The City Council’s recent compromise in passing Mayor Adams’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, watering down the original proposal’s elimination of mandatory parking, must be a central issue in the coming mayoral race.
Significant changes to the policy — which left some of the mayor’s attempt to reform costly parking mandates, but also retained the parking requirement in broad sections of the city — are unlikely until a new mayor and City Council take office, so future leadership should revisit the Planning Commission’s original City of Yes proposal, which prioritized housing growth while aligning with broader efforts to minimize car dependency.
Manipulating parking requirements to slow housing construction worsens the city’s housing crisis. NYC needs bold leadership willing to prioritize long-term housing solutions over short-term political compromises.
I remember this clearly from my work at the Department of City Planning under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. In 2015, a Streetsblog NYC reporter asked me about a de Blasio administration proposal to lift off-street parking requirements for affordable housing in denser parts of the city. At the time, it seemed illogical that the city would spend millions subsidizing below-market rent housing—for which demand far exceeded supply—and then spend millions more on parking spaces for the lucky winners of the affordable housing lottery. In 2016, the City Council agreed, passing a proposal to eliminate parking mandates for affordable housing.
The Streetsblog reporter, however, anticipated the next logical step: lifting parking requirements for all housing, including market-rate units. After all, requiring off-street parking adds costs that developers cannot recoup, and profitable parking gets built without zoning mandates. At the time, I declined to speculate, but the question foreshadowed the City Planning Commission’s 2024 zoning amendments under the City of Yes plan. These reforms aimed to eliminate off-street parking requirements citywide, making housing less costly to construct and addressing NYC’s critical housing shortfall. The plan also removed parking requirements for ground-floor retail in new apartment buildings near transit stops, streamlining development.
Unfortunately, the City Planning Commission’s approval wasn’t the final word. The zoning changes required City Council approval, where public support for cheap parking held sway. Earlier in the year, for example, the Council eliminated most curbside restaurant “streeteries” to reclaim street space for parking. Faced with pressure from housing opponents who view parking mandates as a tool to stop neighborhood change, and housing advocates pushing for reform, the Council adopted a compromised version of COYHO that reinstates parking requirements in many transit-served areas while exempting a limited portion of the city.
The Council’s mixed approach should satisfy neither side. In areas where parking mandates persist, developers can evade them by subdividing large lots into smaller parcels to build multiple buildings instead of one. This workaround comes at a cost: fragmented developments require more lobbies, elevators, and staircases, reducing usable space for housing. Retail spaces on ground floors are also carved into smaller units, making it impossible to accommodate larger stores like supermarkets.
An example in my new report for the Manhattan Institute illustrates this inefficiency. A 41,000-square-foot block in Rego Park, Queens, sits adjacent to a subway station and across the street from a shopping mall with a multilevel parking garage. The block’s current use—a gas station and low-rise commercial buildings—is underwhelming given its location. However, under the Council’s reinstated parking mandates, developing housing with ground-floor retail would require subdividing the block into five separate buildings to avoid providing parking—a layout no developer would willingly choose under more flexible zoning. Alternatively, the site could remain as is, until parking demand rises enough to justify a costly below-grade garage.
The Council’s desire for parking contradicts broader city and state policies discouraging car ownership and use. A bike lane along Queens Boulevard, leading to the Queensborough Bridge, has removed a lane of street parking while narrowing traffic lanes. Congestion pricing has gone into effect in Manhattan’s business district, encouraging transit use and generating revenue to upgrade the subway system. The rise of app-based car-sharing services further reduces the necessity of private car ownership, especially for new residents near transit.
By reinstating parking requirements, the Council not only undermines these transportation policies but also fails to take full advantage of COYHO’s potential to mitigate NYC’s housing crisis. Housing opponents who pushed for these mandates correctly see them as a means to slow development, yet this approach serves no rational planning objective. Instead, it inflates construction costs, reduces housing supply, and perpetuates inefficiencies.
The mayor and his challengers should make an issue of this as they campaign for the June Democratic primary. Anyone not supporting the elimination of parking mandates is only perpetuating our city's housing crisis.
