-intensity housing types.

In most areas of the US, these zones or ordinances have accompanying parking requirements, or parking minimums. Every development must meet the parking requirement in order to proceed to approval. This is a convention developed mid-1900s and is a physical and financial barrier to good development.

For this exercise, a Unit is the usable floor area of commercial, residential, or other space that coincides with one complete parking space.

The formula for single-story development:

Lot Area  ≥  Number of Units × (Unit Size + Parking Area per Unit)

Parking takes up vast amounts of space on finite lots. An example: a 50 foot by 100 foot lot is 5,000 sq ft of buildable area (ignoring setbacks, sidewalks, landscaping, etc.). If a business owner wants to build a restaurant and one parking space is required for each 100 sq ft of restaurant floor area (common standard), the owner needs to plan in increments of 400 square feet. 5,000 sq ft of buildable area divided by 400 sq ft increments is 12.5, and you can’t build half of a parking space. So 1,200 sq ft of restaurant can be built, and 3,600 sq ft of parking must be built. So, for every restaurant being built, two restaurant-sized areas of parking must be paved.

The formula for multi-story development: 

Lot Area ≥ Building Footprint + Parking Requirement × Building Units

Example: A common residential parking minimum requirement for downtowns is 1.5 spaces per unit. If a developer wants to build a small apartment building on the same 5,000 sq ft lot, these units can be stacked. Lets say they all stack perfectly on top of each other in a tower shape, and the units take up a footprint of 1,500 sq ft including elevators, stairs, etc. So, the 5,000 sq ft lot, minus the building area of 1,500 sq ft is equal to 3,500 sq ft remaining surface area. The remaining 3,500 sq ft of surface lot divided by 300 sq ft per parking space equals 11.66 spaces, rounded down to 11. Since each unit would require 1.5 spaces, 11 spaces divided by 1.5 per unit is 7.33. In other words, only 7 apartment units can be built, and 11 spaces will be required (10.5, rounded up to 11).  

Enter height limits.

In this example downtown, the developer runs into a 40 ft height limit, equating to three stories. The developer can increase the building footprint to two units and take up 3,000 sq ft of surface area. That will constrain the development to 4 units as the remaining parking area would be 2,000 sq ft and 450 sq feet of parking is required for each unit, a total of 1,800 sq ft. The developer could also reduce the size of the units to produce more, smaller units, but parking is based on the number of units in this case, and will still be costly. 

From these examples you can see that developing with parking minimums forces buildable areas larger than the building footprints themselves to be paved with asphalt. Garages offer a costly workaround, driving up downtown housing, goods, and service prices to cover construction and maintenance costs. On many smaller lots, garages aren’t practical and often lead to awkward solutions like “buildings on stilts” or other oddities that chip away at downtown character.

That sounds aggressive, but that is what needs to happen. A few reasons why:

1. Parking minimums kill density and walkability. They guarantee everything is now further from everything else due to asphalt requirements. See The Geometry Behind Why Cities and Towns Are Covered in Asphalt. 

2. Parking supply will still meet demand without minimum requirements. A market for parking will develop. Public and private garages become profitable because they are not competing with seas of half-empty lots. Parking is priced more at its value and not internalized to the price of goods and services in the area. 

3. Forcing sprawl forces long drives. When everything is built between seas of asphalt, few things are a walk or even a short drive away. 

4. Whoever is building something already knows how many parking spaces they need. A one-size-fits all minimum is redundant at best and produces massive wasted space. 

5. Parking minimums do not guarantee people will have a space. The ebbs and flows of a town will never match the 1.5 spaces per unit requirement. 

6. The highest cost is the opportunity cost of lost development. The  town center is the economic engine. Let it work to accumulate capital and grow the tax base

7. Forcing pavement drives up the cost of everything else. Everyone in an apartment building pays for the underground garage, regardless of if they have a car. The parking cost burden gets built into the price. 

8. Your town or city may need to adapt to changing conditions. Let it adapt by moving the parking minimums out of the way. And more asphalt = more heat. How pleasant is walking next to what feels like an asphalt oven? 

9. People have real options for mobility. Let them decide how to get where they need to go. Parking minimums lock communities into car dependency and drive up the cost of living. 

10. Let the market work. Find the spot in your town where you can kill the parking minimums. Costs will drop and businesses will thrive.

Each of the reasons on this list could be an entire blog post. Some books have been written to cover these comprehensively. Share this list with your city hall. Find traction to get parking minimums deleted from your town zoning ordinance.

The density your city or town needs to have a thriving Main Street or downtown can be achieved simply by removing the parking minimums and allowing some vertical development. Two, three or four stories without requiring large swaths of asphalt can allow a baseline of density to exist. Businesses can expand, modest apartment buildings or row homes can bring people into the mix, and the activity level can rise. Without changing the character of your city, you can remove the number one barrier to the local economy: the parking minimums. 

Want a thriving Main Street?

You don’t need massive towers — just remove parking minimums and allow modest vertical growth.

Two to four stories, without seas of asphalt, can spark a takeoff:

• More room for businesses to expand

• Apartments and row homes to bring people in

• A busier, more vibrant street life

Without changing your town’s character, you can remove its #1 barrier to a strong local economy: parking minimums.

In order of impact, the barriers to growth are parking minimums, height limits, and single-use conventional zoning. Single-use zoning that separates the city into different use areas is technically called Euclidean Zoning from the 1926 court case Euclid v. Ambler which determined zoning was legal. Zoning is that old because it was originally conceived to deal with separating polluting factories from residential areas. Fair enough. But no one’s going to catch TB from the coffee shop under their apartment these days.

There are what are called “economic externalities” that need to be dealt with, such as the pollution example dragging down peoples health. But this doesn’t require wholesale separation of office, retail, residential, and industrial (often little or no pollutants ir externalities in this advanced era). Single-use zoning creates protracted distances between everyone’s necessary destinations, forcing us all into cars on congested cross-town highways.

Austin, TX has been studied for its approach to lowering housing costs. Unsurprisingly, costs were lowered by increasing the supply of housing. This is the only effective way to reduce the cost of housing city wide.

In economics, housing is what’s called an inelastic good. This means the amount demanded is not influenced, or is inelastic to, the price. In normal terms, everyone has to live somewhere. Cities have set up successful programs and housing efforts to get people off the streets, and that should be celebrated. But the number one strategy for keeping enough housing in an affordable range is to let the market work. And, to remove barriers to development like parking minimums, height limits, and especially single-use zoning. If housing is not allowed, ask yourself, why? Should it really be illegal to build a row house or modest apartment building on a parking lot downtown?

On one lot, dozens of apartments can be built if a development isn’t required to build a garage as big as the building itself and the height limit could reach three stories (only 35-40 feet!). No garage means lower costs and more people on foot, on a bike, or on transit and out out of traffic. This is exactly what Austin TX did to bring housing supply back up to meet demand. And everyone in Austin is feeling the price relief. While costs continue to skyrocket in New York, Austin’s have leveled off, simply by allowing more housing to be built. Let the market work.

Instead of forcing every development to wedge loads of parking on every lot, your town should allow each development to decide what, if any, parking spaces they need. This allows density to accumulate and decouples parking needs from every development.

But isn’t that externalizing parking needs to the customer? Yes, exactly. By allowing developments to choose what amount of parking to supply, and allowing customers to choose their preference from what’s available, you have allowed a market for parking to come alive.

After removing parking minimums, large parking lots will likely develop into offices or apartments or townhomes. Some smaller lots may get infilled as well. Garages for some developments will be built allowing both hourly patrons and long-term parking for tenants. Some parking lots will remain because they are now capable of turning a profit with low costs. Valet parking will take hold for some restaurants when customers prefer convenience. The price for parking will stabilize to meet demand. On-street parking with meters will keep turnover high while keeping prices low. A public garage can keep turnover and price low. All of these are the nuances of allowing the market to work.

The overabundance of parking lots will incrementally give way to a walkable, thriving downtown.

Parking will meet demand. The only thing that will be lost is free and convenient parking on every lot. Parking can stay free with the cost of walking two blocks to the public lot or garage. Or, parking will remain convenient at the cost of $2-$5 an hour depending on the time and day or $10-$20 per day. Some public garages offer one or two hours free

Allowing the user to decide decouples parking from development, and allows a market to emerge. Parking supply and demand will balance at the right market price. Some people might seek alternatives entirely like walking and biking, which gets more people moving and less people sitting in traffic.

Alternatively, your city can keep parking minimums, prevent growth, force sprawl, and have everyone pay by having to sit in traffic and have fewer places worth going.