Last week, the Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to eliminate car parking minimums from the city code, along with a package of other transportation-related reforms. This is great news. Car parking minimums are a terrible policy with no rational basis that makes housing less affordable, small businesses less feasible, good urban design less practical, and a shift towards greener transportation less possible.
Yet the vote in Minneapolis was the result of years of advocacy and education and makes the city one of just a small number in the United States to take this commonsense step. Despite an unchallenged consensus among urban policy experts that car parking minimums hurt cities, they remain widespread and often unassailable. Why is this awful policy so hard to erase?
In a short, sharp piece for Slate, Henry Grabar points out that there are three primary defenders of car parking minimums. The first are traffic engineers and local leaders who are so captured by the paradigm of mass automobility that they would rather cities suffer any other consequence than a parking shortage. The second are local NIMBYs who fear change in their neighborhoods and want all impacts of new development to be mitigated with no cost to incumbent residents. The thinking of these two groups is regrettable, but fairly predictable, and these are the kind of people who will show up and testify at public meetings in support of the status quo.
City Club Apartments is a newish residential building in downtown Minneapolis with no dedicated resident parking. (Photo Source: BKV Group)
But the third group of supporters for car parking minimums that Grabar identifies is a surprising one: practicing city planners. Of all the groups in support of this bad policy, planners should know better. The American Planning Association has publicly noted for decades that car parking minimums come at a significant cost to cities. Despite this, the California branch of the APA recently took a position in partial opposition to a proposed California law that would eliminate parking minimums near transit. On the surface, it makes no sense.
Dig a bit deeper and it still makes no sense, but in a more convoluted way. Planners rationalize support for car parking minimums as leverage to force developers into negotiation. A developer wants to maximize their revenues and minimize their costs. Car parking minimums force the creation of non-leasable space that is expensive to build. As a result, developers are forced to come to the table with planners or other stakeholders and agree to various concessions, like affordable units or design changes, in exchange for a variance to right-size their parking. In the end, the argument goes, the sausage gets made and everyone ends up better off.
Pretextual Planning Isn’t Good Policy
A major problem with this approach—one that the APA should be especially concerned with—is that it is inimical to the principles of good governance. Michael Manville, a planning professor at UCLA, calls this zoning-for-negotiation scheme “pretextual zoning,” and Daniel Herriges at Strong Towns points out that it is a bedrock of planning practice across the country. Planners often set regulations, from car parking minimums to height limits, at levels that are intended to be onerous or even prohibitive. The goal usually isn’t to stifle development entirely (although sometimes it is), but to force negotiation.
This approach has three distinct consequences. One is that the true nature of the game is not apparent to everyone. Once rules for development are established, many citizens come to the strange conclusion that they ought to be followed. When developers bargain their way around them, people see that as evidence of corruption, not as evidence that the system is working as intended. This significantly reduces trust in planners and in government.
The second consequence is that making every development proposal into its own negotiation is a perfect recipe for actual corruption. Sure, a developer might get their approvals by promising to reserve a percentage of the units as affordable housing. But that same system might also enable them to get their approvals by making a donation to the local councilmember’s campaign fund or hiring the councilmember’s spouse for a “consulting” job.
Grabar, Herriges, and Manville all focus on these two issues, but I want to focus on the third problem with a lot of pretextual planning, which is that it is not especially effective at creating the cities that we say we want to create.
To see this more clearly, it’s helps to simplify what we’re calling “pretextual planning” into what most people would recognize as plain old hostage taking. Hostage-taking is a strategy that has been proven effective throughout our history as a species, but it relies on taking a good hostage, and car parking (along with many other non-essential elements of a development) is a terrible hostage.
Two Rules For Hostage Taking
If you’re going to take a hostage and hold it for ransom, it’s important that the hostage fulfill two criteria, (1) it’s not valuable to you, and (2) it’s valuable to the person you are expecting to pay you to release it. For instance, if you are a Russian hacker looking to make a fast $5 million, it would make sense to capture a hugely important American oil pipeline and not, say, a useless one or the one that your local gas station relies on.
By this criteria, planners taking developments hostage with car parking minimums is an extremely ineffective way to get a better city, because car parking minimums fail on both of these criteria.
Parking minimums are disasters for urban design and the climate. Why risk requiring outcomes like this?
For one, the hostage is valuable to the hostage taker. If the developer or their investors cannot or decide not to meet the planner’s required terms, then either result is bad for the city. In one case, the development doesn’t get built, and in the other, the development gets built with too much parking. These are not neutral outcomes, they are scenarios that make the city poorer or more auto-dependent. Without a credible threat to shoot the hostage, you can’t expect to get paid a ransom, and that’s why it’s a bad idea for cities to point the gun at their own head.
On the opposite count, the hostage is not something that is especially valuable to developers, who are the ones supposed to be paying the ransom. American developers are used to working within restrictive land use regulations and are habituated to meeting them. In many cases, a developer or their lenders will ensure that their new development includes a substantial amount of parking because they believe that the building won’t lease without it. Parking minimums increase the amount of parking at the margins. Developers also have the option of going elsewhere if a city’s ransom doesn’t make sense for them. A city cannot force a developer to lose money by going through with a project if it doesn’t make sense.
The fundamental problem is that it is impossible for a city to gain more than they give in this negotiation. A developer will not agree to make changes unless the regulatory concessions that they receive in exchange are of greater value. In some specific cases, say to meet a housing need for a very specific population, that approach might be justified. But citywide it does not make sense. Car parking requirements are responsible for greater increases in costs to the cities that impose them than any ransom extracted from developers can ameliorate.
Cities Should Just Mandate What They Want
Of course it goes too far to say that regulations should never be designed to extract concessions from developments. But those concessions ought to be directly related an externality that is being regulated. A brewery that wants to install a big outdoor patio in a residential area might win their approvals only after promising to limit use of the patio to certain hours on work nights. A grocery business that relies upon regular large shipments might be forced to agree to only receiving those deliveries at certain hours and at a certain designated location. These regulations aren’t pretextual, the concessions are necessarily site-specific, and the agreement actually addresses the relevant issue.
In contrast, car parking minimums and other land use regulations like too-low FAR limits create situations that are either damaging to public trust when used as leverage, or damaging to the city when applied. Planners support these regulations because they imagine them as possible win-win scenarios. But these regulations can instead result in lose-lose situations if developers or citizens decide that the rules are best followed as written and the all-important negotiation doesn’t take place.
Right now, Minneapolis’ twin city of St. Paul is directly confronting this exact choice. City planners have proposed two different approaches for parking reform. One would be to eliminate parking minimums entirely. The other would be to reduce parking minimums with the idea of continuing to use them as leverage. This second option is plainly self-defeating; why reduce your leverage at the same time that you expect to make better use of it? If St. Paul really thought that maintaining leverage over developers was important, it would hike parking minimums to a completely prohibitive level. If St. Paul thought that reducing the burden of parking provision was important, it would eliminate the minimums entirely. In trying to have both outcomes, the more likely outcome is that St. Paul would enjoy the full benefits of neither.
The right approach is for cities to enact policies that make clear what they are want. Minneapolis’ ordinance removed car parking minimums entirely because they are bad policy, full stop. The same ordinance lowered and expanded car parking maximums and raised bicycle parking minimums because reducing car use and increasing bicycle use are some of the city’s public policy goals. That’s all the justification any city needs.
Perhaps most importantly, Minneapolis also redesigned its travel demand management process for large residential developments. Previously, the city had required a traffic study focused on private vehicles. Now, the city will require these projects to select from a menu of strategies designed to nudge residents from cars to other modes of travel.
Minneapolis hasn’t abandoned planning or put a bunch of planners out of work with these changes. Its new regulations make demands of developers just like the old ones. The difference is that these new regulations align with the city’s public policy goals for affordability, diversity, prosperity, and sustainability, and attempt to advance these goals directly instead of through a kind of regulatory subterfuge.
Planners should not need pretext or hostage taking to align new development with the public good when they achieve much better results by direct action. Parking minimums are bad. They can’t be ethically justified by planners who care about their impacts. That’s reason enough to kick them to the curb.