There’s supportive housing in Denver built for people climbing out of homelessness. People getting back on their feet, starting over, holding down their first steady job in years. Almost none of them own cars — about one in twenty.
The city made the builders pour acres of parking anyway.
Half of it sits empty. Permanently. Nine million dollars of asphalt that nobody asked for and nobody uses. That money could have built an entire 40-unit affordable property. Instead, it stores air and collects heat.
And here’s the part that should make you angry: nobody made a mistake. The builders followed the law. The law required the wasted space.
It’s called a minimum parking requirement, and there’s one buried in the zoning code of almost every city and town in America. It says that before you can build a home, you must also build a government-specified number of parking spaces — whether the people living there want them or not, whether they own cars or not, whether the land could hold another family or not.
You’ve been paying for this your whole adult life. You just never saw the bill, it’s another hidden tax.
The Invisible Line Item
A single parking space costs between $10,000 and $50,000 to build. Go below grade and the median hits $70,000 per space — some run as high as $100,000. More than a brand-new pickup truck, for a rectangle of asphalt.
Builders don’t eat that cost. They can’t. It gets folded into the price of every unit — your rent, your mortgage, your kid’s first apartment. Researchers who studied bundled parking nationwide found a garage space adds about 17 percent to a unit’s rent — roughly $1,700 a year. One required space per unit raises total development costs by roughly an eighth. Two spaces, a quarter.
There’s no line item on your lease that says “mandatory parking surcharge.” But it’s there. If you’re a renter without a car — and millions of Americans are — you are subsidizing free parking for your neighbors, by law, every single month.
The federal government can’t force you to buy broccoli. The Supreme Court spent a year arguing about whether it could force you to buy health insurance. But your city council can force you to buy a parking space, and it’s been doing it for seventy years, and nobody ever asked your permission.
Where the Rule Came From
Here’s the history they don’t teach you.
After World War II, cars flooded American streets faster than cities could handle. Planners panicked about curbside congestion. Their fix: make every new building stash its cars off the street. Reasonable enough — until you ask where the actual numbers came from.
They came from a manual. The Institute of Transportation Engineers published tables of “parking generation rates” — how many spaces a building supposedly needs. Those rates were built on tiny samples of suburban sites where parking was free and there was nothing to do but drive. How tiny? Half the manual’s rates rested on four or fewer observations. An engineer counted cars at a handful of strip malls, wrote down a number, and that number became law in ten thousand cities.
Nobody studied your town. Nobody studied your block. City after city simply copied the code from the city next door, the way a kid copies homework. Donald Shoup, the UCLA professor who spent his career dismantling this system, called the whole thing pseudoscience.
He was being polite. It’s a guess, laundered through a manual, enforced with the power of the state — and it reshaped the physical form of America. Drive through any downtown that died in the last fifty years and look at what replaced the buildings. Asphalt. In plenty of American downtowns, more land is devoted to storing empty cars than to housing people.
This is what the permission system does. It takes one planner’s assumption from 1965, freezes it into law, and makes your grandchildren pay for it.
The Poison Pill
The damage isn’t spread evenly. Parking mandates fall hardest on exactly the housing we’ve lost.
Starter homes. Backyard cottages. The small apartment building over the corner store. Housing experts call parking requirements one of the three regulatory poison pills that kill accessory dwelling units — and the math explains why. On a standard single-family lot, the yard has room for a small cottage or the parking pad the code demands. One or the other.
So picture it. Your mother is getting older. You’ve got the space, the savings, and a builder ready to put a little place for her out back — close enough to help, separate enough for dignity. The kind of arrangement American families relied on for two hundred years.
The code says no. The cottage doesn’t come with its government-mandated parking spot. So Mom goes to the facility, the backyard stays grass, and a bureaucrat somewhere files a report about the housing crisis.
A $30,000 parking requirement is a rounding error on a luxury tower. On a granny flat or a starter home, it’s a death sentence. That’s why the mandate functions as a filter: big expensive projects survive it, small affordable ones don’t. The rule written to manage cars ended up banning modest homes.
When you combine it with the other regulations we’ve covered and some we haven’t gotten to yet, it becomes increasingly clear why, as Zillow reports, the average starter home in US cities is now $1 million.
What Happens When You Repeal It
Now the part the planners never predicted. Cities started scrapping these mandates — and parking didn’t disappear.
Minneapolis eliminated its parking minimums citywide in 2021. The city’s own Planning Commission tracked what happened next. Builders kept building parking — about three spaces for every four new homes instead of one apiece. Near transit and in walkable neighborhoods, they built little or none. In driving neighborhoods, they built plenty. Supply matched what residents actually wanted, the way it does for everything else you buy.
And the homes came. Minneapolis built so much housing that rents fell roughly 4 percent from 2019 to 2024 — while rents nationally rose 22 percent. Read that again. One of the only major American cities where rent went down, and it got there by repealing rules.
Seattle’s reforms cut nearly 18,000 unneeded spaces from planned projects — about $537 million in savings that went into homes instead of asphalt. Buffalo scrapped its minimums in 2017; researchers found that more than half of the new homes permitted afterward would have been illegal under the old code. San Francisco, Austin, Portland, San Jose — same story everywhere. Builders still build parking where people want it. They just stopped being forced to build it where people don’t.
And if you think this is some blue-city fad: Montana killed parking mandates for small homes statewide in 2025, as part of the same Montana Miracle reforms that made it the national model for housing freedom. Red-state Montana said its biggest cities may not require a single parking space for any home under 1,200 square feet — and capped mandates at one space for everything else. Texas moved. Dallas ended mandates for small residential projects. So did New York City in its core, which tells you the idea has crossed every line that matters.
When Montana ranchers and Minneapolis renters land on the same answer, it’s worth asking what they both saw. They saw a mandate that made everything cost more and delivered nothing.
Nobody Is Coming for Your Truck
Let’s kill the objection before someone in the comments raises it.
Ending parking mandates bans nothing. You can build all the parking you want — a two-car garage, a three-car garage, a parking moat around your house if that’s your dream. The reform is one sentence long: the government no longer forces you to.
That’s it. That’s the whole radical idea. The people who want parking pay for parking. The people who don’t, don’t. A young couple saving for their first place stops subsidizing storage for cars they don’t own. A builder putting up starter homes spends the money on bedrooms instead of asphalt. Your town’s main street gets a building instead of a lot.
Conservatives spent decades arguing the government shouldn’t force you to buy products you don’t want. Here’s a mandate sitting in every zoning code in America, adding 17 percent to the typical rent with a garage space, killing the granny flat and the starter home, paving over the small towns we say we love. Repealing it costs taxpayers nothing. It’s the cheapest housing reform in existence — you don’t spend money, you stop wasting it.
The American Dream doesn’t need a subsidy. It needs the government to stop charging admission.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
