Some City of Dallas officials are reconsidering the parking requirements imposed on businesses and DART stations throughout the city.
Council Member Chad West (District 1) told Fox 4 KDFW that the City should rethink mandating a certain amount of parking space for apartment complexes, shops, and hotels, arguing that a lot of parking spaces typically stay empty.
“The zoning code requires every single bedroom in an apartment complex to be parked,” West said. “So if you have a single parent living in one room and a kid or [two] kids in the other room, then the apartment complex still has to have two parking spaces for that apartment.”
West told the news outlet that he does not think the requirements make sense in this day and age, noting that the parking requirements for DART stations are especially excessive.
“Almost every DART train station is massively over parked because most of them were built to maximum capacity [for] the one day of the year when you’re going to have full ridership, like probably on the State Fair [of] Texas day,” he said.
West claimed that if the City reduces parking requirements, at least six DART stations would have space that could be used for something else.
“[P]ut housing there on those parking lots literally steps away from a train station. They’re probably going to take the train and may not need a car,” West told Fox 4.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, parking requirements have allegedly stifled building development in Dallas, with some claiming that the elimination or reduction of parking requirements could help guard against the City’s tendency to build up building permit backlogs.
Permit approval times under Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax have often been a point of contention for local builders and developers. As Phil Crone, the soon-to-be vice president of Leading Builders of America, previously said, “Every day of delay costs $200 to $300 per project.”
Speaking at a Metroplex Civic & Business Association luncheon back in December, Michael Ablon, founder of the real estate firm PegasusAblon, argued strongly in favor of parking reform.
“Density is our future. If we don’t make it favorable and we don’t incentivize companies to pick Dallas, they will just go to Frisco. In order to increase the quality of our city, its streets, and the jobs that move here, we have to make it easy, and that begins with parking reform,” Ablon said.
Dallas Senior City Planner Michael Wade told Fox 4 that many cities are exploring the idea of converting parking lots into housing or even public parks.
“Regulations requiring minimum parking conflict with our city goals,” Wade said.
However, he insisted that Dallasites who prefer to continue using cars have no reason to be concerned.
“Staff are not proposing parking maximums that some cities have established,” he said. “Impact will be … glacially slow.”
More information on potential amendments to the City’s parking code can be found here.
The Dallas Express reached out to the City for more information but received no response by press time.