Paved Paradise: The development impact of parking requirements.

• Author: Rhode, Scott

Hunting for a parking space can be frustrating, but excess parking spaces can plague a city and its inhabitants in quiet yet pernicious ways.

"Right now, we have these huge surface area parking lots that push everything farther apart. It extends the distance that people have to navigate our city if they're on foot, if they're not in a car," says Daniel Volland, who joined the Anchorage Assembly in 2022 when a twelfth district was added to the body, representing the Downtown area. He adds that navigating is even harder for pedestrians with mobility disabilities, due to poor infrastructure.

Parking lots also add to the scarcity of developable land in the Anchorage Bowl. "I've heard many times over the years, people say Anchorage is running out of land," says Jeannette Lee, a senior researcher with the Sightline Institute. "Well, how about, actually, Anchorage is using its land very inefficiently, with parking mandates being one example of that."

From her Anchorage office, Lee is the Alaska lead for the Oregon-based nonprofit that advocates on housing, urban policy, and governance issues. She co-authored a report about parking mandates, citing a city-funded study that found one-quarter of spaces were empty during peak periods. Only four out of thirty-five sites surveyed filled all the parking required by Anchorage's land use code, Title 21.

The Sightline report noted other problems associated with overbuilding of parking, such as paving over natural areas, the urban heat island effect, and added costs for housing and business development.

For all those reasons, the Anchorage Assembly voted unanimously in November to wipe out parking requirements citywide. Effective January 23, 2023, the amount of parking is left to the judgment of individual developers.

Limiting Uses

Title 21 listed more than 100 business and housing types and assigned each a minimum number of parking spots required. "For instance, if you were a bowling alley in Anchorage, you had to have four parking spaces for every one bowling lane," Volland explains. "You're constantly assuming that nobody carpools and that every night is league night and it's always maximum capacity."

Dictating the use of land outdoors could constrain the use of interior space. Michelle Klouda, a principal and owner at RIM Architects, faced that obstacle during the renovation of the Midtown Mall. "When you go into that parking lot, half of it is empty, and the development costs to bring that parking lot up to the current standards for landscaping and so on was pretty high," she recalls. "But it also restricts the ability for that property...