The Hidden Cost of Empty Asphalt
Walk through almost any American suburb and you’ll find something curious: vast stretches of parking lots sitting half-empty outside office buildings, apartment complexes, and strip malls. These seas of asphalt aren’t accidental — they are the direct result of parking minimums, rules buried deep in local zoning codes that force developers to build a prescribed number of parking spaces for every new building. For decades, planners treated these rules as common sense. Today, a growing number of cities are tearing them out of the code entirely — and the results are reshaping urban life.
What Are Parking Minimums, and Why Are They Controversial?
Parking minimums require new land developments to include a minimum — often arbitrary — number of parking spaces, typically calculated per dwelling unit or per square foot of floor space. The financial burden is enormous. Each structured parking spot can cost between $25,000 and $50,000 to build, costs that are passed directly on to renters and buyers. A 2025 report from the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute estimated that parking minimum reforms can reduce the costs of basic housing by 10–20 percent. Beyond cost, planners increasingly recognize that these mandates encourage sprawl, reduce walkability, and lock cities into car dependency for generations.
A Global Wave of Reform
The movement to abolish parking minimums has accelerated dramatically over the past decade. Buffalo, New York, ushered in a new era in 2017 when it became the first major U.S. city to abolish parking minimums. Minneapolis, Raleigh, San Jose, and others soon followed. Today, more than 200 cities — including Austin, New York, Milwaukee, and Dallas — have eliminated parking minimums or are actively exploring reform, according to the Parking Reform Network.
Internationally, the trend is equally striking. Oslo, Norway — where a majority of center-city residents don’t own cars — pursued plans to remove all parking spaces from its city center district, replacing them with pocket parks and street furniture. Zurich, Copenhagen, and Hamburg have capped the total number of allowable parking spaces in their cities. In New Zealand, Hutt City Council removed parking minimums in September 2020, and the following year saw nearly 75% growth in consented dwellings.
Case Studies: What Actually Happened?
Minneapolis, USA
Minneapolis took an incremental, data-driven approach — reducing parking requirements beginning in 2009 and ultimately eliminating them entirely in 2021 with unanimous support from all council members and the mayor. The results have been striking. While national rents increased by 22% from 2019 to 2024, rents in Minneapolis declined by 4% during the same period. City data showed that parking construction in new housing declined steadily after each reform, freeing up land and reducing project costs. Developers took advantage of their new flexibility and built less parking than previously mandated, helping increase the overall supply of homes.
Auckland & New Zealand
New Zealand’s National Policy Statement on Urban Development required councils to remove parking minimums by February 2022. Lower Hutt — one of the first to act — saw the average car park per unit ratio across new multi-unit developments halve in the year following the reform. Since each car park requires roughly 30 square meters of land including access, eliminating or reducing them directly enabled more homes to be delivered on the same plot of land at lower cost.
Denver, USA (2025)
A 2025 study modeled how parking requirements affect multifamily housing in Denver and found that cutting minimum-parking requirements would likely boost housing construction by about 12.5%, translating into roughly 460 more homes per year. In August 2025, the Denver City Council acted on this evidence and eliminated parking minimums for new buildings — a move celebrated by housing advocates and transit planners alike.
The Trade-Offs: A Balanced View
Not everyone is cheering. Opponents of parking reform raise legitimate concerns: without on-site parking, residents may compete for scarce on-street spots, jamming neighborhood streets. Small businesses in car-dependent areas worry that customers won’t come if parking is scarce. These concerns reflect a real challenge — parking reform works best in places where alternatives already exist.
- When it works best: Cities with robust public transit, dense walkable neighborhoods, and high rates of cycling see the strongest benefits from removing parking minimums, as residents have genuine alternatives to driving.
- When it’s riskier: In low-density, transit-poor areas, eliminating mandates without investing in transit first can create genuine parking pressure on surrounding streets.
- Developers still build parking: Eliminating mandates does not prohibit developers from building parking — it simply lets the market decide how much is needed. Evidence shows developers still provide parking where demand warrants it.
- Climate and land benefits: Parking minimums encourage sprawling, low-density development that consumes more land and drives up public infrastructure costs. Removing them helps cities reclaim land for green space, sidewalks, and housing.
What Conditions Make This Policy Succeed?
The evidence points to several key factors. Cities that pair parking reform with upzoning, transit investment, and active transportation infrastructure see the most dramatic results in housing production and affordability. An incremental approach — gradually reducing minimums before eliminating them — allows time for market adaptation and builds political support. Transparent data collection after each reform phase, as Minneapolis demonstrated, also helps planners make the case for going further.
Conclusion
Parking minimums were written into zoning codes at a moment in history when car ownership was rising and urban planners assumed it would never stop. The evidence from Oslo to Minneapolis to Auckland tells a different story: mandatory parking is expensive, land-hungry, and increasingly at odds with the way people want to live. Removing these mandates is not a silver bullet, but in cities with the right transit infrastructure and political will, it is proving to be one of the most effective — and surprisingly simple — levers available to tackle the housing crisis and build more sustainable cities.
