End Parking Mandates. Build Better Cities.
HB 369 does just that, because we can't build housing when we prioritize parking.
North Carolina has the chance to take a bold step forward: ending parking minimums statewide. It’s a move that’s long overdue. One that would improve housing affordability, empower small businesses, and create stronger, more sustainable communities.
I’ve spoken out in favor of eliminating parking minimums before, including at the Raleigh public hearing to remove them. Surprisingly, I was the only person who showed up to speak in support of this simple but powerful change. The Raleigh City Council at the time understood the benefit and did vote to end parking minimums, but that experience underscored a key problem: people often underestimate just how much parking mandates quietly shape our cities and how much better things could be without them.
More parking means less room for people. Parking lots and oversized garages waste valuable land that could be better used for homes, shops, parks, or gathering spaces. Just two parking spaces take up as much space as a small apartment or starter home. And yet we’ve used decades old pseudoscience to make them mandatory in nearly every project. These mandates push buildings farther apart, encourage sprawl and car dependency, and make walkability and transit access harder to achieve.
Parking spaces don’t come free. They’re costly to build and maintain. Developers are forced to include parking lots and garages in new construction projects, even when demand doesn’t warrant it. Those costs are passed on to homeowners, renters, and especially small businesses who are often prevented from creating walkable and loveable places because of parking requirements.
Parking is so ingrained into our thinking that even as recently as 2014, Raleigh was getting this wrong. Back then, Leo Suarez covered the pressure placed on the Citrix building to meet minimum parking requirements for spaces they would never need in order to finish their office construction. The resulting additional floor of parking garage will be evident for decades to come even though the company has already left the building, the looming parking garage remains.
I’m sure glad Raleigh changed parking policies so this doesn’t have to happen again. And unsurprisingly, in the several years since they did, nothing radical or terrible has happened, there’s still parking, it’s just not an obstacle.
We often hear that meeting climate goals requires radical change. But eliminating parking mandates is not really that radical. It's one of those practical, achievable steps that shifts the default in a way that invites less car-dependent choices. If we want vibrant, walkable neighborhoods, we need to stop mandating policies that encourage the opposite.
And to emphasis just how obvious removing parking minimums should be, I’ll return to the points I made at the Raleigh hearing because they are still relevant today. While we often think of urban planning debates as polarized, even two legendary thinkers - Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs - found rare common ground on the issue of parking.
Mumford and Jacobs famously clashed on many issues. Mumford was a champion of large-scale regional planning, while Jacobs fiercely defended the organic, street-level life of neighborhoods. Their ideas often seemed at odds, yet both recognized that parking mandates undermined the vitality of cities.
Mumford warned in The City in History that accommodating cars at all costs would destroy cities: “The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar,” he wrote, “is actually the right to destroy the city.”
Jacobs, who criticized much of Mumford’s thinking, agreed with him here. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she called parking lots “border vacuums”: dead zones that suffocate the vibrancy of streets and neighborhoods.
If they could agree on this, surely we can too.
(Michael Manville wrote about this in the Atlantic back in 2021).
So, this is NC’s chance.
With HB 369, our state has the chance to end that failed experiment. North Carolina’s proposed legislation to eliminate parking minimums would empower cities to create better places.
The Parking Lot Reform and Modernization Act (HB 369) is scheduled for discussion next week in the NC House Standing Committee on State and Local Government. This bill is all about parking lots! It has already passed crossover. Now it’s time to make sure it moves forward.
HB 369 currently does four important things:
🚘 It prevents municipalities from requiring a minimum number of parking spaces at all. That’s right. No required parking, residential or commercial.
🏠 It prevents cities from setting minimum house size requirements. This is a practice at the heart of exclusionary zoning and a major reason affordable starter homes are disappearing.
🔥 It stops local governments from adding extra fire code requirements that block neighborhood infill. Instead, cities must follow the state fire code, which already allows for compact, walkable development.
🧪 It limits the use of products containing PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) on parking lots, which are linked to environmental harm and long-term health risks.
Take Action This Weekend
This one’s easy: Write an email.
Click here to view the committee members.
Then click their names and send a short email urging them to support HB 369. Use one of the reasons I wrote about, or your own parking story. A quick message from constituents makes a real impact before their discussion Tuesday.
Jenn Truman is a designer with experience in architecture, civil engineering, and interior design. She has worked in the Triangle for small, local architecture and civil engineering firms for over a decade, bringing to life some of Raleigh and Durham’s favorite retail and restaurant projects.
Jenn has a passion for designing experiences and places and believes in building things together. As a young designer, leader, and advocate based in Raleigh, she is embedded in the local community through her professional and volunteer work. Jenn is the Founder of CITYBUILDER.