Removing Parking Minimums Is Just the Start

Downtown Hartford, CT. (Source: Flickr/JJBers.)

Hartford Connecticut made history in 2017 when it became the first U.S. city to eliminate parking minimum laws citywide. This shift meant that developers and business owners were no longer required to spend thousands on parking spaces, but could instead make their own decisions on how much parking they needed.

Changing the law, however, doesn’t mean immediate transformation. Six years later, 22% of Hartford’s downtown still comprises parking lots.

This is plenty of excess room for parking, according to The Parking Reform Network, which has unveiled a new interactive tool that illustrates how much downtown land is dedicated to parking in 80 different U.S. cities. The researchers discovered that, on average, those cities commit 20% of downtown land to parking. This analysis didn’t include underground, podium parking, or metered street parking. Even though Hartford sits 2% above the average, it’s not the worst: some cities dedicate over 35% of their downtown to parking. But some of the largest cities waste far less land on this low-value use: Chicago, for example, dedicates only 4% of its downtown to surface parking lots. 

Excessive parking costs the public with little return. Publicly owned lots throughout a city cost taxpayer funds to stay maintained, and private ones generate little to no taxable value that can be reaped and poured back into the city. Parking requirements can also harm potential entrepreneurs with overly expensive costs. Hartford recognized this years ago and, wanting to do better by their locals, they removed parking requirements.

So Why Is There Still So Much Parking in Hartford?

“The surprising truth is that sitting on a piece of land like [a parking lot] can be immensely profitable,” said Strong Towns Editor-in-Chief Daniel Herriges. “The owners may be in no hurry to develop or sell. And a key reason for that has to do with the backwards incentives created by the way we tax property in almost every city in America.”

Throughout most cities in the United States, buildings are taxed just as heavily as the land they are built on. This means that when a homeowner, business owner, or developer, builds or makes upgrades to their property, the tax bill goes up. A downtown parking lot pays very little in taxes, while bringing in modest revenue to the owner. So while a city won’t reap much return from an empty parking lot, an owner who holds onto the land for years—waiting for that perfect buyer—just might.

As President of Strong Towns Chuck Marohn says, “You get what you tax for.”  A split-rate tax, in which the value of land is taxed at a higher rate than the improvements upon that land, would encourage redevelopment of unproductive downtown parking lots. A number of cities in Pennsylvania have such a system, and Detroit is currently considering adopting one.

“Removing parking requirements isn’t a silver bullet,” said Herriges. “While parking requirements should be removed, the lack of these laws won’t automatically create the conditions for redevelopment of parking-strewn landscapes into more walkable places. There are a handful of other factors that must also be addressed, from how property is taxed to what obstacles might exist to incremental or even temporary development on these sites.”

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