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Chicago will no longer require new buildings near transit to include parking.
(chi.streetsblog.org)
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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I don't get why laws like that are a thing at all. This is a near perfect example of something better sorted out by the free market instead of government regulation. Some people want a house or apartment with a parking spot, other people don't need it, so a free market system ought to cause both kinds of housing to be built as there is demand.
the answer is most likely lobbying. induced demand is a thing and car companies know it. I'd be shocked if these laws weren't originally written by a car company representative.
That and the HOA / NIMBY crowd.
They hate affordable housing.
That means they make less money.
That means their property values go down if housing is just generally cheaper.
Thus, anything, literally anything that lowers construction costs is opposed by them.
...
They climbed the ladder over the wall, then they built the wall higher, and took away the ladder.
They will fight for every single possible, arbitrary costly thing that can be tacked on to make a 'bare minimum viable housing unit' as expensive as possible, because they are directly financially incentivized to do so, vis a vis their own wealth being reliant on property values never ever going down, in real or nominal or relative terms.
No public transit, no bike lanes, no rent a bike/scooters, no tax breaks nor subsidy programs for renters at anywhere near the scope and magnitude offered to homeowners, no solutions for food deserts, no tenants rights, no goddamned nothing that in a direct or indirect way might make their next home value on appraisal go up by too little, or their property taxes go up by too much.
They are demons, they want you to be broke and suffer so they can be rich and lazy, and they will lie to your face about this being their motivatiom, and they will hire others to do so.
Landowners vs non-landowners, tale as old as time, just looks a bit different in our particular setting.
Maybe, but one would think companies that build houses have a lobby too.
They can charge more for the place if it has a parking garage or lot with it. It’s like how I was looking to buy a laptop recently and a bunch of them came with a wireless mouse or a year long subscription for Microsoft office. I didn’t want or need those things, but they bundle them into the laptop so they can say “look at all the stuff you’re getting! Give us more money for this stuff you don’t want!” The parking availability makes the property more valuable technically, so they can charge more for renting or buying
When I was looking for an apartment, one apartment I was considering came with a parking space, and they explicitly told me that if I didn't need a parking space, I could rent it out to someone else. I probably would have done that if I had ended up moving there (which I didn't, for a different reason). Not sure if that is a thing in many places.
If entire society is conditioned to need a car, then that is not the battle the builders fight.
@humanspiral @schnurrito The entire society is not conditioned to need a car. In many large US cities, particularly those that were built mostly before freeways and minimum parking requirements, around 30% of households don't own cars. A massive PR campaign by the auto industry, combined with classism and racism, has convinced much of the middle class that everyone needs a car, but statistically that belief is not supported. Even in rural areas about 7% of households are carless.
It's also an important thing for price discovery. As it stands few of these municipalities have any idea how much a parking spot is worth vs how much it costs.
Spoiler alert!
The market isn't free
I would like to see a law allowing parking in a residential building to be used as storage with maybe a container requirement and allowing for the parking of any vehicle. Many places won't allow bikes to be parked in the spot by the owner. which is bs.
They build some not-so-affordable apartments near my friend's house that has a parking garage underneath and is a short walk from mass transit. But the parking garage isn't included in rent, so everyone was parking on the street until the town started ticketing people who parked in front of houses they didn't own.
Even in this case, people are too stupid or selfish for the "free market" to work properly. Personally, I don't see an issue with forcing apartments to have a parking garage underneath, even if it's just for bikes and scooters.
Because parking spaces in a garage can cost nearly as much to construct as the apartment itself. If we want plentiful, affordable housing we've got to loosen the grip on parking regs a bit
A bike room in place of a ramp is a good idea though
If there is plenty of free on-street parking, then the free-market was working properly.
Tragedy of the Commons.
There was not "plenty" of parking. That's why the town had to step in and start enforcing the parking rules that were ignore before.
Tragedy of the commons doesn't apply to parking because the parking still exists after exploitation. The public utility must degrade (the parking spots disappear after using them) for the tragedy of the commons to apply.
DrunkEgnineer is correct: in a free market with two prices for the same item, the one with the lowest price will be sold first. There was plenty of free on-street parking, so the paid parking was not preferentially picked.
Parking rules can also be enforced with money and not who owns the private property next to the public property. That is, charge for street parking at the supply-demand equilibrium.
@pc486 @Duamerthrax Parking does degrade though. Lots need resurfacing and sometimes stabilization to prevent sinkholes and garages can collapse altogether. We're already starting to see serious structural problems with decks built in the mid-late 20th century that are buckling from a combination of age, lack of maintenance, and not anticipating that they'd be filled with oversized SUVs and pickup trucks, many with electric batteries making them even heavier.
Parking is not a finite and limited resource. Road surfaces can, and regularly are, refurbished and established. That's why parking is not a tragedy; it's not a resource that is lost forever.
I think you do bring up a good point though: who pays for parking lots and street parking when it does need help? Is it only the home owner in front of the street or is it a general fund expense from local sales taxes? Double points if you can answer who is then allowed to park in that publicly-paid parking spot.
Parking is not an unlimited and infinite resource? Every parking space is lost walking space, green space, or construction space.
In an economic sense, it's not limited. Land is limited and there are oh so many negative externalities*, but we haven't paved over everything, there's more than enough bitumen and agate to level the world, and you can always dig or go up. We are nowhere near close to being unable to build one more parking spot. It'd be a hellscape, but it'd be one with plenty of parking.
... but those are all economic limitations too? We are limited, economically, by land and negative externalities.
I think you mean in a pedantic sense we aren't limited. Like, technically I could eat a fistful of rat poison. It wouldn't be good for me, but I could technically do it!
So long as you don't die from that fistful of rat poison, correlating to a economy that survives to another day, then yes, you could eat that poison! It would be very bad idea and may leave you maimed, but it would be possible. Furthermore, it's more poison than you are currently consuming (at least I hope you're not eating rat poison). I'm not sure why one would but if someone paid you to eat some poison, you certainly could do that transaction and I could say there's been an increase of rat-poison-eater supply.
Economics may be strange but it's not a value judgement on what we do. It's just a way of modeling and understanding how a society handles goods and services. Invoking economic arguments like the tragedy of the commons requires understanding consumption of public resources and what that does to the resources. Parking doesn't fit the argument because the supply curve does not change over time due to the pressure of strong demand. Parking can be refurbished, unlike a common livestock pasture. Parking supply can be increased by building on infertile land, up, or down, where a common livestock pasture cannot. A common livestock pasture can be consumed to the point where it cannot supply anymore (becoming infertile). A parking spot does not get consumed beyond a point to where it no longer functions as a parking spot.
Parking is not subject to the tragedy of the commons.
The economy would not survive another day if we paved the entire world with parking spaces.
This isn't a value judgement. It's an observation that we are economically limited by things like land availability. You seem to be using "economically possible" to mean "possible by the laws of physics" which is really strange.
There isn't a free market. Regulation is the only thing that can make capitalism safe and productive for society, as this counters the negative effects of prioritizing money over anything else. If the people of Chicago want to take care of each other better, this is a fantastic way to do so, and it should be supported and emulated.
Well, now the requirement is no more. So I guess they think the same as you.
"free market" is overrated. People aren't well informed rational actors.
I think a city has a right to zone this way. Building parking means cars come. The city is encouraging different means of transportation by limiting the cars coming in. They're not saying you, Joe Apartment Renter, can't bring your car; just that you won't have a spot to park in, and you'll have to go on the hunt every night when you get home. So it's basically discouraging folks who require a car from choosing to live here.
Of course, I agree with you. I owned a car for some years (don't anymore) and didn't have a parking spot on the grounds of my apartment building at the time, I always needed to find a parking space on a public street (usually didn't take long, I usually managed to park next to the block I live in).