Decreased Parking for Successful Mixed-Use

With today’s trend toward mixed-use, the parking requirements left over from Euclidean zoning are out of whack. Many communities in the United States require two spaces for every residential unit. If a single person occupies a home, two spaces are required; if that occupant doesn’t even need a car, two spaces are still required. Similarly, many municipalities require certain amounts of parking per thousand square feet of commercial space. Ordinances that instead would limit parking, or require some ratio of shared cars per unit, would promote a more sustainable development and help us get over our dependence on cars.

We did a project called Coconut Point, in Estero, Florida, where there was a standard of one parking space for one-bedroom units, 1.5 spaces for two-bedroom units, and two spaces for three-bedroom units. Based on that, we built several hundred spaces, costing in excess of $25,000 per space. Here’s the crazy part: This was a walkable community with retail, office, residential – just about everything its occupants would need was available without requiring them to drive. In addition, it was in an area frequented by tourists, and retirees who lived nearby, who only used the project on an occasional basis, and certainly didn’t need dedicated parking spaces to accommodate them all at once.

Today you drive through this garage – with its millions of dollars of constructed parking space – and find it nearly vacant, all the time. For what we spent on it, we could have easily built a third the number of parking spaces, purchased vehicles for a car-share program, and put an endowment in place to maintain and manage the fleet – and for the cost of another couple of spaces, established a bike-share program too. That would have been more environmentally responsible, and I bet we would have had happier customers. For one thing, it would have relieved many of them of the financial burden of owning cars of their own. But the city didn’t even want to hear about it.

Euclidean zoning deliberately separated uses. So it wasn’t the parking standards that created the problem. Many people want to live differently now, so the regulations no longer apply, specifically in mixed-use and urban infill situations where one space can serve several users at different times and fewer people need cars.