Jonathan Berk
One year ago, Salem became the first Massachusetts community outside Greater Boston’s urban core to eliminate minimum parking requirements for new multifamily housing.
Opponents warned that developers would stop building parking altogether, neighborhoods would be overrun with cars and street parking would disappear. Instead, Salem has followed the same pattern seen in cities across the country that have eliminated parking minimums.
Parking still gets built. But instead of building to arbitrary mandates, developers are providing parking in quantities that better match market demand.
That distinction matters. Eliminating parking minimums has never meant eliminating parking. It simply replaces a one-size-fits-all zoning mandate with flexibility and deference to what people actually want.
Under Salem’s old requirement, established in 1969, every multifamily building had to provide at least 1.5 parking spaces per apartment, regardless of location or how residents actually traveled. But data from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) found that 38 percent of required parking spaces sat empty overnight, with actual demand averaging just 0.85 spaces per unit.
One year later, the early results are following a pattern that’s become increasingly clear across North America. Cities that remove parking minimums don’t stop building parking; they stop overbuilding it.
That means lower development costs, more room for housing, better urban form, and parking that better reflects how people actually live rather than what a zoning code written decades ago assumes.
The Market Still Builds Parking
Removing a parking mandate isn’t the same as banning parking. It simply allows each project to provide the amount of parking its location, residents and economics actually justify.
The recently approved redevelopment of Salem State University’s South Campus illustrates the point.
The first phase includes 340 apartments and roughly 524 parking spaces, about 1.5 spaces per unit. No zoning code required that amount.
On a suburban site at the edge of the city, where most residents are expected to own cars, the developer concluded that the provision of abundant parking made sense here.
That’s exactly what parking reform is supposed to do. It doesn’t eliminate parking; it eliminates arbitrary mandates, allowing parking to be built where the market demands it instead of where a decades-old zoning formula says it must be.
Parking Reform Unlocks Housing
The contrast is just as striking on the other side of town.
At Pickering Wharf, a proposal to convert the upper floors of an underused office building into housing is only feasible because the parking mandate is gone. On a constrained waterfront site in the heart of Salem’s historic downtown, there is simply no way to add 1.5 new parking spaces for every apartment.
Under the old code, that requirement would have killed the project before it ever got off the ground, leaving the building underutilized. Today, those homes can move forward in one of the city’s most walkable neighborhoods, where residents are least likely to rely on a car.
Also in downtown, a previously approved mixed-use project returned to take advantage of the new parking rules, releasing a complicated commitment to lease off-site parking spaces and converting ground-floor parking into a small neighborhood storefront that better serves the community.
This Shouldn’t Be 351 Battles
The effort to remove multifamily parking minimums in Salem took a year and a half. All that time and effort to confirm exactly what the national research has long shown, what MAPC’s regional research has shown: that developers had been required to build far more parking than residents actually used.
Parking minimums were never grounded in reality. The familiar ratios – one space, one-and-a-half spaces, two spaces per unit, one space per bedroom – these weren’t derived from careful examination of how people actually live in individual communities. They were copied from national planning manuals and repeated from one zoning code to the next. Salem simply did what few communities ever do, they checked the math.
That’s why this shouldn’t remain a city-by-city, town-by-town, debate.
North Carolina, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support in the House, Senate and governor’s office, recently became the first state to eliminate most parking minimums statewide.
Massachusetts must recognize that mandates built on faulty assumptions don’t become more valid simply because they’re repeated 351 times.
Salem had the staff, volunteers and political will to spend eighteen months proving what countless cities had already learned. Most communities don’t.
We shouldn’t require every city and town to reinvent the wheel before they’re allowed to stop overbuilding parking. The evidence is already in. It’s time our laws caught up.
Jonathan Berk is the founder of the real estate and placemaking consultancy re:MAIN, a Salem resident and the board chair of Abundant Housing Massachusetts.
