Parking Mandates Crush Local Businesses
Cities can’t flourish where bad zoning requirements remain on the books
Written By Dave Olverson
What if I told you that parking mandates are stopping you from creating the next hot restaurant in your town while simultaneously limiting the supply of housing? Required parking minimums are a nearly ubiquitous part of zoning codes across the South. Some cities like Raleigh are slowly doing away with them, but for most Southern cities, they are the norm.
Durham is home to some inspiring small business stories, such as Ricky Moore who went from opening a tiny seafood shack to winning a James Beard award. Or Cocoa Cinnamon, a bike-based coffee shop barely able to make it up a hill that became a Durham institution with three brick-and-mortar locations.
But those businesses happened to get their starts years ago, in Durham’s downtown design district, where there are no parking minimums. Today, with Durham growing and land getting more expensive, downtown locations are out of reach for scrappy startup businesses.
So, what if you wanted to start a small restaurant in a neighborhood outside of downtown? Old East Durham could be a perfect neighborhood and the building below has the potential to be a really cool restaurant space.
This building used to be a post office and has found renewed life as the Piedmont Glass Co. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision a local entrepreneur rolling up the garage bay doors, putting some seating out front, and creating a great restaurant.
In this overhead of the building with context of the neighborhood, it is in the upper-left corner surrounded by residential and other small commercial buildings. One block to the east is the main commercial intersection of Old East Durham.
The problem? Durham mandates one parking space for every one hundred square feet of restaurant space. To comply with that mandate, this is the parking a new restaurant would have to build.
The problems are obvious, but to spell them out:
The entrepreneur would have to find a way to purchase the surrounding lots (a nonstarter both in terms of availability and cost).
The existing homes and small businesses would have to be demolished for parking. Not only does that exacerbate the general squeeze on housing in Durham, but the entrepreneur would be forced to drive away potentially some of the restaurant’s most loyal customers.
This great, small-scale urban neighborhood is forced to become more sprawling and look more like suburbia.
Parking mandates need to be eliminated. Developers will still build parking, just not more parking than is needed. Entrepreneurs will be able to do what they do best—find creative solutions. Meanwhile, our cities will be better off.
Dave Olverson is a budding incremental developer. During a career in marketing and licensing, while living in New York City, he fell in love with the built environment. He moved to Durham, North Carolina, had three inspiring children, and earned a planning degree from the University of North Carolina. Since then, he has worked for various local developers in Durham and is building his own first project on the same block as his family’s home. @dolver