Less Homes for Cars, More Homes for People

Our national housing shortage is causing instability for families, destroying young people's hope for economic mobility, and driving our unhoused population up. One way that we can begin to bridge the gap between how many homes we need and how many we have is to address parking mandates that are creating empty spaces for cars where homes could be.

For every one of the more than 260 million automobiles registered in the US, there are at least three parking spaces. That’s a lot of homes for cars, right? Now compare that statistic with another. In the US, it’s estimated that we have a shortage of four million (some estimates are even as high as seven million) homes.

To say it plainly: we have more homes for cars than we need, but far fewer homes for people than we need. Why is this our reality? And does it have to be this way?

Understanding the Problem

For decades, the US has been behind on building the number of homes that residents need; as a result, the price of housing everywhere, from rural to urban communities, has skyrocketed. To add on to the rising prices due to lack of housing supply, laws dictating how much parking must be available to future residents add another layer of costs for owners and renters. These laws are called parking mandates or parking minimums.

Parking spaces are expensive to build, often accounting for as much as 20 percent of construction costs for housing projects. This cost gets passed on to residents through higher rents or listing prices, even if they don’t drive. Conventional parking minimums can increase the rent or mortgage of an apartment or house by $200-$500 per month.

Parking mandates are harmful not only because they raise prices, but also because they lead to valuable space being taken up that could have been used for housing. In Los Angeles County, 14 percent of the incorporated land is devoted to parking. There are even instances when the government has displaced people to prioritize space for parking cars. For instance, in the 1950s, the City of LA used eminent domain– the power of the government to take over private property– where the current Dodgers Stadium sits to displace up to 1,800 mostly Latino families, claiming it was for affordable housing. The land was instead sold to the Dodgers, who used a large portion of it for a surface-level parking lot. Imagine how many opportunities those families could have accessed and created had they been able to remain in their homes.

When our governments mandate parking, they are also mandating car-centric communities and housing sprawl. Requiring so much parking, especially in our downtown areas, implies that cars should be the dominant form of transportation in our neighborhoods. At a time when we are seeing the consequences of climate disasters, we must acknowledge the harm this kind of policy can cause. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. We’ve seen communities devastated by fires and floods. Yet, instead of trying to build climate-resilient neighborhoods, our leaders are prescribing that we continue emitting more carbon, even though we have better alternatives.

Housing won't fix itself