This story was updated at 9:50 a.m. to clarify a comment from City Councilor Sharon Durkan regarding Zoning Board approvals.

When a developer proposes new housing, one of the most common comments they get from neighbors is, “How will it affect the parking situation on our street?”

Through zoning, most communities require new housing construction, especially multifamily housing, to include space for future residents to keep their vehicles. But housing advocates say those mandates add significant costs to development and are slowing growth that could otherwise help address the high cost of housing.

A 2023 report commissioned by the Boston Planning Department found that the “single substantive change” to the city’s zoning code that would “do the most good for the city” would be to eliminate parking minimums for new homes altogether.

Now, following in the footsteps of some other Massachusetts communities, Boston is considering doing exactly that.

“Other municipalities around the country have done this successfully,” City Councilor Sharon Durkan, who’s filed a proposal to eliminate parking mandates for new housing, said.

“(With) what’s happening nationally and also the stall of development in Boston, we’re actually seeing that people are starting to understand this issue and the nuances of it, and I think that’s a huge success,” Durkan, who chairs the council’s Committee on Planning, Development and Transportation, said.

The cost of parking

Cities around the country began imposing parking requirements in the 1950s and 1960s, when car ownership was surging and suburbs were booming.

At the time, it made sense to build for the growing use of cars.

But these days, trends are changing, at least in dense urban areas, experts say. More people are taking alternative modes of transportation. And many young adults in particular don’t bother with the expense of owning and maintaining a vehicle.

In Boston, about 34% of households do not own a car, according to American Community Survey data.

Building parking creates new costs to the developer, separate from the cost of constructing housing itself. That’s already an expensive endeavor due to inflation, tariffs, labor shortages and other roadblocks that can then be passed on to the future tenant or buyer of the home.

Though the actual price tag can differ widely, building parking can cost around $40,000 per space for above-ground parking and $100,000 per space for underground parking, according to the Greater Boston Real Estate Board.

Those costs make construction more expensive for big developers building big projects.

But for smaller developers and those creating buildings with just a handful of units, it can make a project completely infeasible. Builders can ask the Zoning Board of Appeals to waive the requirements. But that can be a long and expensive process that can also invite pushback from neighbors.

Durkan said the change would also help homeowners seeking to add an accessory dwelling unit. She has heard from multiple homeowners since filing her proposal that, if it passes, they wouldn’t need to go to the Zoning Board at all.

“Parking is the tool that people use when they can’t figure out how to stop a housing development,” she said. “Parking has been made into the issue of the moment for specific developments for a really long time. When at its core, it might just be the last straw of what people are concerned about or what they have the right to be concerned about according to zoning.”

Parking also takes up valuable real estate that could instead be used for green space, communal resources or even additional homes.

“In a city, we have very limited space. Every square foot quite literally matters,” Hessan Farooqi, the executive director of Boston Climate Action Network, said during a panel discussion last month

“We should make sure that those square feet are working for the interest of as many people as possible,” Farooqi said during the discussion hosted by the Citizens Housing and Planning Association, a Boston affordable housing nonprofit.

“Parking just isn’t a way to do that, especially when people are driving solo in a vehicle. You’ve got a whole bunch of space that’s taken up just for one person,” Farooqi said.

Farooqi explained that too much parking has an environmental cost, too, especially as Boston faces the effects of climate change.

Parking lots can create heat islands and are impermeable to stormwater, which exacerbates flooding. But they also encourage more people to drive rather than use more environmentally friendly transportation options.

How much parking do we really need?

Unsurprisingly, the biggest worry from people in favor of parking mandates is that without them, there won’t be enough parking. But experts say we don’t actually need nearly as much parking as we think.

In 2019, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council released a report that studied how much parking at multifamily housing communities was actually being used in Greater Boston. They surveyed residential parking lots and garages at around 2 a.m., when they would be at their most full, as most residents would be home and asleep.

Across the surveyed area, only about 70% of parking spots were in use. At a quarter of the sites, less than half of the available parking spaces were occupied.

While the actual ratio differed from site to site — affordable housing developments and those with better public transit connectivity typically had fewer parked cars — the researchers found that the single biggest factor in how many spaces were occupied was simply how many had been built. In other words, when more parking was built, more people had cars.

“The reality is, when we overbuild parking, we’re actually then incentivizing more people to drive and to park, competing against existing residents for that parking,” Abundant Housing Massachusetts Executive Director Jesse Kanson-Benanav said during a June 4 Boston City Council hearing. “As our need for more homes in the city grows, if we are overbuilding parking along with homes, we are going to see more cars.”

That has led a number of cities across the country to loosen or eliminate their parking requirements, typically with very positive results. Austin, Texas eliminated its off-street parking requirements in 2023. It was the largest city in the country to do so.

The change, along with others intended to spur housing construction, has led to a decline in home prices in Austin, the opposite of what has happened in Massachusetts and most of the rest of the United States.

A March report by Pew Charitable Trusts found that between December 2021 and January 2026, the median rent in Austin fell from $1,546, 15% higher than the national median, to $1,296, 4% lower than the national median. That’s despite the city’s population ballooning by 18,000 residents between 2022 and 2024.

In July, North Carolina eliminated parking minimums statewide, one of the first states to do so. That legislation goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2027.

Cambridge became the first city in Massachusetts to throw out its parking requirements in 2022. It has since been joined by Somerville, and other municipalities have lowered their requirements or considered similar changes.

In Salem, until last year, new housing projects were required to provide 1.5 parking spaces for each unit. Working with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, which conducted the 2019 parking study, Salem officials studied the North Shore city’s parking needs and found that only about 62% of spaces were occupied.

Households in multifamily developments had an average demand of just 0.85 spaces per unit.

“No building anywhere near downtown, the common, Essex Street actually met that requirement. They all had far less parking,” Planning Board member Jonathan Berk, who also co-founded the advocacy group Abundant Housing Massachusetts, said.

“If you actually built a city based on those requirements, Salem would look like Route 1 in Saugus. You lose the urban character, you lose the historic neighborhoods,” Berk said.

In September 2025, Salem Mayor Dominick Pangallo signed an ordinance eliminating parking mandates for new multifamily housing with three or more units. Since then, two housing projects have been approved with no parking, both right downtown, Berk said.

“All of it is about letting people choose and have options,” Berk said. “If you’re somebody that requires a car and you need a parking space, it’s not going to make much sense for you to buy a place that doesn’t have that option. But if you’re somebody that can afford to pay less for housing … you can choose to live there. You can walk, you can get access to the ferry, you can get access to the train and you can get access to the amenities of downtown itself.”

Boston’s parking requirements

In 2021, Boston eliminated parking minimums for new housing projects where at least 60% of the units were subsidized affordable housing for residents making 100% or less of the area median income.

But for most new housing, developers are still responsible for providing parking. The 2023 Planning Department report on the city’s zoning code found almost 200 instances setting parking minimums, often differing between very similar neighborhoods or even contradicting each other.

The zoning change that Durkan filed last year would remove those requirements for all new residential development. The city councilor emphasized that that didn’t mean a parking ban, only that developers would have the flexibility to determine how much parking they need — or don’t need.

In locales where parking minimums have been abolished, developers still often provide parking, as they know they won’t be able to get people to move in without it.

“With the current market environment, we’re not going to meet our (housing) goals without broad brush reform,” Durkan said.

Durkan said she anticipates the City Council voting on the zoning amendment by the end of 2026. If it is approved by the council, she would then need to present it to the Zoning Commission for final approval.

The proposal has momentum and support from a wide swath of backers, ranging from individual residents and housing advocates to environmentalists and the business and commercial real estate communities.

At two City Council hearings that have been held on the issue, in December 2025 and June 2026, the overwhelming majority of members of the public who testified were in favor of the change.

Though some councilors requested to hear from experts who took the opposite view, Durkan said she and her office had tried, but hadn’t been able to find any.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been universally accepted. Opponents typically worry that Boston’s already tight parking environment will get even worse if more people move in with nowhere to store their vehicles.

Roxbury resident Connie Forbes said at the June 4 hearing that she had seen new residential buildings with little to no parking pop up in her area, and she and her neighbors had been struggling with the parking situation.

“Residents who parked on the street … are now coming home and finding no parking spaces,” she said. “We have families, we have senior citizens, we have people who are disabled. Imagine coming home to an area that you don’t have your own parking space … and you have groceries and a child in your car. What do you do?”

“We should start looking at the real world, versus a virtual world which is based on data, and look at human beings,” she added.

Some city councilors are also hesitant. At the same hearing, Councilor Ed Flynn pushed back against the idea that it was easy to survive in Boston without a car, citing the millions of dollars of repairs needed for the MBTA and saying options like Uber and Lyft are out of the budget for many households.

“To really cut out the opportunity for working families, struggling parents, and try to tell them that they can’t have a car in the city is disingenuous,” Flynn said. “It’s very difficult for them to get to where they’re going to support their family. We can’t penalize and punish working-class families in this city.”

But supporters say those worries are overblown. Becca Schofield, senior developer at the real estate firm Pennrose, said at the Citizens Housing and Planning Association panel last month that while she had frequently worked on projects where she built more parking than residents needed, very rarely had she seen a project where not enough parking got built.

Schofield said that especially when a project is close to public transportation and the developer provides incentives like bicycle storage or even free MBTA passes, it’s completely viable for residents to get by without vehicles.

“When people have always had a car and always had an off-street parking spot, the idea of someone not having that and not needing that feels super foreign,” she said. “The quirk of all of this is, they’re probably not going to believe us, and they’re probably still going to be angry about it, and we do the project anyway. … It really has to play out once a development is built and once people live there.”

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