Asheville’s Latest Parking Reform Effort Is a Missed Opportunity

In case you haven’t heard yet, parking mandates are a crazy thing. They have a harmful effect of making housing more costly and more scarce in high-demand places. We talked about it a bit last summer. And you can read more about the housing-related benefits of abolishing costly parking mandates here.

So as awareness grows that parking mandates are a terrible legacy of a mid-twentieth century, car-centric way of thinking that should have no part in contemporary urban planning, cities across the country have eliminated them from their municipal codes. These cities have all figured out that parking mandates don’t need to be tweaked, or reformed. They simply need to be eliminated.

The list of cities that have eliminated parking mandates (otherwise referred to as parking minimums) include such diverse places as Anchorage, Alaska; Birmingham, Alabama; Austin, TX; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. They include places with robust transit networks, and places with no public transit all. (Even Durham is on the list!) After all, eliminating costly parking mandates doesn’t eliminate parking. It simply makes it so that new buildings don’t have to include a large number of parking spaces when it doesn’t make sense to do so.

So, after the 2023 Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study strongly encouraged minimizing or eliminating parking mandates in the city’s core residential neighborhoods, and then Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission signaled its wish to see parking mandates in residential neighborhoods eliminated entirely with a unanimous vote last summer, and then the city’s 2024 Affordable Housing Study effectively mirrored the Missing Middle study’s recommendations regarding parking upon its release in September, how has the city responded?

Asheville city staff has now readied plans for parking reform, and these plans are tentatively scheduled to be heard by City Council on February 11th. (They will be making a pit stop at next week’s Planning and Zoning Commission, which is admittedly confusing given that the panel has already discussed and voted on parking reform twice in the past year.)

And those plans include zero changes to costly parking mandates in all of Asheville’s residential neighborhoods.

Instead, the city has targeted “commercial districts” for parking mandate elimination.

To be clear, this is still a big improvement. The city allows multifamily housing to be built in any of those commercial districts. We could use more apartments and condos on Merrimon Ave. or Patton Ave. or Haywood Rd. or Tunnel Rd., and this change may allow for more housing in those places and others.

But the complete lack of any changes to residential neighborhoods is still perplexing.

(I want to make clear that I don’t fault Asheville’s Planning & Urban Design Department staff for the limited proposal; I think it’s likely that politics are at work here, and that staff has been directed to delay “missing middle”-related reforms. But that’s a can of worms that we’ll leave closed for now!)

Here’s a map that Zach at Strong Towns Asheville made. It shows all of the commercial corridors where parking mandates will be eliminated if the city code revision that city staff has proposed passes. (Note that the Central Business District and surrounding area is a different color because parking mandates for new development were effectively eliminated there a while back—with some asterisks.)¹

A couple of observations:

First, from this map, we are talking about a very small amount of the city seeing any positive change. At Asheville For All, we talk a lot about the importance of broad geographic changes as a bulwark against land value inflation and speculation. It sure seems like we’re missing a big opportunity to make housing more affordable if we’re only really allowing infill to happen in a relatively small amount of land in the city—whether that land is coded commercial or residential.

Second, it sure looks like a good amount of the land that is targeted for parking mandate elimination is in or near the areas that flooded during Hurricane Helene, possibly fifty percent or more of it!

Everyone in the city appears eager to debate the future of the city’s floodplains, but I’m of a strong mind that this is a terrible distraction—a kind of big black hole that is sucking everyone’s energy and attention away from a bigger, more important question—what changes are needed in the 91% of the city that isn’t likely to flood again?

(If you missed it, Citizen Times recently had a story about the question of building housing in the floodplain, where developers were quoted as saying that even if it is going to be technically permitted, they’re not sure if it will be a sound business decision. I think removing parking mandates is unlikely going to change that.)

* * *

Let’s set aside the idea of eliminating costly parking mandates completely, citywide, for just a moment. And let’s compare the map of proposed parking mandate eliminations with a map from the 2023 Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study (page 36). As I’ve said before, this is no radical document.

The Missing Middle Housing Study includes a suggestion for the geographical boundaries within which pro-housing reforms, including parking mandate reduction or elimination, should be enacted to promote more “middle housing.” The red dashed lines on the image below show areas within a ten minute walk to “existing and potential . . . walkable centers and corridors.”

The difference is striking. Again, even if we want to take city-wide parking mandate elimination off the table—and I sure don’t!—you can immediately see an enormous potential for changes, changes that will promote more housing options, lower rents, and greater walkability, in West Asheville and North Asheville, as well as other spots like Fairview Road in Oakley. The city’s current plans squander this potential.

And let’s remember, when we say that these neighborhoods are supposed to be off limits to neighborhood change, even modest change, we’re repeating some historical patterns. High-demand, core neighborhoods—Asheville’s oldest neighborhoods, and the ones most supportive of walkability—are likely to be the ones that are most segregated, or the ones experiencing the most increases in housing instability for working people. In fact, limits on neighborhood change have been historically, following the 1910s, the mechanism for enforcing socioeconomic and racial segregation.

* * *

The city has a new public survey up. It’s for providing feedback on the proposed parking mandate reform, in addition to two other changes that also have the potential to spur infill housing.

So let’s send a message to the city that if eliminating costly parking mandates is a strike against segregation, a way to increase housing options for cash-strapped renters and first-time homebuyers, a way to limit sprawl and promote walkability, and if it’s good enough for cities from Anchorage to Austin to Ann Arbor, it’s time for Asheville to ban parking mandates. Citywide.

Click here for Asheville For All’s “guide” to the city’s new survey. Please fill it out as soon as possible, in order to influence both the relevant Planning and Zoning Commission meeting and the later City Council meeting!