Parking minimums force developers to build 95 more spaces than residents need, adding $100/month to rent per unit in Aurora, CO — and this pattern repeats in thousands of cities

Most US municipalities require developers to provide a fixed number of off-street parking spaces per residential unit — typically 1.5 to 2 spaces per apartment. These minimums are set by decades-old formulas that dramatically overestimate actual car ownership, especially near transit. In Aurora, Colorado, a 405-unit apartment complex was required to build 485 parking spaces — 95 more than the developer predicted residents would actually need. The excess parking cost was passed through to tenants as $100/month in additional rent per unit. Structured parking costs $30,000 to $56,000 per space to build. For a 100-unit building required to provide 150 spaces in a parking structure, that is $4.5 to $8.4 million in construction costs that produce zero housing. Those costs flow directly into rents. For affordable housing projects funded by Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, a 2020 national study found parking structures added an average of $56,000 per unit in total development cost. On small urban lots, parking requirements can consume so much of the site that the remaining buildable area cannot support enough units to make the project financially viable, so it simply does not get built. Parking minimums persist because they were baked into zoning codes in the 1950s-1970s when car-centric suburban development was the norm, and most cities have never revisited the underlying assumptions. Removing them requires a politically visible vote that opponents frame as 'taking away parking,' even though eliminating minimums does not prohibit parking — it simply lets the market decide how much to build. As of late 2025, reform is accelerating: Washington state capped minimums at 0.5 spaces per unit (SB 5184, May 2025), Connecticut banned minimums for projects under 16 homes (HB 8002, November 2025), and cities like Minneapolis and Seattle have eliminated them entirely. But thousands of smaller cities and suburbs still enforce outdated formulas that make housing more expensive for no reason.