Parking minimums topple in Somerville

December 16, 2024

By Jennifer Smith

Somerville will be the second city in Massachusetts to entirely do away with requirements that new developments be built with a minimum amount of parking. 

Cities have long had rules requiring a minimum number of new off-street parking spaces for residential and commercial developments alike, as a way to make sure that enough people driving to any given building have a place to park. Those car-focused policies have increasingly come in for scrutiny, with smart growth advocates saying they hinder communities’ ability to think more holistically about growth and can add unnecessary costs onto already pricey housing. 

In a Thursday night vote, the Somerville City Council passed the new zoning ordinance unanimously, though one councilor was not present. It joins Cambridge, which similarly rezoned in 2022, in waving away baseline parking requirements for new construction.

“It's worth kind of emphasizing that this is a topic that people viscerally feel strongly about. And I am one of them,” council president Ben Ewen-Campen said on an episode of The Codcast one day after the vote.

“In my experience, trying to fix this problem is incredibly counterintuitive,” he said. “People think there's not enough parking in Somerville, so we need to build more parking. That is a completely reasonable thing to think. Decades and decades and decades of people have thought that and have done that. And the unfortunate reality is that that very intuitive strategy has just been proven to be counter-effective over and over and over. Everywhere that we do it, it has had the opposite effect. It's actually made traffic and congestion worse. It has not solved the problem, and it has ultimately brought more and more and more cars into cities.”

Somerville passed citywide zoning in 2019 that eliminated parking minimums on land within a half mile of public transit, which Ewen-Campen estimates covers about 70 percent of the city. This vote, he said, let the council “finish the job, to have it cover the entire city of Somerville."

Access to parking – free parking specifically – has long shaped city planning priorities. 

“Parking costs a lot of money to build, and it takes up a lot of space,” writer Henry Grabar said earlier this year. “So required parking not only adds tens of thousands of dollars onto the cost of every single American home, but also for every completed building with a bunch of parking, there’s a blueprint for an unbuilt structure that didn’t pencil out,” said Grabar, author of the 2023 book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.  

City parking policies arose in the 20th century to deal with the disorganized pile-up of parked cars and idling cars taking up curb space while waiting to pick up passengers. As travel patterns shifted in the 1950s, with a greater demand to park in downtown city centers, requiring developments to build parking into their plan seemed an elegant alternative to massive city-run garages or parking lots.

But urbanists and progressive politicians argue that those policies ended up encouraging people to drive, with an expectation that there would be somewhere to park. Plus, as Massachusetts and other states wrestle with an ever more expensive construction landscape – new housing in Greater Boston often costs $500,000 to $600,000 per unit to finance and build – parking requirements only add to the land crunch driving up costs. 

Eliminating minimums, Ewen-Campen said, does not mean there will suddenly be zero new parking. But the amount shouldn’t be decided by city officials guessing at the best number, he said.

"The way that I think about this is we should not be dictating with arbitrary rules how much parking is absolutely required in every new development,” he said. “We should let the people who actually understand how much parking they're gonna need – whether that is the homeowner or whether that is someone who's building a new lab building – figure out how much parking they actually need and build it.” 

Developers can and will build new parking, he said, but ideally in a way that doesn’t leave 30 to 40 percent of the city’s residential parking unused even when the maximum number of people are parked for the night. 

The policy will take effect on February 1. The delay is to give the city’s planning arm time to change forms for developers to clarify parking obligations under disability access laws. Councilor Jake Wilson said there was still concern about how the parking minimum change may affect accessibility. 

“This ordinance is really just the small part of the city that is not already in a transit area,” Wilson said during the meeting. “So what I would have is actually more of a sweeping look at the city … seeing what we can do to do better by those with accessibility needs.” He is satisfied with eliminating the minimums, and is “content to come back” for a separate process to address those concerns.

Somerville may only be the second Massachusetts city to fully eliminate parking minimums, but others ranging from Salem to Gloucester to Middleborough have rolled the rules back over the decade for an array of developments. Boston in 2021 eliminated off-street parking minimums for affordable housing developments. In Cambridge and the areas of Somerville where the minimums are lifted, Ewen-Campen said, “it’s working.”

“I hate to be pedantic, but it is the right policy,” he said. “You can't talk to someone in this field who studies it who tells you otherwise. I think it can be a difficult conversation to start, but I really do think that there's a lot of value in pursuing it.”

For more with City Councilor Ben Ewen-Campen – on the climate angle of parking requirements, changing residential parking permit rules, and parking lots versus parkings spaces – listen to The Codcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.