Earlier this spring, when Port Townsend, Washington, eliminated parking mandates—predetermined numbers of parking spaces required by law for new buildings—the news took the internet by surprise. Not many people expected the first Washington city to make off-street parking fully optional would be a small town of 10,000 residents.
“Seattle getting lapped by…Port Townsend,” The Urbanist wrote. Another commenter wrote, “Port Townsend punches well above its weight in a few ways.” Even my own colleague Dan remarked on the news, “The politics around abolishing parking mandates is bizarre.”
For every large US city that has fully repealed parking mandates, two small towns have done the same.
But it’s not surprising that towns of Port Townsend’s size are leading the way. While large cities like San Jose, California, and Austin, Texas, garner national press coverage for eliminating parking mandates, this policy reform is most commonly enacted in towns with fewer than 25,000 residents.
According to the Parking Reform Network’s mandates map, for every large American city (with a population of 250,000 or more) that has fully repealed parking mandates, there are two small towns (fewer than 25,000 people) that have done the same.
To be clear, there are far more tiny towns in the United States than big cities. But small jurisdictions are also likely underrepresented in the Parking Reform Network data. With little to no media coverage of zoning changes in places like Gilman, Wisconsin, or Canandaigua, New York, those parking reforms are less likely to make it onto the map in the first place. The database also fails to acknowledge the multitude of rural communities and small towns that never adopted parking mandates in the first place—or any zoning codes at all—and still manage to get along just fine. My hometown in northern Maine is one of them.
Overall, places with 25,000 or fewer residents make up 40 percent of known jurisdictions in the United States that have returned decisions about parking back to the people who live and work there. Below are just a handful of stories from these communities about why they removed parking minimums and what has happened since.
A town charts an economic revival
Parking reform has created new economic opportunities for businesses in Ecorse, Michigan. Image from Google Maps.
Ecorse, Michigan, was already scheduled to update its local zoning code in 2020, when United States Steel, the town’s largest employer, announced it would be shutting down most of its operations. The news prompted the city to completely overhaul its zoning, including eliminating parking mandates.
“We didn’t really get any pushback against the reduction of parking minimums,” said planner Nani Wolf. “We have way more parking than we need, and I think everybody was generally in recognition of that.”
The main form of development in Ecorse is renovations of existing buildings. Unfortunately, there are a number of vacant properties. Since its peak in the 1970s, the town has lost almost half its population, now at 9,800 residents.
“Having those parking minimums removed has made it so much easier and quicker for people to reoccupy those buildings,” said Wolf. She pointed to one example of a former ice cream shop that someone wanted to turn into a Puerto Rican restaurant. The owner’s biggest concern was parking: there were only two spaces on the property. In past years, that would have posed a regulatory problem, but Wolf reassured the owner that he was good to go.
The removal of parking mandates made it possible for this building to find new life as a local restaurant. Image from Google Maps.
In other cases, the city introduced prospective entrepreneurs to nearby businesses that might be amenable to a parking lot sharing agreement. “We really need to focus on redistributing what already exists, not requiring people to build more,” said Wolf.
As Ecorse charts a new future, the reduced red tape has made it easier for people to invest in their community. “Speed of development review is so much faster,” said Wolf. “That’s true for developers and for city staff. Parking just takes so much time and energy from everybody involved.”
Protecting rural land
Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia wrote its zoning code to protect its rural character from Atlanta sprawl. Photo by Serenbe.
The town of Chattahoochee Hills incorporated in 2007 with the aim of helping protect Georgia’s farms and forests. After a new highway cut through the land in the early 2000s, the area seemed suddenly vulnerable to turning into suburban tract homes. “People were freaking out about the idea that this was going to develop like everything else in Atlanta,” said Mayor Tom Reed. The growing metropolis was just 25 miles away, well within commuting distance.
Landowners came together to gain local control of their own zoning. One of the voices in the conversation was the developer of Serenbe, a now famous neighborhood in Chattahoochee Hills. Mayor Reed, who moved there in 2005, referred to it as a tiny urbanist community literally out in the woods. Originally governed by Fulton County pre-incorporation, the project needed a special zoning overlay to create a walkable neighborhood not oriented around parking lots.
New commercial centers in Chattahoochee Hills were built around walkability, not parking lots. Photo by Serenbe.
The conversation around parking was a short one. Reed, not mayor at the time, posed the question about the draft code, “Why do we have parking minimums in here, since we all know they’re a bad idea? Why?” He proposed changing the word “minimum” to “maximum,” and the topic was never discussed again. The new town ultimately protected 70 percent of the land in its rural state through a system of transferable development rights that pays farmers to preserve their land.
The average Serenbe household uses cars for just 2–3 trips per day, compared to 11–12 for a household in a typical suburban development.
The compact neighborhoods allowed by zoning, called “villages” or “hamlets,” both preserve rural land and increase walkability. As a result, new growth comes with far less driving than usual. Despite having no public transit service, the average household in Serenbe uses cars for just 2–3 trips per day, compared to 11–12 for a house in a typical suburban development. Not only does the walkable neighborhood boost quality of life for residents, having access to trails out the back door and a bakery down the block, Reed explained; it also makes financial sense. “The amount of infrastructure that the city has to do to support a place like Serenbe is much lower,” said Reed. More neighbors are already arriving. From 2010 to 2020 Chattahoochee Hills’ population grew by 24 percent, outpacing Fulton County or Atlanta.
Making sure Chattahoochee Hills’s growth is sustainable is embedded in many aspects of its code. There are no parking garages in the city yet, for example, but if one were built it would be required to be convertible—a design with flat parking decks that could later transition to an apartment or office building without demolition. “When you’re planning a town, you’re planning 100 years in the future. All these decisions you’re making are going to be in the ground in 100 years,” said Reed.
Combatting large parking lots
Seabrook, New Hampshire, was already inundated with large parking lots when its city council eliminated the town’s parking minimums in 2019. Big box stores had been moving to Seabrook, a little town of 8,400 people just north of the New Hampshire border, to cater to Massachusetts shoppers looking to save a buck on sales tax. “Our parking requirements were the same as everyone else’s,” explained Tom Morgan, Seabrook’s town planner, “but it just ended up with too much asphalt.”
When the moment was right, Morgan made the pitch to the planning board. “I said, ‘Let’s just try this out. Doesn’t work, we can just go back to the way it was.’” The flexibility has already been put to use. The interior of a vacant Sam’s Club warehouse store was leased to two companies, while the majority of its 900-car parking lot was separately redeveloped into a terminal for C&J bus lines, a regional transit service providing service to Boston and New York City. “I like to brag that we’ve taken 800 cars off I-95,” Morgan said.
The parking lot of this former Sam’s Club was redeveloped into a regional bus terminal, after Seabrook eliminated parking mandates. Photo by Tom Morgan.
Parking reform is for everyone
The examples of Ecorse, Chattahoochee Hills, and Seabrook run counter to the claims, made by skeptics of parking reform, that a no-mandate policy might work for large cities with robust public transit networks but not for suburban or rural locales where people depend on driving to get around. “We support the goal of a robust and effective transit network that people can get around with, but unfortunately that is not the reality in most cities in the state right now,” the Association of Washington Cities testified to the state legislature in 2022 regarding eliminating parking minimums (see 1:19:00). “In too many communities, in order to get to work, school, family, daycare, etc., you do need a car, and we cannot just ignore that.”
But the reality is that fully flexible parking policy is more routinely adopted by small jurisdictions with little to no public transit than large cities with light rail systems. A citywide repeal is simple and fair. It makes the zoning code easier to navigate for locals interested in reinvesting in their community and for the handful of city staff members who administer the rules. Whether to encourage new businesses, to reduce the barriers to building homes, or to repurposing existing parking lots, the upsides of this reform can be realized by any community—large or small.
