CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In a city booming with growth and often crippled with traffic, finding a perfect parking spot can come with a sense of accomplishment. But that convenience comes at a cost.
"Parking is very expensive," Mayor Pro Tem Braxton Winston said.
Winston has long advocated for lifting the city's "parking minimums", which are zoning regulations that require apartment complexes, office buildings, and many other businesses to provide a certain amount of parking.
"You run the risk of that government regulation is making living, working, and playing in the city more expensive than it needs to be," Winston said.
He said the cost of building a single parking space in a parking garage is anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 per space. Those costs get passed down to customers, renters, and shoppers.
"That has to be subsidized. People have to pay that back in rents," Winston said.
On any given day, you can find countless parking garages around the city that are only half-full. Winston suggests businesses are best equipped to know how much parking they need, not the municipal government.
Grubb Properties is building an apartment complex near Uptown. A rezoning request allowed them to forgo a parking garage. The developer recently told The Wall Street Journal it allowed them to build 25% more units, which translated to rents that are about $250/month lower, per unit.
City leaders considered the inclusion of lifting parking minimums in the city's Unified Development Ordinance passed last year, but a majority of the city council voted against it.
Ed Driggs, the District 7 councilman, serves as the chairman of the city council's Transportation, Planning, and Development Committee. He understands the appeal of lifting parking mandates, but he says Charlotte's transit and transportation infrastructure isn't prepared for it.
"I think we need to advance on several fronts, in terms of offering alternatives to cars, before we start to make it harder to use a car," Driggs said.
Last year, Raleigh became the 24th city in the country to lift its parking mandates.
Contact Ben Thompson at bthompson@wcnc.com and follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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