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In the face of collapsing housing construction and a painful budget crunch, two Boston city councilors say it’s time Boston stopped mandating how much parking housing developments build.
The offices of City Councilors Sharon Durkan and Henry Santana told reporters Wednesday morning that the pair, led by Durkan, plan to propose a citywide zoning ordinance eliminating parking requirements for all new residential buildings citywide at this afternoon’s City Council meeting.
Led by former city councilor Kenzie Bok, the city eliminated parking requirements for affordable housing developments in 2021, and city planning officials have been increasingly receptive to market-rate developers’ requests to cut out parking in order to make previously-approved developments pencil.
“We’re over-building parking and raising the cost of housing at a time when so many people in the city are rent-burdened,” Durkan said in an interview.
The city’s parking requirements – which vary widely depending on where and how big a development is – are out of sync with the actual demand for new parking, Durkan contended, citing research by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council that 40 percent of the parking spaces in eastern Massachusetts housing developments were going unused. MAPC research suggests underground parking can cost up to $100,000 per space in some parts of the city.
The municipal rules that mandated that parking also mean housing developments’ budgets must drag around a financial dead weight, raising the cost a consumer must pay to rent an apartment or buy a condominium. They also create enough fear of abutter lawsuits in the development community that many projects never get proposed, at all.
“People’s eyes glaze over when you talk about zoning, but they don’t glaze over when they think about their rent and trying to stay in the city,” Durkan said.
If passed, Durkan said, the measure wouldn’t eliminate parking at new developments, simply let developers build what parking’s needed. A December 2025 hearing held by the council, she said, included testimony from developers that many banks still require parking based on their own analyses of what renters or buyers want.
“We’re getting in the middle of this – the market has already found ways to determine what’s appropriate for different areas,” she said.
The proposal must still go through months of debate, including a hearing currently scheduled for June 4, Durkan said. However, the limited polling available suggests that the idea will find receptive ears among city residents.
How Much Support Is There?
A survey commissioned by advocacy group Abundant Housing MA, which helped Durkan develop the zoning proposal, and published last fall found 38 percent of city residents strongly supported “the City of Boston changing its rules to allow property owners flexibility to determine the size and location of paved parking for new homes.” Another 32 percent somewhat supported the idea, with 24 percent expressing some kind of opposition and 6 percent unsure.
“Owners and renters alike support it, it’s a real telling thing. We see strong levels of support for parking reform,” Jesse Kanson-Benanav, the group’s executive director, said.
The idea drew a strong message of support from one of the city’s major real estate lobby groups.
“The city is in desperate need of real solutions to increase supply and lower costs, and removing nonessential policies is a simple step to help us overcome the housing crisis,“ Greater Boston Real Estate Board CEO Greg Vasil said in a statment.
Boston is actually behind many major cities in reducing its parking requirements, Kanson-Benanav said, and the idea has worked in cities like Austin, Texas and Minneapolis, Minnesota to unlock more housing development.
“Despite some of these macro issues – inflation, etc. – other cities around the country that have reformed their parking rules, that have seen the same impacts from tariffs and inflation, have seen more housing get built, and seen their housing costs go down as a result,” he said.
Locally, Cambridge, Somerville and Salem have all initiated major parking reforms, or eliminated parking requirements completely in recent years.
If the Boston City Council ultimately votes to remove parking requirements for housing projects, Kanson-Benanav said, it will be the culmination of an idea that helped headline zoning expert Sarah Bronin‘s 2023 recommendations to then-new Mayor Michelle Wu on what the city should do to modernize what’s been labeled one of the longest and most byzantine zoning codes in the nation.
“If this passes, it should be seen as an accomplishment for Mayor Wu,” he said.
