This article explains why eliminating minimum parking requirements is such a good idea, and suggests the idea of parking benefit districts as a way to get past misguided political and neighborhood opposition.

Eliminating existing requirements currently on the books in almost every city, namely that housing builders install lots of off-street parking spaces, is a key strategy for housing affordability. Most people wouldn’t guess it, but parking requirements (or “quotas”) raise the rent—and not just by a little, but by a lot. Here’s a full rundown of how they do so, but some major ways include:

• Parking quotas raise the cost of building housing, especially inexpensive housing, and they suppress the number of apartments and houses that can fit on a lot—often by a quarter to a half.
• Parking quotas block adaptive reuse of old buildings, such as vacant warehouses, to housing.
• Parking quotas disperse housing by suppressing housing units per city block, which exacerbates sprawl and therefore distances traveled, which makes transit less practical and driving more common. And driving is expensive.

I’m all for it. The only concern I can think of is that neighborhoods with higher-cost parking (likely to be more desirable, richer, less diverse neighborhoods in most cities) would get greater benefits than other neighborhoods. So it seems like maybe a portion of it could stay in the neighborhood, and a portion could be shared across all neighborhoods in a city or even metro area that agree to the policy.

This is both a great example of progressive policy innovation, and a market-based way of aligning peoples’ economic incentives with the best policies. So it should be able to gain support across the political spectrum. But the article also talks about how bureaucrats at existing transit agencies can be an obstacle to this sort of policy (as they can to other good ideas like flexible bus routes). This is sad. In my ideal world, there would be a single agency in charge of getting people from point A to point B and using space in the most efficient, safest and healthiest ways, open to innovation and stakeholder input.