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South Bend, Indiana Council Votes to Eliminate Parking Requirements Citywide

Maria Walliser-Wejebe

In early January, South Bend city council voted to eliminate parking requirements for businesses and development. What are parking minimums, and why is it noteworthy that South Bend nixed them?

Parking minimums are local laws requiring a certain number of parking spaces for commercial and residential spaces. With the rise of the suburbs and automobile commutes, parking minimums became a standard element in most city codes and planning regulations.

If a city’s goal is to control congestion and support businesses by requiring enough parking spaces for residents and commuters, then parking minimums sound like a smart idea at first. But unfortunately, parking minimums generate more problems than they solve, beginning with their baseline assumptions about how much parking is needed. Historically, planners have recommended parking minimums based either on the parking minimums used in other nearby cities, or based on survey data observing the parking generation rate at peak demand hours in largely suburban sites with little to no public transportation available (Shoup 1999). That’s a roundabout way of saying that the formula behind developing parking minimums is a pseudoscience; a city is basing policy on assumptions that are either primed to overestimate parking demand or risk repeating someone else’s assumptions.  In both cases, the likely outcome is to require more parking than needed most of the time.

Requiring more parking than necessary can negatively impact new development at a specific site, and citywide. Parking is one of the most expensive parts of development, between $5,000 and $10,000 per surface lot parking space and $25,000 - $50,000 per space in a structured lot, like a garage (Strong Towns 2018). These costs can easily translate into higher rents and overhead, chaining a business to a large, expensive lot that may never fill all the way up. On a macro scale, requiring excess amounts of off-street parking reduces density, impacts walkability, and indirectly reinforces car dependence, all while taking large chunks of land out of productive use.

The cons of parking minimums have encouraged a number of cities nationwide, like Minneapolis (MN) and San Francisco, to reduce or eliminate the requirements within their cities (Walker Consultants 2019). Several cities across Ohio, including Akron, Cleveland, Marysville, and Sandusky have eliminated parking minimums in their downtowns and central business districts in an effort to support ongoing revitalization efforts (Strong Towns 2020).

Previously, the City of South Bend (IN) had eliminated parking minimums in their downtown, but on January 13, city council voted to get rid of minimums citywide, making it the largest city in the Midwest to make this change (Guevara 2021). Eliminating minimum rules for parking does not mean the same thing as eliminating new parking entirely, but it does mean that city regulations will no longer force businesses or apartment complexes to build more parking than they need. The new rules won’t change much for existing businesses, but may help to attract new businesses to the city by reducing some of the overhead costs associated with overparking, and several South Bend council members expect the new rule to support small businesses in particular. Prior to this ruling, businesses would either have to seek a variance to get around parking rules, or purchase more land for additional parking. By creating a cost savings for new commercial and residential development, many urban scholars believe that eliminating or reducing minimum parking requirements has the potential to make cities more vibrant, walkable, and affordable places.

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