We know that parking mandates increase costs and make housing harder to build, especially on constrained urban sites.
DC Office of Planning is proposing to the Zoning Commission a reduction in parking requirements for affordable housing in smaller buildings that are close to transit. This is good but the city can do more. We hope you will email the Zoning Commission to support these two amendments:
- Increase the parking exemption for affordable dwellings from 40 to 50 units. Having researched the issue, we believe that eliminating parking minimums for 50-unit buildings near transit will better match the size of many projects and reduce the cost of creating affordable housing, particularly for smaller, constrained sites.
- Eliminate parking requirements for affordable housing altogether, at least near transit. This is the more significant step that we’d like to see but don’t expect the Zoning Commission to take.
In both cases, the housing providers will have more flexibility to provide parking according to the need that they see, for the people they are serving.
Send a letter to the Zoning Commission to tell them we need more relief from parking mandates, and we need to make it easier and cheaper to build affordable housing.