Some Council Members Hope Reducing Parking Standards Will Make it Easier to Build in Dallas

Five Dallas City Council members filed a memo Aug. 3 requesting the City Plan Commission “reopen and modernize” the city’s antiquated parking code. 

The discussion has stalled since District 1 Councilman Chad West originally filed a memo almost four years ago. The delay is due in part to the promotion of a “car-centric mentality of Dallas” and the complexity of parking code revisions, West told CandysDirt.com. 

“This work is so important,” West said. “Staff has acknowledged publicly many times that 70 to 80 percent of the man hours spent at the permit office can be attributed to working through complicated parking scenarios to try to make development work.” 

Council members Jaime Resendez, Adam Bazaldua, Jaynie Schultz, and Gay Donnell Willis added their names to West’s memo. The issue is already listed on an agenda for the Aug. 15 meeting of the Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee.

Bazaldua said parking restrictions are a perfect example of a hurdle that hinders the city’s ability to address the need for affordable housing. 

“It also perpetuates building a city based on the need for a car instead of improving the quality of life for our residents and making it more walkable and pedestrian-friendly,” he said. 

Schultz declined our request for an interview, and we did not hear back from Resendez and Willis. 

The City’s Planning and Urban Design Department already is working on revisions to the development code that would eliminate minimum parking requirements. Two public input sessions were held earlier this month.

Mendelsohn Gives Parking Pushback

Not every council member supports the initiative. District 12 Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn drew attention to the matter in her newsletter distributed Monday.

“This is very important to Far North Dallas because we have different challenges than some other parts of the city,” Mendelsohn said. “Our office receives many complaints about not enough parking at apartments and spillover into neighborhoods, but the ordinance being considered will not require even the same amount that is present today, meaning parking could be removed.”

City staff is trying to solve the problem of big empty parking lots, but also trying to get people out of cars and into buses and trains, Mendelsohn added.

“It may be appropriate for the central business district or entertainment areas to have different minimum parking than residentially-focused areas,” she said.

The council members who filed the memo say they aren’t asking for a government mandate to eliminate existing parking spaces, but to give businesses and builders the ability to determine how much of their space they want to dedicate to parking, West explained.

“I expect places in walkable neighborhoods or near public transportation will choose to build less parking than places with a more suburban feel,” he said. “I represent a part of Dallas that is fairly walkable and I have had small business owners come to me for help because the current city parking minimums are too onerous and costly. They stifle economic development and entrepreneurship in our city.”

No One-Size-Fits-All Solution to Auto Woes

Nathaniel Barrett, founder and CEO of Barrett Urban Development, told CandysDirt.com that mandatory minimum off-street parking requirements were originally conceived as a way to prevent the overcrowding of the public right-of-way caused by the rapid adoption of the automobile.

“Unfortunately, parking requirements are one of the worst ways to address the issue,” he said. “It imposes a very blunt, expensive, and unscientific process to address a problem that could be fixed at far less cost and difficulty than using parking permits, meters, and no-parking zones.”

In an essay on the subject of parking reform, Barrett explains that, because parking requirements are arbitrarily chosen and do not reflect the economic requirements of businesses or residents, they prevent flexible adaptation to the needs of a community.

“Worse, they presuppose the mode of travel people will use, thus becoming a self-reinforcing cycle: the city requires parking, so everything is farther apart, which necessitates auto travel, so people need parking,” he said. “We have the excellent tools of parking permits, meters, and no-parking zones to address nuisances of a badly-managed curb. An excellent example of this is the Lower Greenville area where resident-only parking passes help keep curbs free of excessive parking. Even better would be parking meters that paid out money to the neighborhood for sidewalk improvements, improved lighting, and other services, which the city is working on.”

A Park(ing) Day Resolution With Reform in Mind

A proposed resolution in the five-signature memo calls for designating Sept. 15 as “Park(ing) Day” to promote community engagement. On this day, the community would create mini-parks, operate vendor booths, and host entertainment activities to repurpose public parking spaces. 

Park(ing) Day Dallas has been held in years past, but the archives don’t appear to show any events more recent than 2016. 

“Park(ing) Day is based on the New Urbanism idea of human-scaled urban designs, neighborhoods with community connection, and the conservation of our natural environments,” the council memo states. “New Urbanism encourages civic maintenance of neighborhoods by revitalizing the communities’ pride and ability to care about the environment and all public spaces within the neighborhood.” 

Implementing Parking Reform

The council memo directs City Manager T.C. Broadnax to “immediately begin planning and implementing actions to reduce required parking in the City of Dallas to promote the ideas of repurposing parking spots into better uses for the community.” 

Further, it asks that Broadnax provide a briefing in September to report on the reduction of parking and elimination of minimum parking standards.

“The city government always needs to strike an appropriate balance in how we interact with developers and builders,” West told CandysDirt.com. “I’ve heard from many of them that municipal parking minimums increase how much land they must purchase to construct new concepts. Those costs get passed on to tenants and customers, and unlike safety regulations or environmental standards, parking minimums aren’t for societal good. They don’t serve a purpose other than letting the city government stifle neighborhood needs.”

The council members who signed the memo have said they are seeking input from experts with American Institute of Architects and The Real Estate Council.