City Council member Cara Mendelsohn said that maybe she should host a Park(ing) Day event in her District 12. But she said it might look a little different. It might not be all that fun. Her neighbors might be upset, she said, because there’s not sufficient parking throughout her district.
On Wednesday, city staff told the council about Park(ing) Day and where the city stands with amending its parking code. No ordinance was being proposed just yet, as the briefing was meant only to be informative. That didn’t stop the City Council from diving deeply into what parking reform could look like in Dallas.
A memo was signed by City Council member Chad West and others in August, asking City Manager T.C. Broadnax to begin planning and implementing actions to reduce parking mandates and to provide a briefing on the status of the elimination of parking minimums in Dallas. The memo, which also called for Dallas to adopt Park(ing) Day, is what prompted the parking briefing on Wednesday.
While the City Council members couldn’t all agree on what to do about parking reform on Wednesday, several said there is no simple solution.
Andreea Udrea, assistant director of Dallas’ planning and urban design department, walked the City Council through where the situation stands today. She said officials started talking about the need for parking reform in 2019, and that between March 2020 and August 2023, city staff worked with the Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee (ZOAC) on the issue of parking minimums to try to come up with a proposal. “After working with ZOAC a little bit, we basically landed on the idea that it's a little bit more complex and it has to be more of a reform of the way we approach parking in the city,” she said.
Udrea explained that currently when a business or residence is established on a property, the development code requires provision of parking and loading spaces that are supposed to be onsite and not on the public right-of-way. This requirement is usually based on a ratio, but parking requirements could be based on square footage of a property, or how many bedrooms a residence has, for example. Parking requirement reductions are available, she said, but they’re limited.“This is one of the biggest issues in the city." – Chad West, Dallas City Council
tweet this
Discussions between ZOAC and city staff revealed issues with the way the current parking code, in place since the '60s, really works.
“We all agree that it is outdated, dysfunctional and it provides inflexible requirements that create barriers to equitable development,” Udrea said. “More specifically, they are a one-size-fits-all requirement because it’s a ratio that applies everywhere in the city and is blind to location and traffic and other consideration.”
According to Udrea, the current parking code is cumbersome for applicants and for staff and can be a barrier to development. She said the current requirements disproportionately burden small businesses and entrepreneurs, and they have a big racial equity impact. She thinks they also impede the city’s environmental and neighborhood walkability goals.
During two listening sessions in August, people expressed support for parking reform but some shared concerns about traffic congestion and the shortage of free and abundant parking. Spillover parking on residential streets was also a concern.
“This is one of the biggest issues in the city,” West said of parking reform at the meeting. West asked Udrea how the city has changed since the parking code was adopted in the ’60s. She said the biggest change is the city is starting to fill in and there’s not as much undeveloped land as there used to be. The city is growing and needs a code that will help facilitate that growth.
West pointed out that there’s also a housing shortage that he suspected wasn’t a problem in the 1960s. He asked how the parking code affects the city’s ability to develop housing. Udrea said it has a significant impact.
“The problem with parking is that it’s very big,” Udrea said. Two parking spots would be equivalent to the size of a small studio apartment. So, parking is big and expensive, she said, and this can affect affordability.
West gave an example of a single parent living in a two-bedroom apartment with only one car. Even though the household uses only one parking space, the parking code requires two spaces to be provided. Udrea said the current parking code is not sensitive to nuances like this.
“Now I know that there is not a one-size-fits-all model of the parking code that’s going to work for the whole city,” West said. “I’ve got challenges in my district where parking reductions are used to preserve historic buildings, and that’s evident in other parts of the city. And I know there’s council members here who have challenges in their district with people parking in the streets and things of that nature. So, it’s not that simple.” But he did ask Udrea if she sees opportunities in the city to eliminate parking minimums.
Udrea said the city has already done this to some extent, citing downtown, which doesn’t have extensive parking requirements. “But we still have enough,” she said, adding that Deep Ellum also has reduced parking requirements, and the Farmers Market area has the same requirements as downtown. “So I would say that we’re already testing, and we’re doing it. It’s just that right now we have to take all the lessons learned and see what will work for the entire city,” she said.
Mendelsohn said people in her district aren’t worried about there being too much parking; they're upset about there not being enough parking at apartment complexes in her district, which leads to a lot of on-street parking and traffic congestion. “So we have very different issues,” the council member said.
Mendelsohn noted that it’s likely there are couples living in one-bedroom apartments with two cars or more. For them, as she sees it, one parking spot per bedroom isn’t enough. “Sometimes there’s three and four adults in a one bedroom apartment because — you know what? — this is how people are surviving in Dallas today,” she said.
While Udrea agreed there shouldn’t be a universal approach to parking, Mendelsohn countered that there shouldn’t be a universal approach to getting rid of parking requirements, either. “We need to have some requirements,” Mendelsohn said.
Paul Ridley, City Council member for Dallas’ District 14, agreed that parking isn’t a situation that lends itself to any easy solution. “It is a very diverse city in the sense of types of development density, amount of parking and the usages of the land that results in different parking demands,” he said. “And it’s not the city it was in 1965 when we didn’t have mass transit like we do today.”
He added, “My point is that this needs to be a very particularized, thoughtful study of the requirements in different parts of the city, urban versus suburban or whatever that divide is, so that it can provide appropriate solutions for all areas and types of development.”
He also said he wouldn’t be in favor of any changes happening overnight. “This is such a far-reaching policy change,” he said, asserting that it should be implemented gradually.
Udrea said parking code amendments could be briefed to ZOAC this fall. Later this fall, these amendments could be brought to the City Plan Commission for a public hearing. From there, it could be brought to City Council for a briefing this winter or next spring.
