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Anchorage needs parking. The city was built around cars and so almost everyone uses them, whether they want to or not. Naturally we need a place to put them. But who should have the power to decide how much parking Anchorage’s homes and businesses need? It’s a question that’s come up in cities and states across the US. City zoning codes tend to dictate how many parking spaces, say, a...

It’s not every day that elected leaders ask for less authority. But at a California Assembly committee hearing in April, two out of every three representatives for local governments testified in support of a new bill that would limit their zoning authority.  AB 2097, introduced by Assemblymember Laura Friedman, would prohibit cities from mandating off-street parking near high-quality transit, in an effort to increase housing production across the state. For decades,...

The conversation shared below was part of the YIMBYtown 2022 conference, cohosted by Sightline Institute and Portland: Neighbors Welcome.* It wouldn’t be YIMBYtown if we didn’t have at least one panel to talk about the high cost of free parking. The principles of Donald Shoup have never been more popular; advocates, elected officials, and policymakers are all looking at reform to car parking policies as an essential task to increase...

Housing reformers from all over the country are currently in Portland, Oregon, for YIMBYtown, a national conference about housing abundance and affordability. Last week I was lucky to catch up with one of the panelists, Leah Bojo. Bojo worked as the policy director for Chris Riley, a city councilor in Austin. In that time the Texas capital successfully removed parking minimums downtown and implemented Austin’s first parking benefits district: installing...

What if more of our collective brainpower—not just our governments, but the billions of tiny decisions that add up to our entire economy—were working to reduce our dependence on the automobile? How many good little ideas might we come up with? Here’s one: apartments that come with an all-you-can-ride transit pass included. It’s happening right now in Minneapolis, the Star-Tribune reported: Metro Transit plans to expand a pilot that provides all-you-can-ride passes to residents of apartments, condos...