MO: KC is pushing looser parking rules to spark growth. Not everyone’s sold

Parking is like cholesterol. A little keeps things flowing; too much clogs the system.

Few would argue that Kansas City has its levels under control at the moment. Drive through downtown or the Crossroads and you’ll find block after block of surface lots where in a healthier city there’d be buildings with people inside.

Part of the problem is absentee owners who let prime parcels sit empty, knowing the low taxes won’t punish them and land values will only keep climbing. But another contributing factor is that city codes require businesses and developers to provide more parking than anyone actually needs. Which costs money. Which slows development. Which leaves Kansas City with more asphalt than ambition.

If you would like to hear about what this kind of civic clog looks like in practice, ask Zach Molzer.

Molzer’s firm is redeveloping the Holtman Building, a 127-year-old structure in the East Crossroads at 18th Street and Holmes Road. It’s an $8 million mixed-use project: 20,000 square feet of office and retail on the first floor, eight lofts above, and a 10,000-square-foot rooftop bar. It’s exactly the kind of dense, street-level activation Kansas City says it wants in the urban core.

Molzer also owns a lot across the street with about 30 spots, which he figured would be sufficient for guests and residents of the Holtman Building. After all, he’d received a tax abatement from the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority because it was a transit-oriented community development. The point of the program is to steer development toward transit hubs, making streets walkable and reducing reliance on cars.

But when he submitted his plans to the city, he was informed that he’d need to have more than 100 spots. Per city code, the rooftop bar alone required 80 spots.

“I just felt like, This is insane,” Molzer said. “They want me to, what — build an entire new parking garage for this project? None of the bars down the street have any dedicated parking. It’s a bar. People walk to it, or they use parking on the street. Why would you require me to have so many parking spaces?”

Molzer started complaining — first to city staff, then publicly on X, and finally to City Manager Mario Vasquez, who stepped in to waive the requirement and get Molzer’s project its necessary permit. Usually, though, business owners looking to get around parking requirements must request a variance and open themselves up to a potentially long and costly bureaucratic slog through City Hall.

That process is likely soon coming to an end. The City Plan Commission last week recommended a proposal that would eliminate parking minimums across a huge swath of Kansas City, letting developers and business owners decide for themselves how much parking their projects need.

“City staff sees an example probably once a week where a small business that wants to open gets held up for months over a parking variance,” said CPC commissioner Tyler Enders. “So we’re trying to clear a path for businesses to redevelop urban lots without forcing them to waste space on parking that adds little value and slows development.”

It may sound like a dry, technical tweak, but the proposal represents a rather dramatic shift away from a century of car-centric planning in Kansas City. If you operate a business or develop a project in what the city is calling the “urban core” — south of the Missouri River all the way to 85th Street, and between State Line Road and Blue River — you would no longer be required to have any parking spaces at all. Your lender might require it, but the city will not.

In fact, the city may even begin imposing parking maximums on projects, penalizing businesses that dedicate too much space to cars — though those details are still being ironed out.

There are a few steps left. After staff make revisions based on City Plan Commission feedback, the proposal will head to the city council’s Neighborhood Planning and Development Committee, who will then make a recommendation to full council for a vote. But with a 5-1 City Plan Commission vote in favor, and a city council eager to see more development in the urban core, the consensus seems to be that this thing is pretty much a done deal.

Too broad?

Kansas City hasn’t invented this idea. Buffalo was the first major U.S. city to scrap parking minimums in 2017, and Minneapolis, San Francisco, and several others have since followed. The goals are mostly the same everywhere: to encourage greater adoption of public transit and jump-start development by removing one of the biggest small obstacles to building in cities.

“This is a larger national trend that I would say Kansas City is lagging a little bit behind,” Enders said.

Like many other American cities, the Kansas City region has a housing shortage. By most counts, it is short tens of thousands of housing units. As construction costs continue to climb, planners see parking reform as one of the few levers the city can pull that doesn’t involve spending money. If a developer can save a million dollars by skipping a parking garage, that might be the difference between a project stalling and 100 new badly needed housing units.

The sweeping geographic scope of this proposal is where things get a little thorny.

Eliminating parking minimums downtown or along the streetcar line is one thing — those areas attract people who expect to walk or take transit.

It’s a different story on a narrow residential street where many homes were built without driveways and curb space is already scarce. In areas like that, a new 90-unit apartment building without dedicated parking would wreak havoc on existing residents.

Jimmy Fitzner lives in one such neighborhood. He’s the president of the Indian Mound Neighborhood Association in the Northeast.

“There’s about 100 different neighborhoods that would be affected by this, and most of them aren’t asking for it,” Fitzner said of the current proposal. “It’s saving developers millions of dollars because they don’t have the added cost of building or paying for parking, but there’s no guarantee on the back end that they’re going to build a certain amount of affordable units or anything like that.”

Fitzner added: “By doing this, we’re kind of just trusting developers to build what’s right for the neighborhood, even though a lot of these developers don’t live in our neighborhoods or even in our state.”

He suggested a better solution would be to abolish parking minimums along the streetcar line but simply reduce them in most other neighborhoods. That’s what’s happening in the Northland, which will not be affected by the current proposal.

Chris Koch, president of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association, pointed to Armour Boulevard as a cautionary tale of what happens when projects don’t provide enough parking.

Chicago-based Mac Properties has been developing apartments along that corridor for well over a decade. Koch said residents often stay home after dinner to avoid losing their spots and avoid inviting friends and family over because they regularly end up having to walk “750 feet” from cars to their doors. He said nearby churches and businesses are maxed out on parking and can’t lease spaces to apartment dwellers who badly need them.

“We support increased density goals in Midtown, but density at any cost isn’t responsible density,” Koch said, adding that his group opposed “blanket sweeps” to parking policy across the city.

Fitzner said he viewed it as “magical thinking” to assume that eliminating parking minimums would nudge people in all corners of the city to walk, bike, or use more public transportation.

“Especially when we don’t have fare-free buses, and the streetcar only runs through one small sliver of town.”

KCMO residential permits as compromise?

Enders and the rest of the City Plan Commission heard those concerns from Fitzner and others last week. Enders told me he believes the fix lies with the Public Works Department, which should identify blocks where residents lack off-street parking and create residential permit zones to protect those spaces. So if you live on one of those blocks, you’ll have your street parking reserved (though probably it’ll cost you a monthly fee).

That reminded me of a story I reported a few weeks ago about Warehouse on Broadway, a new music venue in Westport. When it opened this spring, Warehouse on Broadway was illegally zoned and had less than 20% of the 164 parking stalls city code required of it. It has been scrambling to handle its crowds and the cars they bring to the area, and neighbors aren’t happy about coming home to find their street parking spots have been taken on concert nights.

Warehouse on Broadway’s owner suggested the same solution as Enders: residential parking permits.

“What’s nice about residential parking rules,” Enders said, “is you can make them very specific to the problem you’re trying to solve, instead of trying to do it through ordinance and code, where it gets complicated.”

It also happens to shift the responsibility from developers and business owners to residents. But if we want growth in this city, maybe that’s the price we have to pay.

©2025 The Kansas City Star.
Visit kansascity.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.