Denver wisely repeals its minimum parking mandates
By Sal Rodriguez | November 7, 2025
The post-World War II years brought with it many things Americans have taken for granted: economic prosperity, suburban living and minimum parking requirements. Along with the growing prevalence of personal vehicles through the 1950s and 1960s came zoning codes across the country mandating that developments include a set number of parking spots for those cars.
“By 1969, nearly all municipalities with populations of at least 25,000 had minimum parking requirements for many buildings, including beauty salons and bowling alleys,” notes The New York Times. Those mandates have left a mark, with upward of six to eight parking spots dotting the country for every car.
Of course, even without government mandates, many of those parking spots would still exist. The overwhelming majority of Americans do drive, after all, with just one in 10 Americans saying they never or rarely drive a car.
But parking spots aren’t free, not for the developers who have to plan for them, the businesses that own or lease properties subject to such mandates, or the renters of housing units with allotted parking spaces whether they use them or not.
Parking spaces can add tens of thousands of dollars in costs per unit and crowd out space that could be used for other and more beneficial purposes. In the context of a national housing crisis, this is yet another costly regulation worth revisiting. Accordingly, cities across the country have been rethinking these mandates in recent decades and repealing minimum parking requirements. Denver recently joined this growing list of cities as one of the largest to do so.
Starting on August 11, developers no longer needed to plan for city-mandated minimum parking spaces for commercial or residential developments. Under the old rules, new apartments were required to plan for one parking space per unit and restaurants needed to plan for four spots per 1,000 square feet of indoor space, for example.
These mandates came at great expense. According to the city’s planning department last year, “Developers typically build more parking than is required to ensure their projects are attractive and competitive. These conditions can make housing more expensive because each structured parking space costs as much as $50,000.”
With those minimum requirements gone, developers can instead plan for as much parking as they think they need to rather than being forced to plan for parking spaces according to the arbitrary standards demanded by the municipal code. Researchers at the University of Denver estimate that this greater flexibility could encourage upwards of 8% more housing production.
Parking spaces can add tens of thousands of dollars in costs per unit and crowd out space that could be used for other and more beneficial purposes.
“These production gains are the result of two primary mechanisms,” they explain. “First, the direct cost savings of tens of thousands of dollars per unit from not building structured parking improves the financial metrics that investors and lenders analyze before putting their money in a project. Second, eliminating parking minimums rewards design creativity: architects can repurpose physical space from parking spots to homes, allowing more homes to be built on a given lot and allowing tenants to only pay for parking that they actually use rather than having it priced into their monthly rent.”
The benefits of scrapping parking minimums even extend to city housing authorities. “Our city staff spend more than 650 hours every year working on very complicated parking rules and regulations,” Councilman Chris Hinds explained to the local PBS affiliate. “That’s time when they could be spending effort on other topics, such as figuring out how we’re going to build more affordable housing.”
Denver follows cities like Austin, Buffalo and Minneapolis in striking down minimum parking requirements. As summarized by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, after Buffalo eliminated minimum parking requirements in 2017, about half of major developments included the same number of parking spots as were required under the old rules. But “developers who did propose building less parking averaged 60 fewer parking spaces than the old minimum required, avoiding over eight acres of unnecessary asphalt and saving up to $30 million in construction costs.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the sort of developments legalized by the dropping of parking minimums in Buffalo are mixed use developments.
As a simple example, “One small-scale mixed-use development near a light rail station rehabilitated an old structure into 10 new apartments with ground-floor retail space. Despite the close proximity to transit, the project wasn’t feasible under the old parking regime – which called for 10 spaces on the site – because the physical structure occupies nearly its entire parcel. With the new rules, it could finally move forward.”
Of course, dropping parking minimums is no panacea. There are plenty of factors that drive the feasibility of developments, including macroeconomic forces out of the control of anyone. But every repealed mandate expands the range of possibilities for developers and consumers alike by bringing down arbitrary and costly barriers and thereby making more projects pencil out that otherwise couldn’t.
As politically challenging as it can be, reevaluating minimum parking requirements is worth the effort.
