Underground parking spots can cost roughly $100,000 each to build in some markets. That math is why a growing list of U.S. cities like Austin, San Francisco, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Denver has fully eliminated mandatory parking minimums.
According to data from the Parking Reform Network, which has examined over 3,000 municipal codes nationwide, about 20% have abolished or reduced parking minimums citywide.
But that shift comes with a trade-off that often gets overlooked: parking reform without curb management is only half a policy. As cities remove requirements for off-street parking, the demand for parking doesn’t automatically disappear. Some of it can shift to the curb, putting pressure on cities to manage increasingly valuable public space.
Why Cities Are Scrapping Parking Minimums
Parking space mandates are not new. Their history dates to 1923, when Columbus, Ohio, adopted one of the earliest minimum parking requirements. By 1954, a 100-unit building there had to provide 100 parking spaces. Today, the same building would need 150 spaces. Eliminating them cuts construction overhead directly, and the driver behind the current wave is a national housing shortage.
Minneapolis offers an instructive case study of how changes to parking policy may affect housingaffordability. The city abolished its citywide parking mandates in 2019 as part of the Minneapolis 2040 rezoning plan. National rents rose 22% between 2019 and 2024, while Minneapolis rents declined by 4% during the same period, according to CREDA.
Researchers caution that the plan’s other reforms—including upzoning and eliminating single-family-only zoning—share credit for the divergence. The Minneapolis experience is therefore best understood not as a clean test of parking reform, but as evidence that eliminating parking mandates can be one part of a broader strategy to increase housing supply.
Austin, mirroring Minneapolis, purged its parking mandates in 2023 to make missing-middle housing more financially viable in a city where added parking costs can make such projects difficult to build. And the reform isn’t just city by city anymore. Washington State passed SB 5184, capping parking minimums statewide and eliminating them entirely for small businesses. Unlike most local parking rules, the law applies regardless of a property’s proximity to transit.
What Cities Are Building on Former Parking Lots
The U.S. has 2 billion parking spaces, according to the Urban Land Institute, an inventory that cities are increasingly questioning as land becomes more valuable.
Dallas converted a massive downtown lot into Pacific Plaza Park; San Diego turned a former dirt parking lot into an 11-acre salt marsh at the Del Mar Fairgrounds; and San Francisco’s The Mason on Mariposa project replaced vehicle space with nearly 300 market-rate apartments.
These projects illustrate the range of possibilities, from creating new public space and restoring natural habitat to adding much-needed housing.
Grubb Properties went further, converting existing suburban office spaces and adjacent surface parking lots into Link Apartments Montford, a 500-plus-unit development, in Charlotte, tying parking reform to the broader office-to-residential conversion wave.
However, one pattern stands out across these housing projects: the conversions generally target underused or civic-owned parking rather than heavily contested residential curb space that residents rely on every day. In other words, the examples examined here suggest cities are starting with the easiest parking to repurpose, lots where political and practical costs of removal are relatively low.
That matters because converting surplus asphalt is very different from eliminating parking that drivers actively depend on. The hardest test will come when cities have to balance new housing against curb space that is already in short supply.
What It Actually Costs Drivers
The affordability case is real. Parking construction is expensive, and removing the mandate to build it makes housing expansion financially viable while still encouraging walkable, transit-oriented development.
But the cost side has data too. When Buffalo eliminated parking minimums citywide in 2017, a peer-reviewed study tracking 36 major developments over two years found 47% built fewer spaces than the old mandate required (mixed-use projects built 53% fewer). The finding doesn’t prove that those cars moved onto residential streets, but it does show why curb management becomes more important as developers provide less off-street parking.
Vancouver’s West End is a good example of what can happen when that curb space is already under pressure. More than 6,000 drivers competed for just 2,747 permit spaces, and only one in five blocks stayed under the city’s 85%-full peak hour standard until the city raised permit prices and added meters, after which every measured block cleared that threshold within two years.
The lesson is straightforward: curb overcrowding isn’t inevitable, but managing a finite supply of street parking becomes essential once cities stop requiring developers to provide it on-site. That shift does not affect all residents equally.
Older residents and people with disabilities who rely heavily on personal vehicles or specialized transit are often hardest hit by the shift.
Catie Gould, a senior researcher at the Sightline Institute, has closely documented these same overcrowding dynamics in cities from Buffalo to Vancouver and has tracked this tension through projects like hollywoodHUB, a 12-story, 222-unit affordable housing development BRIDGE Housing is building with TriMet at Portland’s Hollywood Transit Center.
Her work underscores the trade-off: cities can enable cheaper, denser housing, while shifting some responsibility for parking from private developers onto public streets. The challenge is whether curb-management systems—permitting, meters and dedicated loading zones—can keep pace with the housing cities are approving.
Pairing Parking Reform with Curb Management
More cities in the United States appear poised to replicate Baltimore and Buffalo’s lead through 2026 as affordability and inventory pressures persist.
The real measure of parking reform, then, shouldn’t be how many parking minimums a city eliminates, but whether it pairs those reforms with tools that manage the curb: pricing, permits, loading zones, and occupancy monitoring.
So far, few cities have tackled both sides of the equation at once. Zoning reform can move far faster than curb management, leaving cities to address parking demand after new housing is already built.
If cities can show that parking demand remains manageable as housing costs fall, the case for reform becomes considerably stronger. If they can’t, they risk simply shifting the cost from developers’ balance sheets to drivers circling the block.