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Cities are, by their very definition, crowded. That brings so much that we love — bustling shops, great restaurants, our favorite bands coming to town to play to a packed house. But it also means limited space and hard choices about how to allocate it. It’s especially challenging in the face of the housing shortage and affordability crisis gripping New Bedford, the South Coast, and beyond. The New Bedford City Council has a chance to take a step forward by reforming restrictive parking mandates that limit housing supply and increase costs.
Parking mandates tell developers that they must reserve a significant chunk of valuable real estate not to build homes, but to store vehicles. Those costs — including land value, paving, and maintenance — are then passed onto tenants, whether or not they use the parking, raising rents anywhere from 12% for on-street parking to 17% for garaged parking, according to a UCLA study. It hits lower-income families and seniors especially hard. They may not be able to drive or afford a car, but parking mandates raise their housing costs to pay for car storage, whether or not they need or want it.
Many developers successfully negotiate with the city to build less parking, and we commend the city for being flexible as it looks to increase our housing supply. But if our parking requirements are flexible and can be negotiated away, doesn’t that call into question why we have them at all? These negotiations often require developers to bring in lawyers, once again raising the cost of building housing. Likewise, the time and expense required to get a variance for parking creates a formidable barrier to small-scale local developers, who more than anyone know the housing needs of their community and should be encouraged to build in their neighborhoods.
The Light recently reported on how this increased costs when the Holy Family High School was renovated into 15 new mixed-income apartments. The city’s parking mandates dictated 30 spaces for just 15 apartments, which the developer was able to negotiate down to 22 spaces. Buying eight nearby spots added $50,000 in costs, even though some tenants don’t own a car and many of the building’s parking spaces sit empty. “If we’d had one space per unit, that building would have been done quicker, and it would have been done cheaper,” developer Colleen Kavanaugh told The Light.
Meeting the challenge of right-sizing parking is a matter of basic economics. If a grocery store gave away bread for free, we wouldn’t be surprised if those shelves were bare. And we wouldn’t blame the store for not supplying enough bread! Our curbs are no different. We allow free car storage in all of our neighborhoods, leading to misallocation and overconsumption. Tell me you don’t have someone on your block who parks multiple commercial vehicles there or who leaves a broken-down car in front of their house indefinitely.
In reducing parking minimums, New Bedford will be joining a growing number of cities that are unlocking the potential of their neighborhoods and their local, small-scale developers by creating more space for housing, stores, restaurants, and other neighborhood amenities. Look at the city of Salem, known as a traffic and parking nightmare in spooky season. It just eliminated parking mandates for most new multi-family housing.
And the costs of car ownership are skyrocketing — up 41% since January 2020, according to Navy Federal Credit Union, far outpacing 25% overall inflation since then. The average American household now spends over $1,000 a month on vehicle ownership, insurance, maintenance, and gas.
Going car-free isn’t for everyone. But what about a couple with one partner working from home, who could get by with one car — should our laws force them to pay for a second parking spot they don’t need? In New Bedford, nearly 60% of households have only one car or none at all, yet our zoning still requires homebuilders to provide two free spaces in every project. Parking mandates also run counter to our goals in other areas like reducing traffic, cleaning our air, and making our streets safer.
We urge the City Council to ease government parking mandates to free property owners to make their own decisions about how many parking spots their tenants will need. It’s an important step toward unleashing the resources and energy of locals to build the housing we need and build wealth within our neighborhoods, with the larger goal of making New Bedford a thriving city that’s accessible for all.
Ned Carson is a member of SouthCoast Places for People and a New Bedford resident. Will Gardner is founder of SouthCoast Places for People and a Fairhaven resident.
“In New Bedford, nearly 60% of households have only one car or none at all, yet our zoning still requires homebuilders to provide two free spaces in every project.“
The math doesn’t math! The writers of this article are spot on! Wealth generation for families starts with affordable housing, and these regulations are not making it easy.
As the area income rises from the influx of higher income people due to the T there will be more vehicles , rents will continue to rise and the lack of parking in neighborhoods will create problems not easily solved.
More affluent households often have 3 vehicles…just look at Dartmouth
Thanks for commenting, Michael. It’s an interesting point.
We’re not arguing that people can’t or shouldn’t have any number (or no) vehicles. We’re arguing that any perceived lack of parking can’t effectively be addressed by government mandates requiring homebuilders to build and maintain car storage regardless of whether people need it or not.
Dartmouth is a suburb whose appeal (among other things) is having lots of space for each household. A lot of people choose to live there because they value having that space. It’s a nice place!
New Bedford is a city. The appeal of cities has historically been that they put you in proximity to lots of amenities, culture, work opportunities etc. Cities are at their best in terms of livability and financial stability when they maximize the number and diversity of amenities and opportunities easily reachable from each neighborhood.
Each type of place has its tradeoffs, but as Americans we generally agree that choice is good : )
What doesn’t work is when cities try to adopt suburban land use rules. It just doesn’t make sense to compete with suburbs at their game. Nobody chooses to live in any great city for the abundant free parking. If that were the case, Boston would be bowing down to Fall River ; )
Just look at Dartmouth– its most affluent homeowners are summer people who spend the rest of the year in urban zip codes where a deeded garage spot costs more than a house in North Dartmouth.
Reducing parking requirements will NOT solve the parking problem, assuming there are more parking spaces than cars is a pipe dream. There will always be a shortage of parking space. Just look at downtown where they tore down buildings to put up parking lots. Are you people naive or stupid, maybe it’s just plain old fashioned GREED !!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyone who says they’re for minimal government regulations would agree with this opinion to eliminate parking minimums. The city council requiring a certain number of parking spaces in every construction is the epitome of governmental meddling.
Elimination of parking minimums doesn’t mean “no parking allowed”. It merely frees the developer to include private parking or not, as they see fit.
New Bedford has a functioning public transportation network. There’s a lot of room for improvement in the SRTA bus system, but improvement will be better tackled when there’s fewer cars in the way.
As long as there’s even 1 homeless person in the city, we need to prioritize safe living space over private car storage.
Limiting parking to people with one car may have been possible in 1960 to 1980, but it’s not going to work in 2026 and beyond. While one family owning one car 50 years ago was feasible back then when the majority of women didn’t work outside the home, a second vehicle might be possible, it’s no longer an option for most. Just the added costs including purchasing a 2nd vehicle, the maintenance, car insurance, inspection, registration, and inspection fees, and excise taxes, and more.
There are many married couples who work opposite shifts, so one car per family won’t be possible, so the cost of the study is a complete waste of time and money, and I’m sure any attempt to limit the number of cars per household violates the rights of the tax payers.
In some neighborhoods homes have a garage .Why not let them park on the street in front of that garage? Utilizing the garage and the space on the street may be helpful. Of course only property inhabitants would be permitted to use it.