The city would have required Barrett to have some 40 off-street parking spaces for the project, which he said wouldn’t be possible with the lot he had.
If it weren’t for something called delta credits, he would have had a difficult time providing all that parking. Delta credits exempt buildings that were constructed before parking requirements went into effect. Since then, Barrett has been looking into parking in the city and has learned there’s a huge difference between the parking a project needs and the parking that is required.
“Those two things are not the same," Barrett said. "Not at all.”
These parking requirements can make building more difficult and more expensive than it needs to be in Dallas. That’s partly why City Council member Chad West filed a memo to get Dallas to take another look at its parking rules. His memo, signed by five council members, asks City Manager T.C. Broadnax to begin planning and implementing actions to reduce parking mandates and to provide briefings on the status of the elimination of minimum parking requirements in Dallas. The city’s Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee discussed the issue at its meeting this week.
West authored a similar memo to the city manager in 2019, but he said discussions about parking reform have been stalled ever since. “I’m over it,” West said. “It’s time to actually address this issue and to help our city become a modernized city.”
His memo this year also calls for the city to adopt something called Park(ing) Day, which recognizes how you can put parking spaces to other uses besides just parking. Jaime Resendez, Adam Bazaldua, Jaynie Schultz and Gay Donnell Willis were the other City Council members who signed on to the memo.
It was a case in 2017 that initially got West paying attention to parking reform. “It was a ridiculous overparking requirement for a hotel,” West told the Observer. The hotel would have had 12 rooms and would have been within walking distance of the Bishop Arts District. There would also be a restaurant on site. The development would have been required to provide 25 parking spaces for the restaurant and 12 spaces for the hotel.“I’m over it." – Chad West, Dallas City Council
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“So, it was impossible. It wasn’t going to be able to be built,” West said. “But the crazier part of it all was that this occurred within one block of the streetcar stop and within like four blocks of the Bishop Arts District where people are taking Ubers and Lyfts, and walking. So, it made no sense for this parking requirement to be in existence.”
Barrett explained that, as it stands now, Dallas follows a conventional approach to parking. It sets a ratio usually based on square feet (but sometimes based on the number of seats or some other capacity measure) for minimum parking requirements. A warehouse, for example, might require only one space for every 500 square feet, while a restaurant or bar might require one parking space for every 100 square feet of floor space, Barrett said. Multifamily developments require one parking space for every bedroom.
“That’s the approach that Dallas has taken since about the mid-1960s, and most American cities have done the same thing in that time period,” Barrett said.
This can cause a number of problems when it comes to building in Dallas.
One of those problems, Barrett said, is that it creates an incentive to knock down older historic buildings to make way for more parking. “If you have a business that is successful and you want to expand it or even change what use you’re doing in the building, you’ll have to have more parking and that might entail knocking down a building next door,” he explained. “You may not even really need it to service all your customers but just because that’s the law and you can’t run the business without the parking, you knock down some buildings.”
He said parking requirements also make it difficult to build density in Dallas.
A single car can take up about 300 square feet, and this can add up quickly. In the case of a restaurant that requires one parking spot for every 100 square feet, “that means you have to have a parking lot three times the size of the restaurant,” Barrett said. “This has the effect of causing everything to be spread out.”
He also noted that while parking takes up a lot of land, it’s often doesn't make for a large return. “If you think about how much people are willing to pay to park, it’s not very much,” Barrett said. “So that translates into lower tax revenues for all of us because now we have all this land dedicated to low-value parking.”
Parking requirements can also make some lots unable to be developed, he added, and they can make building more expensive in Dallas.
One of the biggest costs in all of this is simply providing the parking. If you’re constructing structured or underground parking, it could cost $30,000–$50,000 per space, according to Barrett. This can affect affordability for tenants. “You can pretty reliably estimate those costs,” he said. “For every $100 it costs, you’re going to probably add a dollar of cost to rent to everyone.”
Doing away with all of these parking requirements could solve a lot of the problems for developers and certain businesses. What it wouldn’t do is solve the original problems that parking requirements were meant to solve, such as curb management and associated issues with loading and unloading zones and parking meters, and spillover parking for locations where the standard parking is at capacity. But Barrett said there are better ways to address these issues. The city could instead use no-parking zones, more resident-only or permitted parking, and more parking meters.
“The right solution is to regulate the problem directly,” Barrett said. “We got a nuisance parking problem. Let’s charge for parking. Let’s make sure people don’t park where they shouldn’t.”
