Sustain St. Paul supports ending minimum parking mandates across Minnesota
This spring, Sustain St. Paul is proudly supporting a new bill at the Minnesota Legislature: the People over Parking Act. This bill would end minimum parking mandates throughout Minnesota, opening the doors to increased sustainability and housing affordability statewide.
The problem with parking mandates
In jurisdictions across the state, homes and businesses are mandated to have fixed amounts of parking spots — for example, some localities might require two parking spots per apartment unit and seven parking spots per bowling alley. Often, these requirements are arbitrarily chosen or copied from model codes.
Mandating parking is expensive and environmentally harmful, and creates barriers to building new homes, starting new businesses, and building dynamic places in Minnesota. Here are a few of the problems with parking mandates:
They’re expensive. One estimate pegged typical above-ground parking spots as costing $27,000 per spot in Minnesota. This goes into housing and business costs, making us all worse off.
They’re environmentally harmful. Parking spots use a lot of space: requiring more of them makes our places more spread out, using more rural land and increasing polluting car trips. They also increase the amount of impervious asphalt surfaces, worsening water runoff issues.
Parking mandates often fail to predict local parking needs, and prevent individuals from making the parking management choices that are best for them.
They make places less dynamic. Such rigid and restrictive rules make it harder for places to adapt over time as needs change.
Learning from St. Paul’s success
In August 2021, St. Paul fully eliminated parking minimums, a change supported by Sustain St. Paul. In a statement at the time, Mayor Melvin Carter said that “this simple step will help add much needed housing and jobs as we seek to maximize this period of historic economic expansion in Saint Paul."
One new apartment building, on Lexington and James Avenues, was able to redesign its plans after eliminating parking minimums. While it had originally planned to build 92 homes with 88 parking spots, meeting the required number of parking spots, the removal of parking mandates enabled the developer to build 114 homes and 82 parking spots instead. That’s more homes for people, and still plenty of parking — no requirements needed.
More broadly, results in St. Paul and Minneapolis, which implemented the same policy, show that buildings typically still include parking, but in more appropriate quantities.
Bringing change to the state level
The People Over Parking Act would end parking mandates across Minnesota, bringing these benefits to jurisdictions everywhere. Sustain St. Paul is excited to be supporting this bill, alongside a coalition of Minnesota housing and environmental advocates.
If you’re interested in supporting this bill alongside Sustain St. Paul, be sure to sign up for our email newsletter at the bottom of our website’s home page. For further inquiries, reach out to info@sustainstpaul.org and we’ll help you get connected.
Chris Meyer, legislative assistant to Minnesota Senator Omar Fateh, speaking at a press conference for ending parking minimums in January. Photo by A.J. Olmscheid via Sightline Institute.
