Jonathan Berk
Across the country, historic buildings and historic neighborhoods are being lost, not only to fire, flood, or neglect, but to something far more banal: minimum parking requirements.
These invisible rules, buried deep in zoning codes, have quietly done more to erase our architectural heritage than the new development so often blamed.
Cities have paved over courtyards, demolished corner stores and blocked the adaptive reuse of irreplaceable landmarks by forcing every project to carve out space for cars. This often leads to these landmarks falling into disrepair.
If we’re serious about balancing the preservation of our past, while creating sustainable, housing-abundant communities of the future, we need to recognize that one of the greatest threats to historic preservation efforts isn’t always a developer’s bulldozers – it’s often a line in our zoning code.
Parking Minimums Encourage Demolition
Numerous historic buildings are situated on small or irregular parcels that do not meet modern parking standards.
Owners often encounter a challenging decision: either demolish the building – potentially violating historic preservation regulations – or extensively alter it to incorporate parking.
If neither option is feasible, the building stays unoccupied and falls into disrepair, becoming an eyesore in the community and a detriment to the integrity of our historic neighborhoods.
Throughout the past century, vast sections of historic neighborhoods in Massachusetts have been replaced by surface parking lots, disrupting walkable streets and erasing heritage.
In many of our Gateway Cities, from Fall River to Springfield to Haverhill, 25 percent to 40 percent of their buildable downtown land is occupied by surface parking, much of it the result of sprawl-oriented, mid-century redevelopment following catastrophic fires.
These lots create gaps in the urban landscape and hinder economic revitalization efforts . Repairing this damage, reconnecting these historic neighborhoods and rebuilding a housing supply similar to nearby areas is made nearly impossible in many of these neighborhoods.
Current parking requirements would consume excessive land in new developments or significantly reduce living space, rendering these new projects impractical.
Frozen in Time by Regulations
Historic neighborhoods, like all communities, need to be able to adapt and change in response to evolving climate, economic and population demands.
The enforcement of preservation restrictions in these older areas, along with new dimensional and parking requirements that weren’t present when these neighborhoods were initially developed, makes expansion or new housing nearly impossible or financially impractical.
When changes happen, they frequently come at a significant cost to both the new development and the surrounding neighborhood.
You can find just one example at 211 Union St. in downtown New Bedford. Developers Robert Johnson Jr. and Angelina Johnson will be fully restoring it into a 35-unit apartment building above ground-floor retail. However, local parking requirements would require the project to include 119 parking spaces based on both the city’s residential and retail minimum requirements, making any development here essentially impossible.
Thankfully this project was granted flexibility from the burdensome parking requirements, but not every project – or neighborhood – is so lucky.
Transforming an old Salem mansion at 94 Washington Square East into an apartment building appeared to be a victory for historic preservation. However, in order to meet the city’s requirements of 1.5 spaces per unit, three potentially buildable parcels at the back were allocated for surface parking for the primary structure, disrupting the historic neighborhood’s fabric for parking.
It was a win for historic preservation and housing, but it may have come at the cost of additional needed housing units and certainly came at the cost of the neighborhood’s “historic character.”
Cities and States Responding
Buffalo, New York was one of the first large cities in America to eliminate minimum parking requirements from its residential zoning code, allowing infill development to tick up that was previously impossible with the archaic requirements in place.
Numerous historic restoration projects across the city credit the 2017 “Green Code,” a form-based code that included elimination of parking minimums, with making their projects viable.
With the old parking requirements, Buffalo developer Bernice Radle told Congress for New Urbanism in 2020, “We would have had to buy the vacant lot next door to install a parking lot. It would have doubled construction cost. Instead of $525 rent, we would have needed $800 to $900 month. That’s do-or-die for a small business.”
In Montana, minimum parking requirements in cities statewide were eliminated by the legislature earlier this year, not only to make it easier to build housing in existing urban areas, but to make the adaptive reuse of historic downtown buildings possible in many Montana cities.
Minimum parking requirements are likely among the most significant policy-created obstacles to both historic preservation and housing development.
But if historic preservationists and housing advocates collaborate, they can enhance preservation efforts while also promoting the development of necessary housing. This will allow our older, historic communities to thrive in the next century and beyond while building a bridge from our past to a workable future of housing abundance.
Jonathan Berk is the founder of the real estate and placemaking consultancy re:MAIN and the board chair of Abundant Housing Massachusetts.
