Asheville for All

This member commentary post does not necessarily reflect the views of Asheville For All or its members.

In case you haven’t heard yet, parking mandates are a crazy thing. They have a harmful effect of making housing more costly and more scarce in high-demand places. We talked about it a bit last summer. And you can read more about the housing-related benefits of abolishing costly parking mandates here.

So as awareness grows that parking mandates are a terrible legacy of a mid-twentieth century, car-centric way of thinking that should have no part in contemporary urban planning, cities across the country have eliminated them from their municipal codes. These cities have all figured out that parking mandates don’t need to be tweaked, or reformed. They simply need to be eliminated.

The list of cities that have eliminated parking mandates (otherwise referred to as parking minimums) include such diverse places as Anchorage, Alaska; Birmingham, Alabama; Austin, TX; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. They include places with robust transit networks, and places with no public transit all. (Even Durham is on the list!) After all, eliminating costly parking mandates doesn’t eliminate parking. It simply makes it so that new buildings don’t have to include a large number of parking spaces when it doesn’t make sense to do so.

So, after the 2023 Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study strongly encouraged minimizing or eliminating parking mandates in the city’s core residential neighborhoods, and then Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission signaled its wish to see parking mandates in residential neighborhoods eliminated entirely with a unanimous vote last summer, and then the city’s 2024 Affordable Housing Study effectively mirrored the Missing Middle study’s recommendations regarding parking upon its release in September, how has the city responded?

Asheville city staff has now readied plans for parking reform, and these plans are tentatively scheduled to be heard by City Council on February 11th. (They will be making a pit stop at next week’s Planning and Zoning Commission, which is admittedly confusing given that the panel has already discussed and voted on parking reform twice in the past year.)

And those plans include zero changes to costly parking mandates in all of Asheville’s residential neighborhoods.

Instead, the city has targeted “commercial districts” for parking mandate elimination.

To be clear, this is still a big improvement. The city allows multifamily housing to be built in any of those commercial districts. We could use more apartments and condos on Merrimon Ave. or Patton Ave. or Haywood Rd. or Tunnel Rd., and this change may allow for more housing in those places and others.

But the complete lack of any changes to residential neighborhoods is still perplexing.