Following Kansas City parking rules is like a modern-day labyrinth | Opinion
What if local elected officials could, at no cost, lower construction costs, reduce housing prices, make it easier to start a business and cut red tape? They can, and it involves rolling back parking mandates.
We’ve all seen them, the asphalt deserts surrounding big box stores or shopping centers. Whether in urban settings or suburbs, there are tragically large parking lots that seem to stretch to the horizon. Worse, the concrete curbs and medians laid by modern-day equivalents of the mythical Daedalus imprison us in maddening low-walled labyrinths.
What’s the big idea?
Well, much like Daedalus, who built the maze imprisoning the Minotaur, today’s builders are doing the bidding of their government overseers. In Kansas City, building code 88-420 dictates parking requirements. But the code is a labyrinth of its own.
No equal parking rules
Westport restaurants must provide “off-street parking at a minimum rate of 2.5 spaces per 1,000 square feet.” Yet in the Crossroads, restaurants do not need to provide any off-street parking for the first 2,000 square feet of floor space. Retail spaces in the Crossroads are exempt for the first 4,000 square feet — but “Artist Work or Sales Space” requires 2.5 spaces per 1,000 square feet. Someone’s probably billing by the hour to explain that what looks like an artist’s gallery is actually a retail shop — because in the Crossroads, that can mean fewer parking spaces.
The Brookside business district has a completely different standard requiring too many words to describe in this column. Meanwhile, businesses in the downtown loop “are not required to provide off-street parking” at all.
These parking rules are often a mess, and it’s a national problem.
Famed economist and expert in parking policy, Donald Shoup, called parking minimums a pseudoscience and wrote, “I have never met a city planner who could explain why any parking requirement should not be higher or lower. To set parking requirements, planners usually take instructions from elected officials, copy other cities’ parking requirements, or rely on unreliable surveys. Parking requirements are closer to sorcery than to science.”
Amen.
The basic problem with parking mandates is they assume city leaders know better than developers what is optimal. They don’t. It’s the job of builders to understand market demand. They have every incentive to figure out how many parking spaces are needed. Absent such rules, developers will still include parking, but not as much as cities have required.
Government-imposed parking mandates increase the cost of construction, driving up the prices for retail space and housing units. They hamper the entrepreneurs who want to open small restaurants but can’t bear the additional costs of required parking. Worse, the burdens of these mandates encourage developers to ask for public subsidies. They certainly result in the kind of lobbying that has produced the hodgepodge of standards in Kansas City’s code.
One city acted, kind of
Kansas City, Kansas, recently acted to fix all this. Almost. The Unified Government Commission enacted a three-year moratorium on parking mandates in the older half of their city, and only for commercial or mixed-use projects up to six units. But it’s progress. I testified in favor of the moratorium before the planning commission. And while the measure passed unanimously, one could feel hesitancy borne of risk aversion among commissioners.
A growing chorus of cities is rethinking parking mandates. Buffalo eliminated all parking minimums in 2017. Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, followed suit in 2021. Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina, did so in 2023. Dallas came close this year but stopped short, opting to dramatically reduce them instead. In each case, eliminating parking minimums was followed by a clear increase in housing and commercial development — though the scale and speed varied.
Parking mandates increase the cost of all types of construction. And in a country with a severe housing shortage and increasingly empty downtowns, anything that reduces cost, supports entrepreneurs and encourages new development is welcome.
Removing parking mandates is the right thing to do. Local elected officials work to be responsive to their constituents and can do so by striking down outdated policies and unleashing the energy and creativity of the people to build a more prosperous city. Hopefully, the positive example from KCK will serve as guidance to KCMO and elsewhere.