In his NJ.com column yesterday, “New book on parking is just the ticket” (also published in yesterday’s Star-Ledger, for once with the same title), Paul Mulshine discusses a recent book by Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. As articulated by Mulshine, Grabar traces a lot of modern evils to the requirement the new development include a minimum number of parking spaces.
In my day job I’m an attorney, in part practicing land use and zoning law. (I often represent clients before municipal boards that meet in the evening, so I guess it’s a night job too.) The towns in which I appear all have minimum parking requirements. (Even in one city that had a zone that specifically did not require onsite parking, the planning board always wanted to know where the residents of the apartments that my client was going to create would park. What part of “no parking requirement” didn’t they understand?)
I think that a lot of the impetus behind parking requirements is the desire to use the requirement as an additional limitation of what can actually be built. Residential developers usually want to know how many units they can get while commercial developers want maximum floor area. Modern zoning codes control the intensity of residential development by limiting density, the number of dwelling units per gross area of land, as well as by limits on building and impervious cover and floor area compared to the total area of the site. The intensity of commercial development is controlled by similar coverage limits as well as detailed minimum parking requirements, usually based upon the floor are of the building (often one parking space is required for every 200-300 square feet of floor area depending upon the use.)((Parking requirements for restaurants and houses of worship are often based upon stated seating capacity, on the order of one space for every three seats.))
Whatever the ostensibly permitted floor area for a commercial development based on lot size, once you add required parking spaces, you may have no room for the building. Towns regulate not only the number of parking spaces, but also their size. Typical minimum stall sizes are 10 x 20 and 9 x 18 feet. Even at the smaller size a 9 x 18 space is 162 square feet (not counting pavement needed for drive aisles and driveways.((Some towns allow a developer to “bank” spaces, meaning that they are all designed but do not have to be built unless the town determines that they are needed. The land is still reserved for future parking and so is still subtracted from what can actually be developed.))
Buildings can be multi-story (depending on local height limitations), but parking lots are usually a single level. (Mulshine’s column contains a cost figure for parking garages at $40,000 per parking space.)
Now, in addition to providing off-street parking spaces, developers must make a certain number of the spaces “EV-ready” so that electric vehicle drivers will be able to charge them. That legislation contains a small compensation, EV spaces count as two towards minimum requirements, but cannot reduce that actual requirement by more than 10%. Nothing, however, prevents municipalities from raising the requirements to soak up that bonus.
Jay Bohn
June 26, 2023