Right-Sizing Parking: A Key to Unlocking Housing Opportunity Under MBTA Communities
By Adi Nochur, Senior Transportation Planner
December 16, 2024 – “After adopting multifamily zoning districts under Section 3A, what transit, climate, and equity policies can municipalities use to develop their districts into sustainable, connected neighborhoods?”
This research question animated a team of graduate student researchers from Tufts University’s Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning program in the spring of 2024. Through a collaborative field project with MAPC, the students produced a powerful report, Zoning for Livable Communities: MBTA Communities Law as a Catalyst for Municipal Opportunity.
The report highlights how cities and towns can act in four key areas – multimodal mobility, parking reform, climate resilience & mitigation, and housing affordability – to create equitable and thriving communities.
The students’ recommendations for parking reform were directly drawn from MAPC’s Perfect Fit Parking research. Through four phases of this work dating back to 2015, MAPC has consistently found that parking is overbuilt and underutilized at multifamily housing sites throughout the Greater Boston area. In our most recent Phase 4 survey (2022-2023) of communities west of Boston, nearly 40% of the parking spaces supplied sat vacant overnight.
This overbuilding is a direct consequence of outdated zoning codes that require the construction of high amounts of off-street residential parking (in many instances two spaces or more per housing unit). This excess parking in turn drives up housing costs (i.e., parking is expensive to build), reduces the land area available for more housing units and other community-focused uses, undermines sustainable modes of transportation (including walking, biking, and transit), and increases driving, traffic, and climate and air pollution.
Given these interconnected challenges, MAPC’s Perfect Fit Parking recommendations include the following:
- Shift from parking minimums to parking maximums
- Reduce parking requirements
- Unbundle parking from housing costs
- Explore strategies for shared parking and Transportation Demand Management (TDM)
Read more: Perfect Fit Parking Initiative Phase 4
These recommendations are increasingly timely as cities and towns in Greater Boston work to comply with the MBTA Communities Act/Section 3A, which requires zoning for multifamily housing near transit. As national parking expert Henry Grabar put it at MAPC’s “Finding the Fit” MetroCommon event in March, “The approach to parking will determine whether the MBTA Communities Act succeeds.” The Finding the Fit event also highlighted Everett and Somerville as early adopters of parking reform, with positive results in Everett being particularly noteworthy – including the development of 125 affordable apartments on a parcel that was previously planned as a parking garage for an adjacent development to meet parking requirements.
A subsequent event with Grabar and MAPC staff in Lexington in April, as well as the MAPC-organized panel “The High Cost of Residential Parking: How a State Multifamily Zoning Law Has Sparked Local Parking Reform” at the SNEAPA conference in Springfield in November, further highlighted Acton and Watertown as examples of municipalities that are now using the MBTA Communities Act as an opportunity to embrace parking reform. Acton’s Planning Director Kristen Guichard described how residents expressed a strong desire for more mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods, which led the Town to largely eliminate or reduce parking minimums and to institute parking maximums in its MBTA Overlay Districts and the South Acton Village Core. MAPC’s Land Use Department provided technical assistance to the Town of Acton to support their 3A efforts.)
"The approach to parking will determine whether the MBTA Communities Act succeeds.” - Henry Grabar, March 2024
Watertown’s Senior Transportation Planner Zeke Mermell discussed the City’s proposed MBTA Communities zoning for Watertown Square, which would reduce residential parking minimums to 0.5 spaces/unit and institute a parking maximum of one space/unit in a transit-rich downtown core. While the details of parking reform may look different across cities and towns and should be tailored to the local context, both Guichard and Mermell emphasized the overall importance of right-sizing parking to unlock increased housing affordability and inclusivity.
Including parking reforms to bolster multifamily zoning efforts is not limited to Acton and Watertown. As local zoning expert Amy Dain noted in a June 2024 Upzone Update newsletter, “MBTA Communities has encouraged cities and towns to reduce parking minimums.” While the MBTA Communities law does not mandate specific parking ratios, it does require cities and towns to assess the impact of parking requirements on potential housing unit capacity in multifamily zoning districts. In confronting the trade-off between housing and parking – providing space for people or space for cars – housing and people are increasingly winning.
In addition to Watertown, Dain highlighted Newton, Chelsea, and Braintree as additional communities that leveraged the multi-family zoning mandate to adjust their parking requirements to advance broader community development goals. Bedford stands out as well, having eliminated parking minimums entirely in its MBTA Communities zoning district. This is an impressive accomplishment for a suburban community with limited transit access and an example that more communities should follow.
MAPC will continue to pursue opportunities to right-size parking with cities and towns in the weeks and months ahead. We will also continue to emphasize the connections between parking reform and the other action areas of multimodal mobility, climate resilience and mitigation, and housing affordability that the Tufts students uplifted in the Zoning for Livable Communities report. Of particular note is MAPC’s current work with Salem, where the City has requested that MAPC provide a Perfect Fit-style analysis of parking utilization at multifamily housing sites.
The project with Salem represents MAPC’s first time taking a deeper dive into a single municipality, as opposed to the more regional research that has characterized previous phases of our Perfect Fit Parking work. Furthermore, the City has asked MAPC to not simply hand off the analysis, but also to engage the broader Salem community about the findings and to use the research to draft zoning amendments that update the City’s parking requirements and Inclusionary Housing Ordinance. An additional highlight of this project, MAPC is updating the economic feasibility analysis required under Section 3A to see if reduced parking requirements can support deeper and higher affordability requirements. We are excited by this opportunity to take our work at the nexus of parking and affordable housing in new directions and we look forward to sharing the results soon.
MAPC also looks forward to researching additional parking and housing topics. These include more in-depth connections between parking and housing costs, opportunities to require the unbundling of these costs in state and local regulatory processes, and ways to enable inclusionary zoning policies to also reduce parking requirements. We invite municipal and community partners to connect with us around these ideas and to continue partnering with us to lead the charge for reduced parking and increased housing in our communities - contact Adi Nochur at [email protected].