By Mark Carlisle | Daily Independent
Artist rendering of parking lot at planned Camelback Lakes Residential development.
The city of Phoenix cut minimum parking requirements roughly in half for new multifamily developments in certain parts of the city, mostly along light rail.
Multifamily parking minimums also saw a steep cut in the city’s Walkable Urban Code zoning designation, which is typically tied to light rail. Multifamily housing for special needs populations — such as the elderly or disabled — can also get a roughly 50% reduction if developers provide a traffic study and can get a further reduction if approved for a special-use permit by the city.
Advocates on Phoenix City Council, which passed the new requirements with an 8-1 vote last week, said reducing parking minimums and increasing density where appropriate helps add more housing, particularly affordable housing, to the city.
“We all know that affordable housing is a critical issue in our city, and I think we’ve really stepped up and we’re trying to address that,” said Vice Mayor Debra Stark.
Most developers provide more than the minimum required parking spaces, said Planning and Development Director Joshua Bednarek, but city officials wanted to give the opportunity for less parking as the city strives for walkable developments in certain parts of town.
A simplification was made to multifamily parking requirements in the city at-large that likely won’t largely affect minimums one way or another. The prior requirements differed for each unit size. The most common units, those with one and two bedrooms, required 1.5 parking spaces per unit. Three-bedrooms required two spaces per unit. Studio apartments required 1.3 per unit and a unit of less than 600 square feet required just one space. Now, the requirement is simply 1.5 spaces per unit.
Whether that is a increase or decrease to the previous requirements may vary by project.
Three designations will only be subject to half of that new requirement, or 0.75 spaces per dwelling unit: housing for special needs populations, developments in Walkable Urban Code zoning and housing in Phoenix’s Infill Development District, which largely follows the light rail lines in the city.
Councilmember Yassamin Ansari, one of the biggest champions of the change, said it was “a great first step” for parking reform, but she would like to see more. She called them “arbitrary minimums,” requiring more parking than is needed in some cases and therefore wasted space. The city should put the decision in the hands of experts developing the projects, Ansari said.
Ansari said developers, particularly affordable housing developers, have pointed to parking minimums as a reason why a project might not come to fruition or might not contain as many affordable units as developers hoped.
Aside from space, parking comes with a cost. Ansari said the highest price she’d heard a developer cite was $40,000 per space.
Ansari did not specify which further parking requirement reductions she would like to see, but the city had considered steeper cuts earlier in the process.
Read More (subscriber content)
Some stories may only appear as partial reprints because of publisher restrictions.