Salem Eliminates Minimum Parking Requirements For New Multi-Family Housing

Jonathan Berk
Sep 29
6 min read

SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS- On Thursday, the Salem City Council voted 10-1 to eliminate onerous minimum parking requirements for new multi-family housing. This is a chance for Salem to take control of its future. Eliminating minimum parking requirements is a historic preservation strategy, a climate action, a mobility win and a housing affordability policy rolled into one. It helps make housing more affordable, neighborhoods more walkable, and our city more livable. It aligns with bipartisan best practices and growing momentum across the country. And finally, as we head into Salem’s 400th year, it gives us the local flexibility to, once again, design our City for people, not just for cars as we’ve done for the past half-century.

For decades, Salem’s zoning code required 1.5 parking spaces per home, no matter where the home was built or how residents lived. That outdated formula originally based on flawed assumptions and imported from the 1970s, didn’t reflect our city’s walkability, transit access, or the simple fact that 60% of Salem households own one car or less. The consequences were real. Excess parking drove up the cost of housing, over $40,000 per underground space, and ate up valuable land that could have been used for homes, shops, or open space. It encouraged more driving, adding to worsening regional congestion, and it chipped away at the human-scaled character of the historic neighborhoods we treasure.

Excess Parking Harms Salem in Tangible Ways

Requiring more parking than we need produces negative consequences across multiple dimensions of urban life:

Urban Design: Much of what we love about Salem, our historic, walkable neighborhoods could not be built under our extremely rigid current zoning requirements, including our archaic parking mandates. These areas thrive because they were designed primarily for people first, with cars as an afterthought. Over-parking erodes the fabric of our city and makes new developments look more like Route 1 than the historic places we fight to preserve in much of our City. I wrote a recent post on why parking minimums are one of the greatest threats to historic preservation efforts here and across the Country.
Affordability: Every unnecessary parking space adds substantial cost to a housing project, up to $40,000 per underground space or $20,000 per surface space. These costs are passed directly on to renters and buyers, making it harder to afford to live in Salem while using valuable urban land in walkable, transit oriented locations, like The SOFI at Salem Station Apartments, for surface parking instead of housing for people.
Traffic and Car Dependency: When we require parking, we encourage driving. In turn, this leads to the very traffic congestion that parking proponents often cite as a reason to restrict new development. Certainly many people need cars, and as the data has born out, our existing housing supply does a more than adequate job of providing parking for folks who choose to self-select to live in a place that provides them ample parking. For those who may not want or need a car, or multiple cars, we should be able to offer them housing that meets that lifestyle at a lower cost to build and own/rent.
Environmental Damage: More pavement means more heat, less green space, and more stormwater runoff. In an era of extreme weather and climate change, we must avoid compounding these problems. In fact, the North Carolina House of Representatives recently unanimously passed a NC GOP bill to eliminate parking minimums, due in large part to the environmental concerns around runoff from large paved areas.

Reform DOES NOT Eliminate Parking… It Right-Sizes It

It is critical to emphasize: removing minimum parking requirements does not ban parking and it does not impact existing parking availability. It simply removes the requirement that developers build more than the market demands. This reform gives developers the flexibility to provide the right amount of parking for their specific location, residents, and price point.

Research from Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) Perfect Fit Parking Study, and our own local planning staff, as presented in previous discussions, has found that most new developments in Salem are already overparked. In practice, developers will almost always include parking, but when they’re forced to include too much, it reduces the space available for housing, green space, or other community benefits.

Other Cities That Eliminated Parking Mandates Showed Salem a Path Forward

Seattle: After removing mandates, 70% of new developments still included some parking, but 18,000 fewer parking spaces were built overall, saving $537 million in construction costs. Parking requirements were the strongest predictor of how much parking developers built, when the rules were lifted, they built smarter.

Minneapolis:
In 2021, Minneapolis eliminated minimum parking requirements citywide, following a reduction in 2015, despite its limited public transit. This reform made many small-scale density projects financially viable, resulting in a modest increase in housing production. Developers continued to build parking to ensure financing and market appeal. While most projects in 2011 included 1 parking space per unit, post-reform developments saw ratios drop to between 0.5:1 and 0.75:1. Developer Sean Sweeney noted that the reforms were essential for his projects, stating, “The reduced parking minimums are the only reason many of these projects were feasible.” He added, “Huxley has 1:1 parking, while most others range from 50–75%.”
- As Rents Nationwide Climbed, Minneapolis Saw A Decline: From 2017 to 2022, Minneapolis saw a 12% spike in new rental apartments, during that same period, rents Nationwide surged 22% while in Minneapolis, rents bucked the trend, dropping 4%.

A Growing National Movement, With Bipartisan Momentum

Salem is not acting alone. Across the country, red and blue municipalities and states alike are recognizing that excessive parking mandates are a direct barrier to housing affordability and downtown vitality:

New Hampshire: The House of Representatives recently capped the municipalities ability to implement minimum parking requirements at one space per unit statewide. As Republican Representative Joe Alexander put it, “The majority of the committee believes that the free market is the best determinant of what sufficient parking is needed for each residential unit.”
North Carolina: A bipartisan, statewide parking reform proposal received unanimous support during a recent vote in the House.
Texas: In 2023, Austin became the largest city in North America to eliminate parking minimums. “If we truly want to achieve our progressive goals of making Austin a less car-dependent city,” said Councilor Zo Qadri, “we cannot be forcing developers to provide car storage in every single new project.”
Dallas made substantial reforms to it’s parking requirements, eliminating them for most residential uses across the City.
Montana: The state’s Republican-led legislature passed statewide parking reform, recognizing the burden parking mandates place on small-town downtowns, eliminating minimum parking requirements for nearly all residential uses in Montana’s Cities. Governor Gianforte’s Housing Commission cited this particular reform as key to spurring desperately needed new housing development and revitalization. You can listen to some of Republican Governor Greg Gianforte’s words on parking reform at a recent Ronald Reagan National Economic Forum panel where he spoke proudly about recently signing this reform into law, one he had advocated the Legislature to pass.
Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (R), now U.S. Interior Secretary in the Trump Administration, has openly criticized the car-centric development patterns that modern zoning perpetuates and the damage done to our communities from this deference to the automobile stating in part; “We built cities all over America that are designed for automobiles and not designed for people... Our housing costs are high, in part because of the way that we've designed our cities."
In Massachusetts, Cities like Cambridge and Somerville eliminated all parking minimums over the past few years while a bill currently makes it’s way through Beacon Hill to curtail minimum parking requirements statewide.
On the national level, the People Over Parking Act, introduced in the United States House of Representatives by Representative Robert Garcia, would eliminate mandatory minimum parking requirements Nationwide. Our representative in Congress, Rep. Seth Moulton, has signed on as a cosponsor of this bill.

A Reform For Salem's Next 400 Years

As Salem approaches its 400th birthday in 2026, this reform is about more than housing policy, it’s about building a durable, vibrant, more affordable Salem for the next 400 years. Eliminating minimum parking requirements is housing policy, climate action, historic preservation, and good urban design rolled into one. Eliminating minimum parking requirements is additive rather than subtractive, serving as a step toward making Salem more livable, affordable, inclusive, and resilient for the next century and beyond.

I hope this inspires other Massachusetts communities to set a path toward a stronger future, and I look forward to supporting more local and state parking reform initiatives. For now, I'm incredibly proud of my City for taking this significant step. This reform is a milestone worth celebrating for both Salem and the Commonwealth.

If you'd like to pursue parking reform in your community, feel free to adapt my own 2-minute testimony template, or my full 5-page letter to City Council filed during a Joint Public Hearing with Planning Board as resources in your efforts. I'm also always happy to find time to discuss as are folks from the Parking Reform Network who were a great resource during our journey.

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Jonathan Berk is an experienced, strategic urbanist, attorney, and policy innovator with over a decade of expertise in promoting reforms in housing, land use, and economic development through impactful public-private initiatives. He possesses deep knowledge of the structural obstacles to housing production and economic growth, such as regulatory hurdles and financing challenges, and has a proven track record of creating collaborative solutions that unlock opportunities and achieve measurable results. He is a skilled communicator, published thought leader, and a trusted advisor to policymakers, planners, and advocates working where policy, capital, and community intersect.