Last week, Governor Bob Ferguson’s signature made it official: Washington has passed the strongest statewide rollback of costly parking mandates in the United States. The bill does many things, but put simply, it means that in most places across the state, onerous parking requirements will no longer limit the homes and businesses that Washingtonians need and want.
In most circumstances, the new law will restore the rights of property owners—not arbitrary, predetermined local quotas—to decide how many parking spaces they need for the homes or businesses they hope to build. This means more homes, in more shapes and sizes, to help address a deep housing shortage and help curb the resulting high home prices and rents. It means less red tape, lower costs, and less wasted space for housing and businesses in the kinds of historic main streets people love to stroll and shop and dine along. And it means undoing legal mandates that forced pollution, sprawl, and excess asphalt in cities and towns where land is scarce and opportunity costs are high.
The path to a win wasn’t easy. But a few key champions, a broad coalition, and a powerful set of stories and data laid the way.
Building on years of housing conversations, WA’s parking bill enjoyed a two-year turnaround
For years, advocates in the Evergreen State have been pushing regulatory reform to tame housing costs, building relationships and growing awareness on how parking mandates contribute to the housing shortage. That said, passing such strong parking legislation was unthinkable even two years ago. A 2023 bill to end parking mandates in the tiny fraction of the state’s land near transit stops squeaked through one committee but went no further.
Since then, though, advocates published more research and shared more stories on the real and present harms caused by excessive parking mandates—and the additional homes that can come from added parking flexibility: research suggests that building at reduced parking ratios, similar to the caps ultimately adopted in Washington, could make 40 percent more homes financially feasible to build over today’s status quo. Alongside this growing narrative, a bigger-than-ever coalition was gathering together to elevate parking reform as a major housing priority for Washington Democrats this year.
Sponsored by superstar housing champion Senator Jessica Bateman (D-22), the Parking Reform and Modernization Act (SB 5184) sets universal caps for both residential and commercial parking minimums and repeals them entirely for a set of key uses. It passed on strong bipartisan votes of 40-8 in the Senate and 64-31 in the House.
How did Washington move the needle in two years?
- Redesigned the policy to target building types, not transit
- Told real stories about why it matters
- Activated a broad coalition
- Leveraged local progress, garnering support from cities
- Added guardrails and offramps
- Consider the needs of disabled drivers
- Had strong legislative champions
Washington’s recipe for passing strong parking reform
Target sympathetic building types, not transit-limited geographies
In the lead-up to Washington’s 2023 legislative session, ending parking mandates near transit seemed to hold promise. The previous summer, Oregon adopted a suite of reforms eliminating parking mandates along transit routes and for a host of specified uses. A few months later, California passed AB 2097, which ended parking mandates within a half-mile of major transit stops.
Inspired by these wins, Washington legislators took up a bill replicating California’s. Targeting reforms to places served by transit is relatively easy to justify because it gives more residents and workers the opportunity to use it, maximizing the public investment. It also neutralizes opposition from those who don’t live near transit.
However, debate over the bill became overrun by concerns that transit service often isn’t good enough for residents to go car-free and that even those with access to good transit often still need to drive for some trips. The bill’s transit focus ended up being a political liability. Not to mention that limiting reform to within a small radius of a transit stop left out a huge portion of the state’s urbanized land was vulnerable to small changes in distances gutting the bill.
Based on that lesson, Senator Bateman tried a new approach in 2025, developing a bill with the potential to flip the debate from “where should mandates apply” (geographically) to “when should mandates apply” (in what circumstances). It worked. Instead of nitpicking over transit service, the conversation shifted to, for example, whether it’s okay for excessive parking mandates to prevent a new daycare from opening.
SB 5184’s caps and exemptions apply everywhere in a community, not just near transit. The exemption for all homes smaller than 1,200 square feet is particularly impactful. The average new apartment in the United States is 904 square feet, and even the typical two-bedroom averages only 1,097 square feet. In other words, the vast majority of apartments built anywhere in Washington will have full parking flexibility. Same goes for ADUs and a significant portion of middle housing.
Another feature that separates SB 5184 from legislation passed in other states is that it cuts mandates for commercial uses, not just residential. It fully exempts commercial spaces smaller than 3,000 square feet or located on the ground floor of a mixed-use apartment building. It also grants full parking flexibility to childcare facilities, subsidized affordable housing, housing for seniors, and existing buildings undergoing a change of use.
Residential and commercial developments that don’t fall into any of the bill’s targeted categories for full flexibility are still subject to its parking caps:
- 0.5 spaces per home for multifamily
- 1 space for a detached house
- 2 spaces per 1,000 square feet of commercial space
While SB 5184 was largely successful on the message that excessive parking mandates are bad for all types of communities, legislative sausage-making necessitated compromise on that front. As originally introduced, it applied to all cities and counties regardless of size, but amendments excluded cities with populations under 30,000. Fortunately, this still covers cities and towns that are home to 83 percent of Washington residents. (In contrast, only 20 percent of Washington residents live within a half-mile of 15-minute transit service.)
Politics necessitated another compromise: implementation delay. Cities and counties with more than 50,000 people must comply with the bill within 18 months; remaining jurisdictions have three years.
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Tell real stories about what parking mandates are costing communities now
Storytelling is always a powerful tool for winning policy debates, and there’s no shortage of stories that show how absurd parking mandates can be.
In Washington, one of those stories was right in the legislature’s backyard: although the parking lot of Capital Mall sits 90 percent empty on a typical day, Olympia’s parking rules would require hundreds more spaces if it was rebuilt today. Introducing the bill, Senator Bateman called it out: “I’m sorry to throw my beloved city under the bus, but I keep giving this example because it’s so relevant.”
Representative Duerr relayed her local story during an amendment debate: “In my town of Bothell [just northwest of Seattle], we have a long, long history of having a rather large space that can only be a furniture store. People have floated ideas about cafes and whatnot, but always it comes back to the fact that those would require additional parking. There’s no space.”
Sightline has covered many more such stories in recent articles (and not so recent ones, too) and in last fall’s State of Parking Mandates in Washington report that catalogued how inconsistent and arbitrary parking laws are throughout the state. For example:
- A daycare in Ridgefield was unable to open because it was short 3 parking spots.
- A teacher in Mount Vernon was unable to build a home on her property because there’s no room for the 4 required spaces.
- An affordable housing project in Washougal had to cut the building’s unit count in half after the city raised parking mandates in response to a presentation about the project.
These real-life stories of how the parking status quo is harming Washingtonians today were strong counters to worries about hypothetical future parking shortages. Even the bill’s critics had to admit it’s unwise to prevent a new business from opening over 3 parking spaces. But that’s exactly what parking minimums do.
Activate a broad coalition to give electeds political cover
Parking tends to be a politically explosive issue, and so to sign on in support of it, naturally most legislators want to be sure they have the political cover that a broad coalition of backers can afford them. Historically, opposition to parking reform has been dominated by vocal minorities of local residents and by municipalities who wish to retain unfettered control to set their own land use laws. Even as more people have come to understand the problems with pre-determined parking mandates in recent years, the politics are still catching up.
Sightline led the coalition-building effort for SB 5184, uniting a diverse collection of 56 organizations and cities, including affordable housing providers, labor unions, building industry groups, environmental advocates, and others. The bill’s policy committee hearings in both chambers each had dozens of people testifying in support, many of them sharing personal stories of how parking mandates thwarted their projects.
Leverage local success stories
By the time SB 5184 was in play, three Washington cities had fully repealed their parking mandates: Bellingham (population 94,720), Port Townsend (10,592), and Spokane (229,447). Elected officials from all three publicly supported the bill and helped educate state legislators about how the local reforms were playing out on the ground in their communities.
“With two-and-a-half years’ experience,” Spokane City Councilor Zach Zappone reassured wary House Local Government committee members, “developers are still building parking in almost all cases.” But Spokane’s reforms have been a game-changer for projects on constrained sites or with other circumstances that make it difficult to include as much parking as prior rules required. In Bellingham, repealing parking mandates meant one project could grow from the originally planned 60 homes to 80, and another from 12 homes to 40.
Officials from several other cities also supported SB 5184, including Bothell, Burien, Lynnwood, Mount Vernon, Snohomish, and Vancouver. This show of local support was crucial for counteracting opposition from the Association of Washington Cities, and many other jurisdictions.
Be willing to add guardrails and off-ramps
To soften concerns from cities that thought the bill was too far-reaching, tailored exceptions were added that did minimal damage to the bill’s overall effectiveness. As passed, SB 5184 included four such provisions that grant exceptions or give jurisdictions a more gradual pathway to compliance:
- By the letter of the law, SB 5184 does not apply to parcels on unincorporated county land if the adjacent county road does not meet current roadway standards. That is likely to be true for most roads. However, if a developer makes improvements such as adding shoulders for on-street parking or paving sidewalks to bring the road up to code, the bill’s parking relief would then apply. Requirements for these types of improvements are common but vary between jurisdictions, so it’s difficult to assess how much county land will be subject to the bill in practice.
- In prior years, zoning reform bills have exempted the city of SeaTac, home to the busy Seattle-serving SeaTac airport, from any provisions that limit parking mandates. This is in response to SeaTac’s argument that it has a high number of professional drivers serving airport customers whose livelihoods depend on owning cars and having a place to park them. Like those previous bills, SB 5184 does not apply within a one-mile radius of SeaTac Airport.
- Jurisdictions can qualify for exemption if they conduct a parking study demonstrating that the bill’s required changes to parking mandates would create significantly less safe conditions than the status quo for vehicle occupants, pedestrians, or bicyclists.
- Jurisdictions can qualify for exemption if they provide analysis verifying that their existing rules are substantially similar to what the bill requires—for example, showing that even though their mandates vary by location, when averaged out they more or less meet the bill’s requirements. Importantly, there’s are no exemptions from the bill’s full repeals for daycares, senior living, and affordable housing developments.
Time will tell how many jurisdictions go to the trouble of conducting a qualifying study. It takes time and money, and cities have many other competing priorities.
Provide for the needs of disabled drivers
The prospect of less available parking can be especially concerning to disabled people who need easily navigable access to homes, shops, and services. In response to input from Disability Rights Washington, legislators adopted an amendment to SB 5184 that directs the Washington Building Code Council to review and potentially update its standards for accessible parking spaces.
Washington’s current rules, based on federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards, require two to four percent of a parking lot’s spaces to be accessible. But that’s lower than what’s indicated by newer research that has found disability rates among drivers closer to ten percent. The bill was also amended to give jurisdictions the option to require disabled parking spaces beyond what’s needed to comply with the ADA.
Have strong legislative champions
Washington’s parking bill would not have gone far were it not for the skill and commitment of its prime sponsor, Senator Jessica Bateman. In only her second year as a member of the state legislature, then in the state House of Representatives, Bateman was the driving force behind passage of Washington’s middle housing bill in 2023. When she announced she would be taking on parking next, people took notice. She then won election to the state Senate and was selected to chair its Housing Committee.
For the middle housing bill, Bateman worked hard to win bipartisan support, and she did the same for SB 5184. Democrats had the votes to pass the bill on their own but still garnered 13 Republican votes in the Senate and 7 in the House. Her Republican partner on middle housing, Representative Andrew Barkis, spoke in support on the House floor: “We need to continue to work at finding ways to reduce the cost of building housing in Washington State. Parking is one of those pieces.”
SB 5184 wouldn’t have survived in such strong form—or at all—without the dedicated work of Representatives Davina Duerr, who shepherded the bill through the difficult Local Government Committee she chairs, and Strom Peterson, who sponsored the companion bill. And in both chambers, the Democratic caucus leaders backed the bill, as housing was an established legislative priority for the session.
Is Washington’s parking bill the best yet?
Some parking pundits have been quick to call SB 5184 the most sweeping parking reform ever passed in the US. That’s probably true, but it’s a bit of a judgement call. How do you compare reforms that cap high parking mandates universally with geographically narrower ones that give deeper flexibility over parking counts?
Washington’s bill excels on both fronts. While cities smaller than 30,000 people will see no reform (but represent just 17 percent of the state’s population), everywhere else vast numbers of new homes and businesses will no longer have to provide parking at all, and the rest will have uncommonly low parking minimums, far greater parking flexibility than builders have seen for perhaps half a century.
For comparison, Oregon’s 2022 reform has catalyzed complete repeals in 20 cities that cover 40 percent of the state’s population, with more sure to come.
The bar won’t stand for long. Montana’s parking bill, which passed the legislature just a day after Washington’s did and is just awaiting Governor Gianforte’s signature, has higher caps (1 space per home and 0.5 for those under 1,200 square feet) and doesn’t address commercial uses. However, it applies in all towns and cities in the fast-growing state—even if it currently has about one-seventh the population of Washington.
Eight other states also have parking reform bills currently in play: New Hampshire, Minnesota, Florida, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Texas; North Carolina and Connecticut have both introduced bills that would fully repeal parking mandates statewide.
Regardless of what happens next, Washington has shown a new path to parking reform. That’s great news for Washingtonians, and possibly for millions more Americans in states where parking reformers can follow this lead.
