In this episode, I talk with Catie Gould and Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute about the "dark matter" of urban land use: parking — specifically, the municipal parking mandates that help make housing more expensive and scarce. We discuss a landmark new parking reform bill in my home state of Washington, what it does and the coalition that made it possible, and point to other places where parking reform is coming soon.
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Text transcript:
Parking reform in Washington, parking reform everywhere!
David Roberts
Hello everyone. This is Volts for May 28, 2025, "Parking reform in Washington, parking reform everywhere!" I'm your host, David Roberts. When it comes to urban and suburban land use, there is no topic more delicate and contentious than parking.
Just between us here on the pod, the real reason to think poorly of parking is that, ipso facto, it works against density: the more land devoted to concrete car stalls, the less devoted to everything else, including uses that create much more tax revenue. Excess parking creates urban and suburban dead zones.
But reformers who work on the ground trying to change this stuff will beg you not to talk that way in public, because the average voter's disposition towards density ranges from uncomprehending to neutral to negative, whereas parking is something everyone knows, often needs, and is generally happy to find. "Less of something you like in the name of something you don't give a damn about" is not exactly a political winner.
So how can reformers work to remove some of the onerous parking regulations that make building housing more difficult and expensive than it needs to be? What kind of coalitions do they build? What kind of policies do they push?
To get into all of that, today I am going to talk with some folks from my home state of Washington, where an absolutely kick-ass bit of parking reform was recently passed by the legislature and signed into law. They are from the Pacific Northwest's own Sightline Institute, which is, in my humble opinion, pound for pound, one of the best think tanks going — they choose good fights and have an impact well out of proportion to their size. And they played a key role in this parking victory.
Catie Gould is a senior transportation researcher there, and Alan Durning is the founder and executive director. They're going to fill me in on what's in the bill, how it got done, and what's next. So, let's parallel park this thing.
With no further ado, Catie Gould, Alan Durning, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Catie Gould
Thanks for having us.
Alan Durning
Oh, thank you for having us.
David Roberts
Very excited to get into this. This is juicy, juicy stuff. Catie, I want to get to you in a minute for the details of Washington's bill. But Alan, maybe let's just start with you. You have been running Sightline, gosh, since the 1900s. So tell me, when did urban land use come on your radar and become a priority? And then secondarily — this is a tripartite question — secondarily, when did parking reform emerge out of that as its own distinct fight? And then third, why do you think parking reform is a good fight to pick?
Alan Durning
Wow, right up front, three hard questions. Just to tell the historical answer and wind up to the big one about why parking is so important. Since 1993, Sightline has been focused on making Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest region, a model of sustainability. And quickly, like within the first year, we were focused on urban sustainability as well as rural. At that time, the big fights were about salmon and old growth forests and things like that. And we said, "Look, climate change is the epochal challenge before us, and to get to that, we need to look at the shape of our cities and sprawl and all the rest of it."
So, land use was on the agenda from the very beginning. In 1994, I was doing an interview for our flagship book with a transportation scholar in Victoria, and he turned me on to parking. He was talking about this guy named Donald Shoup.
David Roberts
Yeah, Shoup goes way back.
Alan Durning
Exactly. He went on to become the patron saint of parking reform. May he rest in peace. He passed away earlier this year. The author of an amazing book called "The High Cost of Free Parking."
David Roberts
Highly recommended on this subject.
Alan Durning
It's the way to get parking-pilled. Catie and I have each read all 733 pages at least once. But in 2012, I think I was just wrapping up a series of articles about silly regulatory barriers to doing common sense, good green things. And I thought, "Oh, I'll just finish out the series by doing a single article about parking regulations." And that metastasized into 40,000 words and 15 articles. You know how this goes, David.
David Roberts
I'm familiar.
Alan Durning
You're familiar. Yeah, I just thought I'd do it, I'd just whip out a quick article, and it turned out that parking connects to everything that we care about in the world. It connects to economic opportunity and prosperity. It connects to climate, of course, a core issue for Sightline, but also it attaches to and is important to the cost of housing and the opportunities to start and operate small businesses. Everything turns out to be connected to parking. That's why I say we're kind of parking-pilled. So, in 1993, we started writing about it.
David Roberts
So you were on urban land use then, before, it was cool?
Alan Durning
That's true. I mean, is it cool now?
David Roberts
I think it's cool.
Alan Durning
Is it?
David Roberts
We're making it cool, Alan. Come on, buck up. It's cool now, we're cool.
Alan Durning
Okay. Well, it's news to me. My children will be delighted to learn that I'm cool. And why parking? I just kind of gave the answer. Parking turns out to be — it's like dark matter. It's like most of the universe turns out to be dark matter, according to the cosmologists. And parking policy turns out to be just similarly influential in how we live our lives and how our cities are shaped. It's this invisible force that shapes how cities develop. It affects everything that we care about. Most prominently in Washington, the cost of housing, which is the key driver of most political movement in the states, is the top political issue.
David Roberts
When we talk about parking regulations, are we mostly talking about parking minimums, parking mandates? Is that the evil here that we're after?
Alan Durning
Well, let's not define it as an evil, but it is the dark and invisible force. And yes. So, when we say parking regulation, what we're talking about is that cities all over the United States and other countries as well, to a certain extent, have hidden in their code books, in their local ordinances, requirements on every building lot about how many off-street parking spaces need to be provided based on what type of building it's going to be. And these mandates, these parking mandates, dictate what home builders can do and what developers of office buildings can do, and so on and so forth.
These lists of these mandates, these requirements run to, you know, sometimes dozens of different rules for like what, what's required of a bowling alley? What's required of a daycare?
David Roberts
Yeah, and the really fun part is that like a bowling alley in one town might, you know, be required to have like two parking spaces per lane, and in another town it's five, another town it's ten. These things are not derived from any formula or math or science.
Alan Durning
Like, I think it's 12.5 in Puyallup, Washington for bowling.
David Roberts
Completely arbitrary.
Catie Gould
Because they don't regulate it per lane, they regulate per square footage there. And bowling alleys require huge amounts of square footage. So, if someone was actually going to build one, they would be proposing their own number and having to provide their own study because no one could build that much.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. And we should say that, like parking, is expensive. Like, this is another thing I think people intuitively don't necessarily get about it because it looks like it's just a patch of concrete on the ground. But that's expensive. It's expensive to build, it's expensive to maintain. It's not a small thing to require it of a builder.
Alan Durning
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I maligned Puyallup, mistakenly; it was Redmond that required 12 or the equivalent of 12, and Catie can explain all the details of it. We need to get Catie into the conversation. But let me talk a little bit about the cost. The cost of parking is really very substantial. The real estate value of a parking space in the Pacific Northwest, just as space, starts at at least $5,000. And if you're talking about a constructed space, like underground parking or something, it might cost, like, $60,000 or more. In fact, there are calculations that we did years ago that suggest that the aggregate value of our parking exceeds the aggregate value of our vehicles.
Yeah, this is just epic quantities of money because we're allocating 10-20% of the surface area of our cities to parking.
David Roberts
Yeah, what blew my mind in this — I mean, you know, I've gotten a little parking-pilled, too — and one of the things that did it for me is these aerial maps that they have now where they just shade parking in a city. And you look at these aerial maps, and you're like, "Holy crap, that's like half — that's literally like half the city is just dead concrete. That's, like, occupied, like, 5% of the time." It's really insane when you contemplate it. So when we talk about reforming these parking mandates, generally, what we want is just to get rid of them.
And to be clear here, we'll probably say this 10 times throughout the pod. That does not mean getting rid of parking. Getting rid of parking mandates does not mean getting rid of parking. You just are allowing the developer of the bowling alley to determine on their own, contextually, how many parking spaces will be needed. Is that right? I mean, that's the nut of it.
Catie Gould
Yes, it's really about who gets to make this decision about what is an adequate amount of parking. Is it the property owner deciding what they want to do on their own land or what they think they need? Or is it someone from the city planning office, whoever was on city council back in 1967, the last time that these rules were updated, which is the case in many places.
David Roberts
I know. And they were just pulling these — it's not like there was good science in 1967, either — they pulled them out of their wazoo 50 years ago, and they've completely shaped urban space ever since. It's wild. Like dark matter, I think, is a good comparison. All right, so that's background. Catie, let's talk about this bill. Very exciting, the Parking Reform and Modernization Act just passed legislature, just was signed by the governor a couple of weeks ago. I want to talk about some of the background of the bill, but first, let's just get to the meat and potatoes of what it is and what it does.
Oh, and one other note before I toss it to you, I just want to put on record here that this bill was sponsored by Senator Jessica Bateman, who may be familiar to Volts' listeners who knew her two years ago as Representative Jessica Bateman. I talked to her two years ago just after she had been instrumental in passing a bunch of incredible housing reform through the House. Now, two years later, she's in the Senate and she's passing kick-ass parking reform. We stan Senator Jessica Bateman here on this pod.
Alan Durning
Absolutely.
David Roberts
All right, Catie, go for it. What does this bill do?
Catie Gould
The bill does a lot of things, but the basic summary is it removes parking minimums as a binding constraint of construction in most circumstances in Washington State. So anyways, I'm going to go through a list of the specifics, but generally, that's going to be the future of Washington.
David Roberts
Right. And the core of it is certain building types are exempted whole cloth. There's like a set of those. What are those?
Catie Gould
So, that includes, this is going to sound really basic. Existing buildings that are changing from one use to another use. Maybe a hotel turning into apartments or an office turning into a restaurant. Whatever amount of parking you already have is fine. It's very hard for existing buildings to add more parking. This is a big barrier that keeps buildings vacant or kind of stuck in a use anyway. So, that's the first on the list. Others are small residences. So, any housing that's smaller than 1,200 square feet, this is the vast majority of apartments that are getting built today.
David Roberts
So, any apartment under 1,200ft, there's no —
Catie Gould
Sure, or an ADU or a house, any type of residence.
David Roberts
Right.
Catie Gould
Commercial spaces under 3,000 square feet, affordable housing, senior housing, childcare facilities, any ground floor use on a mixed-use building. Think of something with a store on the bottom and apartments on top. That bottom floor is not required to have any parking.
David Roberts
Ooh, that's a good one.
Catie Gould
Yeah, mixed-use buildings where there are multiple types of uses are particularly challenging for parking mandates now, because additional uses, they get added up together. So, if you have three different things going on in one building, you have an apartment, a store, an office, those peak times are going to happen during different times of the day. But city code usually assumes that nobody is sharing the parking lot, or they might give you a little 10% reduction or something. So anyways, we know this is going to be a really impactful reform. So, those are the list of spaces that no longer are required to have any parking.
And for situations outside of that, cities and counties are limited to requiring only a maximum of one parking space for a single-family detached house, a half a parking space per home for multifamily housing, and two parking spaces for every thousand square feet of commercial space.
David Roberts
Okay, so for those of us who are not sort of like parking mandate literate, what is the significance of these caps? Are these caps low? What's this going to translate to?
Catie Gould
They are low. So, we did a huge survey of zoning codes in Washington. We probably spent a year working on it, off and on, to put it together. So, for reference, the average in Washington state of how much parking is required for just a typical office is three parking spaces per thousand square feet. That is a general rule of thumb. Three parking spaces per thousand square feet means that the parking lot is required to be equal to the size of the building. Because parking takes up a lot of room. So, if you're kind of doing this math, right, if you want to build an office, the city is requiring half of that property to be a parking lot.
This is the low end today. It goes up from there. The average is for a retail store, four parking spaces. For restaurants, the most common requirement is 10 parking spaces per thousand square feet, which means the diner is taking up a really small percentage of the property, and most of it is required to be a parking lot.
David Roberts
So, if you wonder why you drive around the state and you see all these little, like a Denny's, plopped in the middle of a giant sea of concrete, that's why. They have to.
Catie Gould
Yes, there are many factors that go into anyone deciding how much parking they want to build, including what the banks and the lenders are expecting or what comparable buildings are like. How are they doing? But this is kind of the first step of what can you legally do? What can you legally build?
David Roberts
Right. Okay. So, you have a set of building types that are exempt completely, and then you have these caps for everything else. You are not allowed to require more than one space per detached house, two spaces per thousand square feet of commercial, and half a space per home for multifamily.
Catie Gould
Correct.
Alan Durning
And this is a good moment to interject, which does not limit any property owner in the state of Washington to install exactly as much or as little parking as they would like. It just says, "What can cities require of them?"
David Roberts
Can't repeat that enough. None of this specifies what developers have to do. It just says the city cannot require them to do more than this.
Catie Gould
That's right. So, this bill just gives builders more flexibility, more choices, more options.
David Roberts
Right, right. So, the bill excludes cities with populations under 30,000. That just looks to me like a classic bit of, like, horse trading there. There's no substantive — I mean, all the reasons parking regulations are bad still apply when you're in a small town. What is the sort of politics of that? How did that come about? Like, is 30,000 — did someone just make up that number?
Catie Gould
Well, it's a great story, actually. So, just from the policy perspective, there is no justification for parking mandates anywhere, right? I would like to be absolutely clear. They do not make sense in rural places. They do not make sense far away from transit. These numbers are made up everywhere. They cause problems everywhere, right? One of the little stories that I found over the last year was this mini mart in Mattawa, right, which is way out in eastern Washington, a very small little town. Someone wanted to build a mini mart and they just wanted to build 33 parking spaces, but the zoning code required 10 parking spaces per thousand square feet, so they would have to build 100, right?
And they applied for a variance and got denied. Now, the Port of Mattawa is sending a letter to the mayor, saying, "This number's too high. We would love to have this business in our community."
David Roberts
And who wants a mini-mart if it's surrounded by 100 parking spaces? Like, in a small town? That's not a small amount of the total land. You know what I mean? And we've all been to these small towns in Washington and elsewhere where there's just like 12 people here. "Why is there so much parking?" I always think that when I go to those places. Anyway. Go on.
Catie Gould
Yeah, nobody loves a huge empty parking lot either, right? They're kind of universally hated, but this is like one of the ways that they come into being. So, the main opposition to any parking reform bill comes from city councils, mainly in different types of communities of different sizes, for sure. But many people say, and this is true, "People in my community drive. They're dependent on our cars, our built environment. You have to drive to get around." This is kind of the argument against parking reform. And there's a fear, "What if there's not enough parking?"
You know, people drive, therefore they need parking. This is a true statement, right? Cars have to be stored somewhere.
David Roberts
And if you're just a normal, everyday driver, like, that's your experience of things. Like, you don't experience excess parking, you know, on a sort of macro level from your little micro level, driving around. Parking is almost always something you want.
Catie Gould
Yeah, so the bill started out when it was introduced. It applied to every community in Washington. That was the correct place to start. It got narrowed down to just cities, over 20,000 people in the Senate and then in the House to 30,000. And that amendment specifically came from Representative Stuebe, who is the mayor of Washougal.
David Roberts
Which, let me guess, has between 20 and 30,000 people?
Catie Gould
It has 17,000. But they're also one of the few cities that have recently increased their parking minimums. A couple of years ago, they increased their parking minimums downtown. I hate to say it, but this is what happened in response to a presentation about an affordable housing project.
David Roberts
Ah, that's perfect, of course, beautiful. Let's get parking in. Keep the affordable housing away. Ah, love it. I'm guessing the rhetoric around that was like, "Out here in, you know, the sticks, we don't want you city folks telling us what to do with our land." This type of, I mean, was that the shtick?
Catie Gould
Yeah, "The people here drive. We don't have good transit. People are going to keep driving." Yeah. So that's all true. This is the kind of the biggest narrative fight that we're constantly arguing is that, you know, actually nobody has to stop driving for this reform to make sense. What we're talking about most often is situations where, you know, there's room for a 19 car parking lot but 24 are required by code. That's the problem that is most common. We're not talking about a ton of new buildings having no parking at all. And that all of a sudden, Washougal is going to become this like car-free community.
David Roberts
I know you have to imagine — to be scared of this — you have to imagine a developer coming in, building a big new building, purposefully not building enough parking, and then several more developers doing that too over the course of years. Such that what, like in 10, 20 years it's hard to find a parking space? Like literally, what is the fear? I can't even sort of construct a worst-case scenario that they're imagining here. Developers don't want to put in too little parking. You know what I mean? It's weird to imagine that they would do that systematically.
Alan Durning
There is a good faith argument for parking requirements, which we think is mistaken, but at least it's somewhat rational. And then there's bad faith arguments. The Washougal example is a bad faith argument where an off-street parking requirement is being used to exclude certain types of land use.
And so, it's a pretext. It's not the actual reason. The actual reason is that Washougal doesn't want affordable housing, and it is entirely within the state's purview to intervene and say, "No, every community needs to take affordable housing," which is why affordable housing is now exempted from off-street parking requirements statewide in Washington. But the rationale that's often given, and that most cities gave in their testimony on this — or the cities that opposed, we had the support of a number of cities — but is the idea that developers will shirk on their responsibility and that there'll be visitors to their buildings who will end up parking on the street in the neighborhood, and that the people who already live there will dislike that.
Those people may put pressure on their local elected officials. Nobody gets elected to a city council or mayor because they want to work on neighborhood parking conflicts.
David Roberts
Even the phrase itself sends a shiver down the spine, doesn't it?
Alan Durning
You do not want to get yelled at by neighbors. And so, off-street parking requirements evolved, we think, as best we can tell. This has not actually been carefully studied by historians, but we think that they developed as a defense against neighbors getting mad about what's called "spillover parking."
David Roberts
Yeah, this is something you hear on Nextdoor a lot. It's just like, "If this happens, these people are going to come park where I'm accustomed to parking in front of my house."
Alan Durning
So, if the council says to the planners, "Bring me a policy that will prevent me from ever getting yelled at by neighbors about some stranger parking in front of their house..." And the planners also don't study parking policy in school. They're not trained in parking policy. They're like, you know, trained in, like, how to design nice things and where to put the streets and where to put the parks and so on. And so they look around for some solution. And in one study, it showed that 45% of them were just copying and pasting the regulations from some other nearby community.
We continue to see that happen. So, His Highness, Donald Shoup, the great theorist of parking policy, described this process as "nonsense on stilts." It's pseudoscience.
David Roberts
If you study policy long enough, you find lots of things like this, like, "Why do we do things this way?" And it really turns out to be there's no reason other than, like, the last person did it that way and the person before that did it that way. And you can trace that line back for decades, sometimes, decades since anyone sat down and said, "But why?"
Alan Durning
And it's completely true. In this circumstance, it solves a political problem for local elected officials that they don't have to hear anymore. But it imposes enormous costs because it ends up with putting — Catie was saying that, to steal your line — this is like trying to hang a picture with a sledgehammer. Like maybe you'll get the picture hung up, but you're going to put giant holes in the walls and you're putting giant holes in our communities by requiring so much off-street parking that no visitor ever might park on the street. There is a legitimate on-street parking management issue and cities need to figure out how to manage that.
But they can do that at a much lower cost than the current policy.
Catie Gould
Parking mandates are the worst tool for the job. There are so many examples that I've seen where, you know, the street parking is full. It's becoming an issue. Meanwhile, the off-street parking, like there are thousands of parking spots off the street, and they're half full. But they're not being managed in a great way because they're all owned by different entities.
David Roberts
Well, I believe King Shoup was a fan of pricing as a way of managing scarcity, which I believe, you know, it's really a favorite way of managing scarcity going back centuries now. But good lord, I imagine if you go to a small town and propose charging them for what used to be free parking, you would get run out on rails. Catie, talk a little bit about the significance of this. Also covering commercial uses because as I understand it, that's unique to Washington that we got that in. Is that true?
Catie Gould
Yes, I believe it is true. I mean, there's a lot of focus, rightly so, on housing right now. But the commercial does help the housing as well. And I'll give you an example. In Olympia, there's the Capitol Mall. I don't know if you've ever been there. It has a huge parking lot that is mostly empty most of the time. And officials from the city and planners, they would love to grow that whole area into, you know, a denser, walkable, mixed-use area where there's housing and different types of businesses and to really focus some growth there.
Currently, they cannot. You cannot take away a single parking spot from that mall because it is under parked. Right. If that mall was built today, it would need over 200 more parking spaces just to meet the zoning code today.
David Roberts
So even if you updated the building, you would trigger those new mandates.
Catie Gould
Yes, you cannot do anything to the building right now because the category that it's under in the commercial code requires 4.5 parking spaces per thousand square feet. That's the current requirement for that mall. And that is stopping any development from happening in that area. Right. So now, they have space to play with because of this bill.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's madness that we did this to ourselves. I wonder what is the opposition from the commercial sector relative to opposition from homeowners? Like, do business owners also get upset about this or were they easier? Was it easier to sort of roll them into this? What's their political sort of disposition?
Catie Gould
Every business owner is a person, so I'll start there.
David Roberts
So you say.
Catie Gould
And everyone has had experiences of where it's hard to park. And I would say the business community is not a monolith; they all want lower parking mandates. I think sometimes businesses have a lot of fears that if it's harder to park to get to my store, that's bad for me. And all the decisions that are happening outside of me kind of impact that, you know, and what we talked about were some very specific, really sympathetic cases. One of the stories that was just really emotionally resonant was about this daycare that couldn't open in Ridgefield. Dana Christiansen, she runs another daycare.
She is on the board of the Washington Childcare Centers Association, and she found this large property that seemed suitable. She made an offer and purchased this property. She and her architect were working through the layout of the site kind of in this 60-day period. They could only find room for 29 parking spaces, which, for the record, was way more than she thought she needed. She thought, you know, a dozen, 18 spaces would be totally adequate for her. But that land is regulated by Clark County, and they require two parking spaces per employee for daycare centers.
So, she needed 32 parking spaces.
David Roberts
Per employee? Every one of these sounds more random than the last.
Catie Gould
I mean, we can go all day. So, they were trying to — we're three spaces short. They're trying to figure this out. And then the city calls and says, "Don't forget about the landscaping islands that are required to be in the parking lot. To like, ameliorate the impacts of large parking lots with the stormwater runoff."
Anyways, they walked away from the site. This area is in a daycare desert, where there's a real lack of childcare spots compared to the number of children. Most Washington families live in childcare deserts. So, I think, no matter where you think about parking mandates, this is a great story that I love to start with because I think most people could agree it's ridiculous to not be able to open a daycare over three parking spaces. That's what these rules do.
David Roberts
I know people love stories; the public loves stories. But I'm a nerd, and I love studies. So, talk about that study that the Colorado government did, because I thought that was very striking. Like, I think people can sort of accept on an intellectual level, yeah, if you need more parking, you're going to get less other stuff, but it's not a small effect.
Alan Durning
Yeah, it's dark matter.
Catie Gould
So, there was some analysis in Colorado that got published this fall that really helped push the salience of the bill this year where they modeled — not no parking buildings. Right. Just for the record, we're not talking about any buildings having no parking. All buildings had some parking, but they modeled for new buildings that are going to be near transit. They're building a half a spot per unit, and then everything elsewhere is building one parking space per unit. So, we're making assumptions about lots of car ownership here. And they found that those numbers compared to the current zoning codes in those Colorado cities, it meant an overall increase, 40% more homes would become financially feasible to build.
And the main mechanism for that is, think about a multifamily building that's already planned. Right, that's going to happen maybe no matter what. But they can only build, you know, 20 apartments. They're limited by the parking. And once that barrier goes away, now they can add an additional floor to the building with the same amount of parking. So that's how those numbers happen.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's the biggest effect. It's adding more units to existing buildings in a way that you couldn't if you had to add a bunch more parking.
Catie Gould
Correct.
Alan Durning
That's exactly right. And that's why there's such a huge effect on housing costs. On the one hand, housing parking is expensive to build, but even more importantly, physically, you just can't put an apartment and a parking space in the same location on a lot. You have to choose one or the other, and it ends up being a huge constraint, reducing the number of units that can be built, the number of dwellings, maybe as much as a third in some cases. So, this is why the issue of parking in Washington's legislative debate ended up being part of the multi-year effort to address Washington's housing shortage.
I think we'll maybe come around to this more. But the reason that I think we were able to win this was that it wasn't a debate about transit and transportation and people's cars. It was about where are we going to live, where are our children and grandchildren going to live? And that trumps people's love for parking.
David Roberts
You wrote that this parking reform was unthinkable even two years ago. Like, it actually, there was a failed attempt, I think, prior to this. So, things changed pretty dramatically in two years. And you wrote a really great article about why — you have seven, I counted them, seven reasons why this was able to happen this time and not last time. So, maybe let's just go through a few of those because I think they're really educational. Because a lot of this I want to orient toward like other people in other places who want to get into parking reform.
You know, what helps, what's good. So, let's talk about a few of those reasons that enabled this sort of a really transformation.
Catie Gould
Yeah. Hold on, let me pull up my own article.
David Roberts
Well, starting with, I'll cue you for the first one, which I thought was interesting. The previous attempt had gone after parking mandates via their proximity to transit.
Catie Gould
Yes.
David Roberts
It had attempted to say, if you are X distance from transit, you have lower mandates. That ended up kind of falling apart. A lot of arguments about what counts as transit, what counts as proximity, what counts as this or that. And so, there is a different focus for this bill. Talk about that a little bit.
Catie Gould
Yeah. So, that initial bill two years ago, and this is kind of where I enter the Washington story. I'd been doing work in other jurisdictions on parking reform, including Oregon and Anchorage. This was a copycat essentially of California's successful AB 2097 that did eliminate parking mandates near transit. That happened maybe in the fall of 2022. And Washington legislators said, "That sounds like a great idea. Let's do that here." And yeah, it really fell flat. There was, I think, a lot of opposition. "People still drive," you know, like "More people aren't going to use transit. There's maybe one qualifying bus line in my community, but the transit's enough to get around."
David Roberts
Yeah, this is what people hear that and they're like, "Well, I'm close to transit, but I can't live without a car." You know what I mean?
Catie Gould
And they cannot imagine giving up their car. And when the conversation is over there in that space, there's just no possible way to win it. Like, you get stuck, you know, in this just like, pit of, like this is not even the right issue to be talking about. And transit kind of pushes the conversation that way. It's also very vulnerable to being watered down. I think to get a vote out of one committee, they shrunk the radius by half. And that cuts your reform area by 75%. Right. So these small tweaks in the numbers, all of a sudden, all these properties that were going to see benefits from reform now aren't.
David Roberts
And it seems like you're going to get — I mean, I don't know if this is going to happen in California or not — but you're going to get weird things where, like, builders are sort of like targeting areas based on their distance to transit. You know what I mean?
Catie Gould
Yes, I mean, people want to — it's a good idea to maximize the number of homes and businesses and services near transit. Of course, that's a good idea. These are areas where people want to build anyway. So there's nothing wrong with eliminating parking mandates near transit. But the issue is so much bigger than that. So what we did kind of after we lost that fight was really to focus on stories about how parking mandates cause issues everywhere in all these small communities, places that aren't well served by transit. So people can think about the issue more broadly.
And the bill was designed to go after these, you know, kind of sympathetic uses, but I would say high impact uses. One of the findings that came out of Oregon, they had some administrative rules that went into effect a few years ago where parking mandates were eliminated near transit, but also this whole host of other kind of equity uses, which, if you notice, is going to look very similar to what we passed in Washington. And in the case studies, when I was talking to builders about "I'm trying to find examples of, like, how are people using the parking reform? Let's see examples of projects that wouldn't have been possible before."
A lot of those projects, yes, they would have qualified in their transit proximity — Oregon also had a very generous transit proximity — but they also would have qualified for being a small residence, for affordable housing. For some of these other uses as well.
David Roberts
So, you want to get the public thinking, "Should we really require X amount of spots for a daycare?" It's just a better context to be contemplating these things than this transit distance.
Catie Gould
It is.
David Roberts
And so, that won a lot of people over because, you know, it's a lot harder to argue, you know, like, "This small town is better off without this daycare because God forbid they had, you know..."
They don't have enough bus service for a daycare.
Catie Gould
Some backup in the morning, pickup line. We don't want that. All right. Focusing on building types and sort of specific situations, contexts rather than transit distance was a real key. You also mentioned pulling together real stories. You mentioned this woman with the daycare. Like, that's gold. People whose lives are concretely affected by these things. By the way, how do you find those people?
David Roberts
Do you just, like, put out a bat-signal? People who know someone who knows someone. Like, how do you come up with those?
Catie Gould
I think I found her specifically. I was going through a different bill in the legislature a few years ago that was about daycare-related zoning. And she kind of told this story in her testimony. So then I reached out to her. But, you know, sometimes people come to me to say, "Oh, this thing happened to me. Can you help? Do you know how to help me with this situation?" That happens sometimes. People give me tips for stories all the time. But also, and I'll just say this to, like, any regular listener, if you just look into the notes of what's happening at the planning commission, these cases happen all the time.
And I love working with city planning staff because they know all the projects that are not getting built in their community. This stuff is universal.
Alan Durning
That's right.
David Roberts
The third thing which I'm also really interested in is, you come at this with a broad coalition, which, you know, on one level, like, "Duh." Obviously, a broad coalition is better than a narrow one. But on the other hand, it's a little mystifying because, as I said up top, like, this is not something that spontaneously moves — most voters don't think about it at all. And if they think about it at all, they like parking. Who's in this coalition and how are you pulling them together?
Alan Durning
Maybe I could jump in and help with this one. John F. Kennedy said, "Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan." And we've been an orphan on this issue for a lot of years. We've been howling in the wilderness about parking reforms. Three years ago, we couldn't find anyone to sponsor a bill. This year we had Jessica Bateman, who is the ace of the legislature, and her leadership was incredibly important. But Catie and the rest of Sightline's team were able to assemble an amazing coalition in support of this reform. And it's partly, you have to understand this in the context of seven years of Sightline working on abundant housing legislation in the Washington legislature and in neighboring jurisdictions as well, where we've been having one conversation after another with legislators and with other interest groups, with the AARP and the Habitat for Humanity and the realtors and the builders and the trade unions and everyone else gradually building up understanding of the importance of zoning regulations and parking regulations as well.
Catie was able to pass a bill last year that was kind of a starter bill. It was rather modest in scope, but it, for the first time, got the legislature to begin intervening in parking regulations statewide. Then, building on that, this year, she and the rest of our team were able to assemble what, 56 different Washington organizations and cities spanning the political spectrum, from the Building Industry Association of Washington, which is usually a very conservative Republican-aligned organization, or the realtors or the master builders, all the way over to the social justice and climate justice organizations on the left. Everyone was in lockstep on this, along with lots and lots of individual elected officials from localities, all lined up against basically just the Association of Washington Cities whose job it is to defend the prerogatives of cities.
It's their job to protect local control. So, it's no surprise that they would be standing up. But, we did not find huge opposition from other organizations. The homeowners did not mobilize against us.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Alan Durning
AAA didn't mobilize against us. This was largely a process of building enough comfort among the legislators by surrounding them with supportive messages. We built a — Catie and her team put together a huge parade, and then we invited Jessica Bateman and other legislators to walk in front of it. And we ended up winning with bipartisan support. A majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats in the state Senate.
David Roberts
Wild.
Catie Gould
And I'm going to fact-check you on that, Alan. I don't know, I don't think it was a majority of Republicans.
Alan Durning
In the State Senate, it was, Catie. I looked it up on your fact sheets. In the State House, we did not have a majority of Republicans, but we had a substantial number of Republicans in the Senate.
Catie Gould
Great.
David Roberts
Yeah, and this is — how to ask this question? Like, there are some issues where you win, where most of the people in your coalition are in your coalition for sort of contingent or unrelated reasons. But is this more of an issue where persuasion worked? Like, all these people are on the right side of this because they heard the arguments and they were convinced?
Catie Gould
Yeah, a lot of these organizations have direct experiences with these regulations. And I think, at least on my end, talking to these organizations over the years, as I'm doing reporting on this issue, is that lots of people would love to see reform. They just don't think it's politically possible and therefore they're not going to make it their top issue for the next session. And we say, "Okay, well, we're going to make it our top issue and you can come along with us." And I think when Bateman decided to sponsor the bill that year, it really changed the dynamics and all these organizations are going to invest more of their time into making this pass.
David Roberts
Well, this is a classic case of pluralistic ignorance, which I'm sure you guys are familiar with, which is like, everybody's sort of on the right page on this, but they don't know that other people are. So in those situations, like an organization like yours coming in and saying, "Hey, look, you all already agree."
Alan Durning
That's right. Lots and lots of individual conversations. And remember, this is part of an effort where there's a lot of other housing-related bills. Sightline worked on seven and there were a few others as well. And so the strength of relationship and trust that had been building over these years carried over into parking. When we and others said, "You know, the next thing on the agenda is parking. We're going to go big on parking this year." And folks who we'd worked with for years on things like legalizing accessory dwelling units or legalizing duplexes, were like, "Oh, okay, well, you guys keep nattering on about parking. We'll listen a little more closely this year." And this year, everyone was ready to go.
David Roberts
And, Catie, you also mentioned local progress. So, there are towns and cities in Washington who have removed parking mandates. And so, we're not guessing or speculating about what happens when you do this. So, share a little bit about what happens, because it's like, it's one of those things where when I read it, I was like, "Oh, well, obviously." But I wouldn't have guessed beforehand, but basically, what happens is very little. Like, people continue to build parking.
Catie Gould
Like, yeah, the sky doesn't fall.
David Roberts
Everything's fine. Yeah.
Catie Gould
This was certainly really helpful, I think, in making legislators more comfortable. Back in 2023, no city in Washington had fully repealed their parking minimums. And this year, coming into the session, three had. Right. Of all different sizes. Port Townsend, Bellingham, and Spokane.
David Roberts
Ooh, go Bellingham! All right. My kids go to school in Bellingham, so I love a Bellingham story.
Catie Gould
And we had public officials from all three of those cities in support of the bill, so that was really helpful. Some things that have happened, let's see: In Bellingham, their reform is really, really recent. They just adopted it in January, but their planning director testified at the hearings, and they're already having some buildings — what's happening is there are buildings that are already somewhere in the permit process, and now the builders are going back and adding more housing units because they have that flexibility. So they have one building that went from 60 to 80 homes, another from 12 to 40.
So, those are just some examples, right? Of, like, more housing is happening because of these reforms. Spokane, which is a much bigger city, said that it's only in really rare circumstances where a property is really oddly shaped or there's some really constraining circumstances, is no parking getting built at all. The vast majority, they're still building parking.
David Roberts
Yes, like, developers will build enough parking to service the buildings they're building. Like, why wouldn't they? So, like, the sky doesn't fall, and generally, the amount of parking doesn't change dramatically. It's mostly just these sort of edge cases, like a few more units here, squeeze in a daycare here that you couldn't before. It's mostly these sort of marginal cases that are on the verge that are helped.
Alan Durning
Well, Catie might mention that we actually have some numbers on the reductions in parking from Seattle and Buffalo.
David Roberts
Buffalo, New York, they did reform?
Catie Gould
Yes. So, these are two studies that came out, academic studies that measured — there was more flexibility given in parking, Buffalo, no mandates, Seattle, no mandates in some areas — and how much of an impact that had on housing. And surprise, the vast majority of new buildings still built parking. 70% of new multifamily buildings in Seattle still built parking. 83% of new multifamily buildings in Buffalo still built parking.
Alan Durning
And how much did they reduce the parking that they provided?
Catie Gould
So in Seattle, out of what ended up being built, they ended up with, when there's no parking required, those new buildings had on average, a half a parking space per home ratio.
David Roberts
So, they end up roughly where the cap is in the new bill.
Alan Durning
That's right.
David Roberts
In the neighborhood. So, this again, it's not going to require dramatic change on any particular person's part.
Alan Durning
A modest reduction. What we see in apartment buildings across the Northwest where this has been studied is in the middle of the night, between midnight and 3 a.m., if you go look in their parking lots or parking garages — and people do this, planning students are sent out in the middle of the night — they're finding like, you know, 30 to 40% of the slots are empty because the parking requirements when those buildings were built were excessive. All the parking requirements are just a little bit too high. Everyone errs on the side of it. It's a little bit like in the electricity sector, where you're planning for the peak.
David Roberts
Yes, exactly.
Alan Durning
And so, every parking lot is built for the peak maximum occupancy on Christmas Eve or something. When everyone's going to be at home or for commercial parking at retail establishments, they go out and measure how many people are parking there the Saturday, a week before Christmas, and then they make that the law for the entire state all the time.
David Roberts
That's so dumb. Catie, you mentioned guardrails, including some guardrails in the bill to make people feel more comfortable. Like what?
Catie Gould
Yeah, multiple exceptions got added to this bill.
David Roberts
Oh, yeah, yeah. These little side deals. None of those are — I mean, you can tell me, but just from my glance at those, like they're a little, you know, maybe not totally savory, but they don't seem like they hurt the bill particularly.
Catie Gould
Yeah, there was a concern about what about these really rural county roads where there's no parking on the shoulders. It seems like there should be some off-street parking. We still should require parking there. So, one of the exceptions is that for properties along county roads that do not meet the current local standards, roadway standards, the parking minimums still apply. And I'm going to add a "but" here. But if you're — and this isn't even that rural, there are places in Clark County that are building multifamily apartment buildings that are technically unincorporated Clark County.
It is true that, like going in — I talked to a planner, we looked at some aerial shots — this road didn't have any sidewalks, didn't have any street parking. Often in the development process, builders are required to do what we call frontage improvements, where you have to build a sidewalk, you have to maybe widen the street along your property to get it up to code. And in that case, it seems like they would get the benefits from this parking reform. So, it's hard to say how often this kind of scenario is going to play out in real life.
David Roberts
Yeah, but it made somebody feel better and presumably got a vote.
Catie Gould
It gave reassurances, and the county's lobbyists stopped testifying against the bill.
David Roberts
So, yeah, there's a real art to concessions that do not hurt the main mechanism of the bill. I always love to follow the sausage-making. You said it accommodates disabled drivers quickly. What does that mean?
Catie Gould
Just before we move on, there are two other study options that cities or counties can make a case to commerce that parking mandates, getting rid of them, would pose a safety issue or that their regulations are already close enough to the bill that they don't need to do anything else. So, we'll see how many of those actually get sent in.
David Roberts
Safety? I don't even... I'm trying to construct a scenario where more parking saves a life or whatever. I'm not sure.
Catie Gould
I'm happy to see them make the case.
David Roberts
Yeah. All right, so what do you mean by accommodating disabled drivers?
Catie Gould
One of the provisions of the bill — and this idea came from Disability Rights Washington in a meeting that we had — was that we're directing the Building Code Council to look at the state building code, the kind of ratio of parking spaces that need to be made accessible. Right now, these ratios follow the federal ADA, which was last updated 20 years ago. We have a growing senior population. Right, Adam? And like many people who need those spaces, they feel like the supply is already inadequate. And they have, I think, a very real concern that if the number of parking spaces goes down, these spaces will reduce.
So, we just asked for a study to look at these ratios and maybe update them to go above and beyond the ADA.
David Roberts
Got it. And then the final item on your list is to have good legislative champions, you know, which is obvious, but really crucial. And so, it's good that Senator Bateman was there and is on the right page. And, you know, I just love to see competence these days in our current circumstances. I'm developing a real competence fetish. So, with our time left, let's talk a little bit about beyond Washington here. Who else has done this, is doing this, will do it next? Are there exciting stories outside of Washington?
Catie Gould
Absolutely. Montana passed a very similar bill. It looks a lot like Washington's, just days after we passed ours.
David Roberts
So really substantively similar?
Catie Gould
Yes, I'm friends with the parking advocates in Montana. So, it is a small community of reformers across the country that get online for regular chats about different flavors of bills and different messaging that's working in different places.
David Roberts
Montana is just such a fascinating story, though. I mean, it's housing absolute housing champions here in a red state. I'm going to get some Montana people on the pod soon. Talk about how they did that, how they're talking about it.
Alan Durning
It's a perfect example where Sightline was able to support a Republican-led coalition in Montana and a Democrat-led coalition in Washington to pass basically the same legislation.
David Roberts
Really interesting.
Catie Gould
Yeah, there's also, I'm keeping my eye on this year, there are two states that have full repeal bills in the legislature right now. That's North Carolina. They're very focused on water quality. The Riverkeepers organization is the main driver behind that bill.
David Roberts
Is this like impermeable surfaces and runoff type of thing?
Catie Gould
Yes, runoff. They're also like, most of the argument has been about banning this certain type of pavement sealant, which is also part of the bill. And then also, Connecticut is running a full repeal bill.
David Roberts
Interesting. Is there something we can say to generalize about what states are doing this, or is this just like somebody in those states got a wild hair and did it? You know what I mean? Like, what makes a state a good candidate?
Catie Gould
I think it's the right combination of people getting together to make this possible. These rules are arbitrary everywhere. They're causing problems everywhere. You just need the right collection of people with the right messengers to kind of make this politically possible.
Alan Durning
I think that Washington's win is going to give courage to others in other places. The YIMBY movement, the pro-housing movement, is having increasing success in more and more states, red and blue. And I think that the win in Washington will give them courage to take on housing, which some have regarded as sort of a third rail — that is, you touch it and you die. But we should also mention that there have already been wins in Oregon where we were very involved in getting a rulemaking from the Department of Land Conservation and Development that is resulting in, now I think, 40% of the population of the state is in cities that have no off-street parking requirements.
And more and more cities are coming into conformity with the new state rule. And by the end of the next few years, we'll probably be in a situation in Oregon much like the situation in Washington. California eliminated off-street parking requirements close to transit. And British Columbia, not America, but part of the Cascadia region, so we have to mention it, has similarly eliminated off-street parking requirements close to transit on the California model. Anchorage, Alaska did the same thing thanks to Catie's leadership. And there are a lot of cities that have done this, not just states. Catie can maybe tell us what the current tally is?
Catie Gould
It's constantly changing.
Alan Durning
Constantly changing, yes, but in the scores of American cities that have eliminated their off-street parking requirements, giving flexibility back to property owners.
David Roberts
And not a single traffic apocalypse to point to out of all those examples.
Alan Durning
Absolutely not.
Catie Gould
I mean, the average person will have no idea that this reform passed.
David Roberts
I know it's one of those reforms that's a little frustrating in the sense that, once you've succeeded, no one will remember these things and they will not even believe that they existed. In like 10 years, you try to convince someone that this used to be the case, they'll be like, "What, no?"
Alan Durning
But hopefully, the result is more abundant and therefore affordable housing, nicer neighborhoods, main streets, old-fashioned main street neighborhoods, redeveloping where you can go for a nice walk.
David Roberts
Let's pause there because, you know, as I mentioned in the intro, nobody wants to hear about density. Yeah, I'm constantly getting people yelling at me for using the term density. Like, average people do not care about density. If they care about it at all, they sort of don't want it. So, how do you talk about the pleasant experience of density that is enabled by these reforms without saying the word density? You invoke old-fashioned main streets. I think that's quite clever because that really is, for most people, for most Americans especially, their only personal experience of walkable density is that one block in the center of their town that hasn't been ruined yet because it came in before the —
Alan Durning
Before the parking rules, yeah, mostly the pre-war parts of our cities.
David Roberts
And you couldn't make that street in most places today because of parking mandates. So, I think personally, that's a very clever rhetorical bit.
Alan Durning
Sightline, as you mentioned, we published lessons from this parking win for advocates elsewhere in the country who want to learn about them. And we will soon be publishing an article about the messaging lessons that we've learned from this fight and from some opinion research we've done as well.
David Roberts
Could you give us just a couple of top lines preview? Are there big obvious lessons? Don't say "density," I'm guessing it's one.
Alan Durning
The ways that Catie and I have been talking during this podcast, I hope, embody or else we're going to get a tongue-lashing from our communications boss after it airs. But generally, we anchor in housing costs. When we're talking about homes and small businesses, we're winning. When we're talking about cars, we're losing.
David Roberts
Yeah, more of what you want, right?
Alan Durning
You're right. When people are in a car, they're worried about parking. But people are complicated beings, and they can want multiple things. They know there are trade-offs in life. They know they would like more ice cream, but they may not want the consequences, and the same thing they like to be in, as you said, you latched onto the idea of talking about main streets, walkable neighborhoods where you can wander down the street and window shop and walk your dog and not be worried about cars coming in and out of parking lots. Focus on the wastefulness of these expanses of asphalt is a good place to go in conversations. So, those are some of the things.
Catie Gould
And my number one tip is just to focus on the real-life stories of these regulations. I'd like to tell just one more kind of non-scary one.
David Roberts
This will be our finale here. Take us out with an anecdote.
Catie Gould
In the city of Mount Vernon, there is this woman, Mary Jean Rack. She moved there to take care of her aging mother and she is a schoolteacher. She purchased a property with the intention of building a home. She wants just a small, thousand square foot, single level, you know, no stairs, a place where she can also age in place. The city of Mount Vernon requires four parking spaces.
David Roberts
For a thousand square foot single home? Holy crap!
Catie Gould
It doesn't matter the size, just for any detached home. The most common requirement is two parking spaces for a single-family home. But there it is, four.
David Roberts
Four. So, every home in that town has four parking spaces?
Catie Gould
No, that is not correct. Because most homes were built before these rules went into place. So, she did a little survey, in the two blocks around her property, about how many parking spaces houses actually have. And at the time, because this was a couple of years ago, two of those spaces were required to be in a garage and two in a driveway. And she said only 1% of the houses in her little neighborhood had a two-car garage. So, that's how many houses would have actually complied with this code. Most of them just have a one-car garage.
But over a third of the houses in our neighborhood had no off-street parking at all.
David Roberts
I mean, that's just a very stark "don't build new housing" rule. You know what I mean? Like, it could not be more, I don't know if that was the intent when they passed it, but it could not be more clear.
Catie Gould
We're trying to constantly say these rules are above and beyond what is common in our existing neighborhoods, and we just want to lower the bar so that she can build a house. We're just really lowering the barriers to make buildings possible to build. And I think everyone can kind of relate to stories like that, you know, "Don't you know how much parking you need for your own home better than the government?" Yes, I think most people would agree with that statement. And the same thing for building, you know, a little backyard cottage.
"Like, it should be really your choice, and now it is your choice about if you want to build additional parking or not."
David Roberts
Did you go after Republicans with the property rights and "Why should the government be telling you what to do with your own land?" kind of arguments? I'm guessing those are potent on that side.
Alan Durning
We didn't go after the Republicans at all. They were our partners in this effort and they talked about property rights, individual liberty and freedom, and supporting the development of businesses and people making good choices for themselves. Absolutely. The last lesson for our parking allies elsewhere is exactly what Catie just demonstrated. Just tell stories. Once we started doing it and inviting these people to testify, legislators themselves started telling stories from their own communities about properties that they knew about that couldn't be converted from a furniture store to a cafe because of the rules or what have you.
Everybody knew a story about these regulations, and that was uniting and ultimately helped us win.
Catie Gould
Yeah, and it's helpful because there are all these future fears about what might happen, and there's — I can have all the data in the world and none of it is going to be really reassuring. So we're just constantly going back to, like, what's happening today because of these regulations.
David Roberts
Yeah, we can see now that they're safe, which is a huge step forward. It's good. I do think this Washington win is going to uncork a lot of momentum. Well, thank you both for walking us through it and for all your work on this bill. Really cool stuff.
Catie Gould
Thank you.
Alan Durning
Thank you.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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