Is your city struggling? Consider ditching the parking mandates

This one neat trick can unleash a whole lot of good things

One space per what?

Several years ago, when I first joined the Planning and Zoning Commission, someone in a meeting mentioned there was a “group in town” who wanted to “build less parking so people would drive less.” My immediate reaction was “lol” followed by “wait, no—seriously?” Like everyone, I hate driving around looking for parking, and I assumed that if you eliminate parking mandates, greedy developers won’t build parking, and you’ll be driving in circles around your city until you die at the wheel and turn into dust.

Photo: Alan Levine, Wikimedia Commons

Then I started looking into it. What I learned moved me from “parking mandates are awesome” to “oh no they are actually a huge problem.” It didn’t really take that long, either. The evidence is pretty overwhelming.

Want to open a bowling alley in New Mexico? In Los Lunas, you need one parking space for every four lanes at capacity. In Santa Fe, five per lane. In Eunice, NM, it’s 2 spaces per alley. In Taos, four per lane plus 50 percent for accessory uses. In Ruidoso, “At least five spaces for each alley, plus additional spaces as may be required in this section for related uses contained within the principal structure.” What?

Are people carpooling more in Eunice? Do Santa Fe bowlers drive bigger cars? The answer is simpler: Cities are making up these numbers. You may as well consult an astrologer about safety parameters for a particle accelerator beam. Parking mandates are about vibes, not science.

The hidden $40,000 tax on housing

Parking is much more expensive than many people realize: It can cost up to $40,000 for each space, according to parking cost studies. (Underground parking can cost even more.) In Los Alamos, where 78% of residents say housing is their top priority and pretty much nobody is happy with housing affordability, we’re literally paving over solutions.

Try this math game with your kids: “You’re a builder with a parcel of land you want to turn into housing: how much housing goes away for every parking unit we mandate?” Remember that for every fraction (you have half a parcel, so who gets it?), parking wins: that’s how our land-use code works. Parking always wins.

My awkward attempt at illustrating this idea

Your kids will quickly see that there’s a steep cost for these mandates. But it gets worse than just stopping housing: Parking mandates make the housing that does get built much more expensive. When the government forces developers to build parking they don’t need, the developer doesn’t eat the cost. They pass it on to renters and buyers. It’s a hidden tax on housing that’s pricing out teachers, firefighters, electricians, and physical therapists (both my PTs left town since I started writing this article, RIP my rotator cuff) who want to live where they work.

We have choices to make

This is the zero-sum land equation: parking OR housing. You cannot have it all. Look again at the parking game: You start with 10 little housing units. With one parking space per unit, you’re down to five. Mandate two spaces per unit, and you’re down even more. Every mandated parking space represents a hard trade-off between car storage and human shelter.

Maybe you’re wealthy, and convenient parking on demand seems worth it to you—but something I beg comfortable residents to keep in mind is that a lot of people are not wealthy. Parking mandates make everything more expensive, and this hits the most vulnerable members of our community hardest.

In addition to thinking about others, ask yourself:

• Do I want a lively downtown?

• Do I want quality teachers for my kids? Firefighters for our wildfires?

• Do I want to wait less than a year for a healthcare appointment?

• Do I want my children to have a place in my community when they grow up?

• Do I want my elderly parents to be able to give up the car keys and downsize somewhere nice?

If yes to any of that, then parking reform matters to you, too.

Los Alamos: A study in policy failure

According to the local results of the 2024 National Community Survey, one thing Los Alamos residents agree on is that we’ve got loads of parking—the town rated “ease of public parking” at 80% excellent/good, which was higher than the national average and is not surprising when we’ve paved over our potential.

This image and the quote below are both from Los Alamos County documents

Parking is distributed throughout Downtown with large parking fields and on-street parking spaces predominantly underutilized as indicated by a visual survey of aerial imagery over multiple years. As mentioned earlier, assessments made of the areas occupied by surface parking and roadways accounted for over 70 percent of available space within Downtown. - the 2021 Downtown Master Plan, Los Alamos County, p. 20 (emphasis mine)

Here’s what we’ve sacrificed in this quest to pave everything:

• Housing crisis: Only 7% rate affordable housing availability as good

• Planning: Only 11% think we’ve exhibited “well-planned commercial growth”

• Dead downtown: Just 20% think our downtown areas are vibrant

• Business variety: A dismal 14% rate our business variety as good

• Development quality: Only 23% approve of new development quality

We have abundant parking but a dying downtown and painfully high housing costs: these things are related. The government has succeeded in forcing developers to provide free parking for cars, but housing humans has clearly been a lower priority for our elected leaders.

This is what a 70% asphalt downtown looks like (Los Alamos - author photo)

We had a go at reform in 2022 when we updated our development code, but council flinched, backing away from real change and even voting to make a portion of downtown lower density than it is currently. In March 2023, Planning & Zoning pushed back, unanimously recommending changes (still timid, but a tiny bit bolder) to building heights and parking requirements—this after staff reported that developers had walked away from “fairly significant projects” because parking mandates and height restrictions made them financially impossible.

Council, facing public pressure, eventually approved those pusillanimous reforms. However, two years later, our downtown remains mostly devoid of retail, with largely empty buildings clinging like barnacles to huge parking lots. We tried those politically safe half-measures, and they were not enough.

Los Alamos is full of “smooth pavement everywhere,” delighting skaters. Source: Reddit

As people never tire of telling me, some things are out of our control: We can’t make labor or materials less expensive, or lower federal interest rates. But our land-use rules absolutely do affect the cost of building, and our land-use rules absolutely are within our control. So let’s stop pointing fingers at what we can't change, and fix what we can.

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Next up: How did we end up with this mess in the first place? And what can northern New Mexico learn from the growing number of communities—from Montana to Maine—that have ditched parking mandates and seen their downtowns come back to life? I’ll explore a bit of the history behind America’s parking obsession, plus the climate and fiscal costs we’re still paying…and why our region has a unique opportunity to lead on housing solutions that actually work.

This is what a downtown could look like—but not if we keep building everything around cars. Cities all over the world are choosing other ways. Image: IMM Design Labs