Collection: Beyond Parking Mandates

Children can’t drive cars. Yet across Cascadia, onerous rules defining how much parking new daycares must provide on-site are blocking those wee non-drivers—and their families—from the care they need. Even as the majority of families live in childcare deserts, jurisdictions that enforce mandatory parking minimums make it difficult or impossible to permit new daycares if the sites are unable to meet that arbitrary asphalt standard, worsening the shortage. 

Dana Christiansen has experienced this conflict firsthand. In 2023, she hoped to open a new daycare center for 100 children at a site she found in Clark County, Washington, near Ridgefield. After her offer for the property was accepted, she started working with an architect. “We were having a hard time getting the building situated with the amount of playground that we require,” Christiansen said. “But parking is what killed it.”  

Christiansen is not a novice to the industry: she serves on the board of the Washington Childcare Center Association and has been a daycare owner for 24 years. But her expertise counted for nothing against the Clark County legal mandate of 2 parking spaces for every employee on the largest shift. For the 16 employees she estimated would be there at any given time, 32 parking spaces were required. “Why do we need that many parking spaces?” she lamented. Her center down the road in Vancouver runs fine with 8, she said.  

But the law was the law, so Christiansen and her architect struggled to fit all the spaces in. They had found room for 29 spaces when the city reminded them of landscape islands, a design feature required for large parking lots to lessen their environmental impact. The additional space for those islands was the last straw that broke the project camel’s back. Christiansen had to abandon her plans, and local families lost needed childcare as a result. 

Death by a thousand regulations 

This area of Clark County is considered a childcare desert, where there are at least three children under the age of five for each licensed childcare slot. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage has deepened. At the end of 2023, the county still had 700 fewer daycare spots than were available in 2019.  

Additional funding isn’t a cure-all, though. “Our issues are a mile long,” explained Christiansen. Back in the ‘90s, she recalled, the licensing requirements for childcare centers were 45 pages long. Now, it’s 450 pages. “The rules just keep coming,” she said. “We are one hundred precent over-regulated.” 

At the top of her list are new educational requirements for childcare providers. Even people currently operating and childcare programs must obtain new certifications by 2026 to retain their positions. “We’re not against higher education, but there’s no vehicle to pay our teachers higher wages.” said Christiansen. “It’s a real crisis we have on our hands.” 

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Trying to find an adequate site for a childcare facility is a whole other can of worms. Many cities restrict commercial daycares to small areas of town or force operators to obtain a conditional use permit—a time-consuming process ending in a committee vote. When Lakewood, Washington, updated its zoning code in 2023, daycare centers went from being allowed by right on just 4 percent of city land to 52 percent. A state bill that would have similarly legalized daycare in more zones failed in 2024. 

Parking mandates around Washington 

How many parking spaces does a daycare need? It depends. Parking mandates vary from one city to the next. They are commonly based on the number of employees, the number of children, the area of the building, or some combination of all those factors. Land-intensive requirements for pavement can make sites infeasible to build on or restrict facilities’ capacity to the point where they are no longer financially viable.  

Below is a sampling of parking mandates for daycares in Washington state:

Requirements based on staff levels pose an additional barrier to infant care. At a one-parking-space-per-employee ratio, babies require roughly four times as much pavement as school-age children. 

After mandates end, a new daycare opens

Cities that have reformed their parking rules are already seeing success with new daycares opening. After being briefed with information about their own daycare shortage, the city of Sandy, Oregon, voted in 2020 to eliminate parking mandates downtown and reduce them everywhere for daycares. The situation was dire: for the 1,400 children under the age of five living in Sandy, the city only had 162 childcare spots for preschoolers and 6 spots for children in the infant to toddler range.  

The two-story building now home to Grandma’s House & Preschool would have been impossible to build before the code change. The small site has no off-street parking at all, with its entire backyard dedicated to outdoor play. But it now has capacity for 56 children, more than double the capacity of its last location. “I feel like we’re actually helping the city now,” said Versaw. At the time of our interview, the daycare had worked through its waitlist and even had a few openings left.  

Grandma’s House isn’t the only new daycare to benefit from the parking reform in Sandy. Just last month, the city received another application for a daycare downtown. The building doesn’t have any off-street parking currently, and no spaces are planned for the remodel, saving the project from costly paving and stormwater expenses. Thanks in part to the zoning reform, the city will add another 63 childcare slots available for working families.  

Staffers at Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development had Sandy’s success in mind when they added childcare facilities to the list of equity uses exempt from local parking mandates. Those rules went into effect in 2023 and apply to the state’s eight metro areas, which roughly two of every three Oregonians call home. Other states looking to increase childcare options should consider doing the same. Removing parking mandates won’t remove every obstacle to new childcare services, but it’s a no-cost solution that can make an immediate difference for families across Cascadia.

Earlier this spring, when Port Townsend, Washington, eliminated parking mandates—predetermined numbers of parking spaces required by law for new buildings—the news took the internet by surprise. Not many people expected the first Washington city to make off-street parking fully optional would be a small town of 10,000 residents. 

“Seattle getting lapped by…Port Townsend,” The Urbanist wrote. Another commenter wrote, “Port Townsend punches well above its weight in a few ways.” Even my own colleague Dan remarked on the news, “The politics around abolishing parking mandates is bizarre.” 

For every large US city that has fully repealed parking mandates, two small towns have done the same.

But it’s not surprising that towns of Port Townsend’s size are leading the way. While large cities like San Jose, California, and Austin, Texas, garner national press coverage for eliminating parking mandates, this policy reform is most commonly enacted in towns with fewer than 25,000 residents.  

According to the Parking Reform Network’s mandates map, for every large American city (with a population of 250,000 or more) that has fully repealed parking mandates, there are two small towns (fewer than 25,000 people) that have done the same.

To be clear, there are far more tiny towns in the United States than big cities. But small jurisdictions are also likely underrepresented in the Parking Reform Network data. With little to no media coverage of zoning changes in places like Gilman, Wisconsin, or Canandaigua, New York, those parking reforms are less likely to make it onto the map in the first place. The database also fails to acknowledge the multitude of rural communities and small towns that never adopted parking mandates in the first place—or any zoning codes at all—and still manage to get along just fine. My hometown in northern Maine is one of them.  

Overall, places with 25,000 or fewer residents make up 40 percent of known jurisdictions in the United States that have returned decisions about parking back to the people who live and work there. Below are just a handful of stories from these communities about why they removed parking minimums and what has happened since. 

A town charts an economic revival 

Ecorse, Michigan, was already scheduled to update its local zoning code in 2020, when United States Steel, the town’s largest employer, announced it would be shutting down most of its operations. The news prompted the city to completely overhaul its zoning, including eliminating parking mandates.  

“We didn’t really get any pushback against the reduction of parking minimums,” said planner Nani Wolf. “We have way more parking than we need, and I think everybody was generally in recognition of that.” 

The main form of development in Ecorse is renovations of existing buildings. Unfortunately, there are a number of vacant properties. Since its peak in the 1970s, the town has lost almost half its population, now at 9,800 residents. 

“Having those parking minimums removed has made it so much easier and quicker for people to reoccupy those buildings,” said Wolf. She pointed to one example of a former ice cream shop that someone wanted to turn into a Puerto Rican restaurant. The owner’s biggest concern was parking: there were only two spaces on the property. In past years, that would have posed a regulatory problem, but Wolf reassured the owner that he was good to go. 

In other cases, the city introduced prospective entrepreneurs to nearby businesses that might be amenable to a parking lot sharing agreement. “We really need to focus on redistributing what already exists, not requiring people to build more,” said Wolf. 

As Ecorse charts a new future, the reduced red tape has made it easier for people to invest in their community. “Speed of development review is so much faster,” said Wolf. “That’s true for developers and for city staff. Parking just takes so much time and energy from everybody involved.”  

Protecting rural land 

The town of Chattahoochee Hills incorporated in 2007 with the aim of helping protect Georgia’s farms and forests. After a new highway cut through the land in the early 2000s, the area seemed suddenly vulnerable to turning into suburban tract homes. “People were freaking out about the idea that this was going to develop like everything else in Atlanta,” said Mayor Tom Reed. The growing metropolis was just 25 miles away, well within commuting distance. 

Landowners came together to gain local control of their own zoning. One of the voices in the conversation was the developer of Serenbe, a now famous neighborhood in Chattahoochee Hills. Mayor Reed, who moved there in 2005, referred to it as a tiny urbanist community literally out in the woods. Originally governed by Fulton County pre-incorporation, the project needed a special zoning overlay to create a walkable neighborhood not oriented around parking lots. 

The conversation around parking was a short one. Reed, not mayor at the time, posed the question about the draft code, “Why do we have parking minimums in here, since we all know they’re a bad idea? Why?” He proposed changing the word “minimum” to “maximum,” and the topic was never discussed again. The new town ultimately protected 70 percent of the land in its rural state through a system of transferable development rights that pays farmers to preserve their land. 

The average Serenbe household uses cars for just 2–3 trips per day, compared to 11–12 for a household in a typical suburban development.

The compact neighborhoods allowed by zoning, called “villages” or “hamlets,” both preserve rural land and increase walkability. As a result, new growth comes with far less driving than usual. Despite having no public transit service, the average household in Serenbe uses cars for just 2–3 trips per day, compared to 11–12 for a house in a typical suburban development. Not only does the walkable neighborhood boost quality of life for residents, having access to trails out the back door and a bakery down the block, Reed explained; it also makes financial sense. “The amount of infrastructure that the city has to do to support a place like Serenbe is much lower,” said Reed. More neighbors are already arriving. From 2010 to 2020 Chattahoochee Hills’ population grew by 24 percent, outpacing Fulton County or Atlanta. 

Making sure Chattahoochee Hills’s growth is sustainable is embedded in many aspects of its code. There are no parking garages in the city yet, for example, but if one were built it would be required to be convertible—a design with flat parking decks that could later transition to an apartment or office building without demolition. “When you’re planning a town, you’re planning 100 years in the future. All these decisions you’re making are going to be in the ground in 100 years,” said Reed.  

Combatting large parking lots 

Seabrook, New Hampshire, was already inundated with large parking lots when its city council eliminated the town’s parking minimums in 2019. Big box stores had been moving to Seabrook, a little town of 8,400 people just north of the New Hampshire border, to cater to Massachusetts shoppers looking to save a buck on sales tax. “Our parking requirements were the same as everyone else’s,” explained Tom Morgan, Seabrook’s town planner, “but it just ended up with too much asphalt.”  

When the moment was right, Morgan made the pitch to the planning board. “I said, ‘Let’s just try this out. Doesn’t work, we can just go back to the way it was.’” The flexibility has already been put to use. The interior of a vacant Sam’s Club warehouse store was leased to two companies, while the majority of its 900-car parking lot was separately redeveloped into a terminal for C&J bus lines, a regional transit service providing service to Boston and New York City. “I like to brag that we’ve taken 800 cars off I-95,” Morgan said. 

Parking reform is for everyone 

The examples of Ecorse, Chattahoochee Hills, and Seabrook run counter to the claims, made by skeptics of parking reform, that a no-mandate policy might work for large cities with robust public transit networks but not for suburban or rural locales where people depend on driving to get around. “We support the goal of a robust and effective transit network that people can get around with, but unfortunately that is not the reality in most cities in the state right now,” the Association of Washington Cities testified to the state legislature in 2022 regarding eliminating parking minimums (see 1:19:00). “In too many communities, in order to get to work, school, family, daycare, etc., you do need a car, and we cannot just ignore that.” 

But the reality is that fully flexible parking policy is more routinely adopted by small jurisdictions with little to no public transit than large cities with light rail systems. A citywide repeal is simple and fair. It makes the zoning code easier to navigate for locals interested in reinvesting in their community and for the handful of city staff members who administer the rules. Whether to encourage new businesses, to reduce the barriers to building homes, or to repurposing existing parking lots, the upsides of this reform can be realized by any community—large or small.