In the last few years, a growing contingent of advocates who loosely organize under the “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) banner have had some success in removing legislative and regulatory barriers to building new housing in famously restrictive places like Minneapolis, California, and Massachusetts. Other communities are considering such legislation as well, a welcome development in a nation desperate to add housing and lower home prices.

One of these YIMBY reforms entails easing or removing parking requirements for new development in urban areas that force developers to include enough parking for every resident to own a car. In places near mass transit, such requirements can add greatly to the cost of construction while reducing the number of units that can be built, even though many would-be residents presumably want to use transit instead of personal vehicles.

Subsidizing car ownership / But parking plays a greater role in urban development than most YIMBY or other pro-housing forces acknowledge. In dense neighborhoods well-served by mass transit, most opposition to new housing comes from car owners who park their cars on the street by their home for almost nothing. They fear that any new housing will increase the demand for on-street parking and make their ability to find a space significantly more difficult. As long as dense cities allow residents to have free or nearly free on-street parking, the street-parker part of the anti-construction coalition will stay in place, making it more costly and time-consuming to build housing in such places.

In Washington, DC, the cost of a city-issued residential parking permit is just $50 a year. In the city’s densest neighborhoods—such as the tony enclaves of Georgetown and Dupont Circle or trendy Adams Morgan—this cost is orders of magnitude below the cost of a private parking spot, which can exceed $3,000 a year. The difference between the market cost of parking and on-street parking is, in essence, a subsidy for car owners, a policy that is at odds with oft-stated concerns about equity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the District has spent a considerable amount of money in pursuit of the latter goal.

DC’s implicit subsidy for car owners has a predictable outcome: more people buy cars than would otherwise be the case. Many people who would otherwise content themselves with mass transit and ride-sharing services like Lyft and Uber calculate that leaving a cheap car parked on the street is worthwhile even if they rarely drive it. As a result, the city’s streets are replete with cars that are not regularly driven. A 2023 census of automobiles parked on the street in two dense residential neighborhoods conducted by members of Parking Reform, a nonprofit focused on reforming parking laws, discovered that fully 30 percent did not move during the six-week interval of its surveys. One van had been parked in the same spot for over two decades without being driven. A Freedom of Information Act request from 2019 revealed that in Adams Morgan, four residents each owned and parked over a dozen automobiles on the street.

In fact, a large proportion of cars on the street are never driven; they are effectively used as storage containers. Government officials are aware of this and have chosen to accommodate the owners. For instance, in neighborhoods where this is common, they have abolished street-sweeping, meaning the cars need not be moved periodically. Other city policies that facilitate cars as storage containers include:

  • Cars older than 15 years that are driven less than 1,000 miles a year can be registered as historic vehicles, which exempts them from needing to pass emissions standards.
  • Cars used as storage vehicles do not need auto insurance coverage.
  • Traffic safety officers are prohibited from ticketing vehicles parked on the street that do not have insurance, which makes a car-cum-storage-container even more affordable.

DC also allows people to renew their drivers licenses without paying any outstanding tickets. The rationale for this is that people who depend on their car for work should not be denied their ability to travel to and from work, and denying license renewal would be particularly harmful to Black residents. Given that the city is amply served by mass transit and a majority of Black households do not own an automobile, this reasoning is dubious. The District has over $1 billion in unpaid tickets for parking and speeding violations.

Increased demand for street parking / Predictably, the city’s car subsidy results in many more people trying to park on the street than there are available spaces. Rather than adjust the price so the market can clear, the District tries to accommodate car owners by finding more parking.

For instance, DC law explicitly prohibits parking within 40 feet of an intersection to help drivers see pedestrians more easily. The law also prohibits parking within 80 feet of a bus stop to make it easier for buses to enter and leave. But both provisions have been set aside in dense neighborhoods and downtown to accommodate more parked cars. The city also allows parking on most of its major roads used by commuters, such as Massachusetts Avenue and Connecticut Avenue, which greatly exacerbates congestion throughout the day.

DC also uses political redistricting to accommodate car owners. The city awards parking permits by city ward, each of which encompasses several neighborhoods, and parking considerations greatly influence how the city draws the eight wards. For instance, denizens of Ward 6, which includes Capitol Hill, lobby to ensure their ward extends to the edge of downtown so they can park on downtown streets for free. Residents of Kalorama, a wealthy neighborhood replete with large, detached homes and ample parking, agitate to make sure it is not in the same ward as Adams Morgan, a dense neighborhood immediately to its east with a significant parking shortage. Instead, the overflow of cars from Adams Morgan ends up in Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood to its north that is the home of many Latino immigrants who lack both cars and the political power to keep out parked cars from other neighborhoods.

Opposition to new housing / The parking shortage also inspires opposition from many neighborhood associations that ostensibly exist for the overall betterment of their area but inevitably focus on issues that can affect parking availability. These groups work to stop the creation of bike lanes and end permits for sidewalk and street dining that can reduce the number of parking spots, but their efforts are most notable in opposing new housing developments that would bring new residents—including people with cars that they might park on the street.

Virtually every new housing development in DC’s densest neighborhoods is met with a flurry of lawsuits from the members of these groups. These activists have proven adept at using DC’s historic preservation laws to enshrine parking lots, gas stations, and empty lots as “historic” and thus ineligible to be developed. When that fails, they pivot to whatever dilatory tactic they think will slow construction, hoping to increase developers’ costs and delay the day that new residents and their cars arrive.

Parking dictating housing policy / The policy of effectively subsidizing car owners who live in dense neighborhoods served by mass transit is an accident of history: If we were starting from a blank slate, no one would ever suggest we make residential parking virtually free. But because these subsidies have been in place for a lifetime, a switch to charging people something close to market price for parking would be politically contentious and is not something politicians are anxious to do—especially since many of them store their own cars on the street.

DC has spent millions to increase affordable housing. But such subsidies are meaningless if the city’s government continues to accommodate wealthy car owners who want to park their cars on city streets at little or no cost to them.