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As more cities and states lift costly parking mandates, what will happen next? Chris Hawley has seen the future. Hawley, first as an activist, then as a city planner in Buffalo, New York, worked to remove minimum parking requirements citywide in 2017 under the city’s new form-based “Green Code.” (“Form-based” focuses on building form, including its physical appearance and relation to the street, rather than regulating uses, like commercial or...

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...

On Thursday, Oregon approved the largest rollback to parking mandates in modern US history. The unanimous vote by the state’s land use commission came through an unusual channel: an administrative action, ordered by the governor, that breathed new ambition into the broadly written land use laws that have gradually shaped Oregon for 50 years. The law in question gives the state board the power to set land use rules that,...

Avelina Cabantan, 84, has never had a driver’s license. Her husband always drove. But after he passed away in 2003, what she really needed was a home she could afford on her own. Cabantan has seen her share of hard times. She grew up poor in the Philippines, at one point pawning her mother’s ring to afford a $10 document fee that would give her children a future in the...