Washington’s Most Parking-Burdened Towns and Cities

Middle school teacher Marijean Rak moved to Mount Vernon, Washington, in 2022 to care for her 86-year-old mother. She hoped to build a modest, 1,000-square-foot, single-story home on a vacant lot she owned to securely and economically age in place in her newly adopted town. But Mount Vernon parking mandates, which require a two-car garage plus two additional off-street parking spaces, made it impossible to do so.  

“This requirement is cost-prohibitive and doesn’t align with the character of the neighborhood,” she told her city council members earlier this year, pointing out that most of the existing homes in the blocks surrounding her lot have a one-car garage or no off-street parking at all. 

Rak’s story is one of thousands across Washington of a dream unrealized, whether it’s a home in a neighborhood they like, the conversion of a vacant storefront to a new café, or the opening of a much-needed daycare facility. Parking mandates—rules establishing a predetermined number of parking spaces for all new buildings—have proven a sneaky but consequential factor in driving up the costs of homebuilding and developing businesses; sometimes, they’ve prevented them from existing altogether. 

And these parking rules are as arbitrary as they are arcane, slapping one-size-fits-all minimums with no scientific basis across a range of establishments. From restaurants to retail stores, homes to houses of worship, libraries to “butterfly or moth breeding facilities” (yes, really), cities and towns have mandated an excess of parking, locking communities into patterns of sprawling development that makes traveling without a car impossible and promotes unsightly seas of asphalt. In short, parking mandates have silently shaped how we live and how we get around. 

City planners know that parking minimums are too high. That’s why they have layered on exceptions over the years whether for downtown zones or historic buildings. In addition to those exceptions and overlays making zoning more complicated for small businesses or homeowners to navigate, cities are still blindly copying each other’s base codes and killing new homes in the process. Therefore, all our rankings use the standard parking mandates that apply city- or county-wide. These are the numbers that property owners and planning staff are both stuck trying to navigate around. 

Below we call out some of the most onerous parking requirements for a variety of building types and community members: for entrepreneurs, restaurants, renters, daycares, and families seeking apartments.  Don’t see your town? Find complete listings of all jurisdictions in the full report. 

View the report here

Worst parking mandates for entrepreneurs 

No one cares more about the success of a small business than the people pouring their life savings into it. Yet local governments think they know best when it comes to how many parking spaces a new store, law office, or coffeeshop might need.  

High mandates rule out plenty of otherwise suitable properties in favor of lots large enough to accommodate the mandatory parking. As a rule of thumb, a mandate of 3 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet forces property owners to dedicate as much space to parking as the building itself. You can see how this land-hungry requirement drives new businesses to the edge of town or prevents them from opening altogether. 

We added together the base requirements for 1,000 square feet of each of these common uses (office, retail, and restaurants) to see which jurisdictions create the highest barriers to opening a business. Here are the top ten:

Worst parking mandates for opening a restaurant 

Restaurants have the highest number of parking spaces required compared to other business uses. The most common mandate among Washington cities, 10 spaces per 1,000 square feet, requires parking lots to be over three times as large as the diner itself (see all the #3 listings in the table below).  

Here are the places most burdening their aspiring restaurant owners: 

Highest parking burden on renters 

Three out of every five renter households in Washington have one or no cars. Yet many cities require more parking than tenants really need. Even in studio apartments, where renters forgo a bedroom to save money, local governments require those homes to have an off-street parking space, adding to the cost of rent and reducing the number of homes that can be built on any given property. 

Here are the places most burdening even their studio apartment renters:

Most discouraging parking mandates for daycares  

What’s more important for children: space for play? Or a parking lot? Or an available daycare slot at all? 

The state of Washington requires that daycare centers have 75 square feet of outdoor play area for each child. But local governments frequently require that even more outdoor space be dedicated to parking cars. The average Washington daycare in our research mandated 87 square feet of parking per child. Piling on these land-intensive requirements can make it difficult to find sites that can accommodate daycares, which any parent knows are in short supply. 

Here are the places mandating the most parking, in square feet, for much-needed daycare centers:

Biggest parking penalty for family-sized apartments  

Many local governments assume that if your apartment has more bedrooms, you need more parking. That is the case sometimes, but assuming that everybody drives makes it more difficult for families to find housing they can afford. What good are extra parking spaces for a single mom who has two school-age children? On space-constrained lots, increased parking mandates pose an additional barrier for homebuilders who might otherwise provide family size units.  

These cities have the highest penalty for more bedrooms. (note that figures listed are the additional number of parking spaces required for a three-bedroom apartment over and above what the jurisdiction already requires for a studio apartment):

Moving on from parking mandates 

Despite 99 percent of parking spots in the United States being free to use, they come with costs that we all bear. The expense of building them, the space they take up in high-value areas, the costs they add to building new homes or businesses, the homes and business never built because parking costs tipped the financial scales, the pavement they roll across acres and acres of our communities, creating ugly, dangerous heat islands or sprawl into treasured open lands… the impacts are many, deep, and lasting. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Already, towns and cities across North America are changing their tune on parking mandates. Some hopeful signs: 

• Twice as many small towns as large cities are ditching parking mandates, showing it’s not just the transit rich urban centers that can do this. 
• The reform is gaining traction across partisan lines, from bluer locales like Bellingham, Austin, and Minnesota, to redder ones like Anchorage, Montana, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. 
• Businesses are getting wise to its benefits, too, from Anchorage to Oregon. Even Walmart is petitioning cities to build less parking for their stores due to the rise in online shopping. 
• And just this year in Washington, small peninsular Port Townsend and second largest city Spokane took home the gold in putting people ahead of cars, nixing parking mandates town- and citywide. (Peep all Spokane’s zero entries in the full report’s tables.)  

All this is to say: the high costs of parking mandates are completely optional. Washington’s communities can choose to end these arbitrary mandates today and start building a future that prioritizes people, not just parking lots. 

Read the full report