THE NEXT STEP

It was a start, but it wasn’t enough. We needed to repeal parking minimums entirely. It was clear that, while the situation with the bank may have been the biggest example of how parking minimums were harming our small town, their negative impacts were felt much more widely.

These requirements were stopping other smaller businesses — the ones that couldn’t afford to buy up and knock down their neighbors — from expanding. The requirements were also making it difficult to build affordable housing and mandating that people build exactly the opposite of how citizens were telling us (through our Comprehensive Plan process) that they wanted our town to look and function.

But even with all this evidence of damage from our parking requirements, we didn’t have the votes to repeal the minimums. It was not an easy journey to get there.

I gathered letters from local business owners who wanted to expand but were unable to do so, due to the parking requirements. I worked with other residents to track just how many parking spots sat empty at the city lot and other locations where parking far exceeded demand. In collaboration with city staff, we discovered that the most beloved parts of our town would be illegal to rebuild under the current code.

SUCCESS!

It took a while to build enough support – and it was still contentious—but we managed to pass a series of reforms to Sandpoint’s parking requirements. We eliminated minimum parking requirements in Downtown Sandpoint entirely. Everywhere else in the city—for both commercial and residential uses—we greatly reduced them. And, finally, we set parking maximums to prevent even larger empty lots from damaging our community’s economy and quality of life.

The positive impacts were felt almost immediately. A popular Mexican restaurant was able to complete a long delayed expansion that, before the changes, would have cost them more in “in lieu of parking” fees than construction costs. Another restaurant turned their unused off-street parking spaces into additional outdoor seating in the summer. When a big box grocery store moved to town a little while later, the parking maximums left room for other small businesses and housing to also develop around them. And, by the way, they still had plenty of parking.

It became clear pretty quickly that parking minimums had never been protecting us from some dangerous world where no one could park their cars. The market actually wanted to provide more than enough (thus the maximums). In the end, parking minimums themselves were revealed to be the problem. And when we got rid of them, our businesses and community were allowed to gently, incrementally grow; creating more of the same kinds of places we used to build and still loved.

5 Tips for Repealing Parking Minimums in Your Community

Here are some of the lessons we learned from repealing parking minimums in our town that will help you do the same in your community: