In housing-starved Greater Boston, one of the biggest obstacles to solving the housing crisis is finding the right land to build on.
Now, a growing number of cities and towns in the region are pointing to a single factor they say is gobbling up a disproportionate amount of that land and driving up construction costs: parking.
To fix the problem, those cities are eliminating so-called minimum parking requirements for most new housing developments. Instead, they’ll allowing housing developers to build the number of parking spaces they see fit, rather than a mandated amount set forth by city building rules that critics say call for more spaces than will ever be used.
Last week, Salem became the latest Greater Boston municipality to make such a move, with the city council voting to eliminate those parking rules for most new multifamily housing developments. Officials there hope the move will allow builders to construct new apartment buildings at a lower cost and make more efficient use of the city’s land.
“Until today, Salem required more parking spaces in its multifamily developments than there is demand or need for,” said Salem Mayor Dominick Pangallo, who filed the ordinance the council passed last week. “Salem needs more homes and less empty asphalt parking spaces at these projects.”
Advertisement
Parking, especially in urban regions, is a huge expense for multifamily development. In particularly expensive markets, it can cost up to $100,000 to build a single space, and that cost increases even more if that parking has to be built underground. Those costs can translate directly to higher rents.
Advertisement
Under Salem’s old rules, developers were mandated to build 1.5 new off-street parking spaces for every unit of housing in a project. But those rules, city officials said, were causing parking to be overbuilt.
The council passed the new parking rules after the Metropolitan Area Planning Council surveyed the city’s existing parking supply and found that some 38 percent of parking spaces built at a sampling of multifamily housing developments in the city were vacant overnight, when most residents are home.
Those results tracked closely with a similar 2019 MAPC report that found that 30 percent of the spaces in Boston and 20 immediate surrounding cities were empty during peak parking hours. While many cities and towns still mandate one space or more per new unit of housing, in Salem, MAPC found that the demand for spaces amount residents of multifamily developments was more like 0.85 parking spaces per unit.
The move does not mean that new housing projects will come with no new parking spaces for their residents. Rather, the idea behind eliminating parking minimums, advocates say, is that developers can more accurately determine the number of spaces a project needs based on their research of prospective renters and buyers.
The move puts Salem on a growing list of US cities that have eliminated parking minimums as a way to encourage more housing. Cambridge and Somerville both eliminated parking mandates citywide in recent years, and Boston eliminated parking minimums for affordable housing projects in 2021. Generally, advocates who have spearheaded those efforts argue that the United States has built far too many parking spaces, many of which go largely unused, for the number of cars on the road.
Advertisement
“This is a chance for Salem to take control of its future,” Salem’s planning board said in a statement. “Eliminating minimum parking requirements is a historic preservation strategy, a climate action, a mobility win and a housing affordability policy rolled into one. It helps make housing more affordable, neighborhoods more walkable, and our city more livable.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.