The Twin Cities suburbs were built as spacious accommodations for a booming population, as well as the rows of cars to ferry all those residents from home to work and back again.

To house all those vehicles, the suburbs built parking — swaths of it for strip malls and apartment buildings, seas of it for big box stores. Driveways and garages gave cars their own designated spots, just steps from the door, at home.

But as the cost of building housing has ballooned amid a major shortage, some of those suburbs are rethinking the acres of asphalt set aside for cars.

In September, St. Paul suburb Falcon Heights joined the ranks of metro cities, including Richfield, West St. Paul and Edina, that have recently reduced — though not eliminated — the minimum number of parking spots city code requires of some new developments. Several cities had recently allowed developments exceptions to parking rules before they changed the code.

"We don't want tons of underutilized parking lots in the city," said Hannah Lynch, Falcon Heights' community development coordinator.

These changes have happened quietly compared to the splash that followed decisions by Minneapolis and St. Paul in 2021 to stop requiring builders to add any minimum number of parking spots for new developments, among the first U.S. cities to do so. Advocates cheered the elimination of so-called "parking minimums" as a way to prioritize housing, transit, walkability and tax revenue over places to park cars. Opponents worried it would make it harder to drive, diminishing options to live, work and get around cities for the worse.

In Falcon Heights, the City Council halved the number of parking spots apartment buildings require. Now, a large complex requires one space per unit, while buildings of under 10 units require 1.25 per unit, assuming they don't have street parking nearby.

Lynch said the city's old requirements were on the higher side and that many recent Falcon Heights developments have received variances that allowed them to build less than the previous minimum required parking. She described the reduction as a way to cut down on unnecessary parking in the transit-connected city and, by setting a lower minimum, leave it to developers to decide if they want to build more.

Not everyone agreed that the parking is unnecessary.

"I think it's pushing something that's idealist too soon," Council Member Melanie Leehy said before the vote.

A statewide debate

The discussion in Falcon Heights echoed arguments made earlier this year at the Minnesota State Capitol during hearings for the People Over Parking Act, a bill that would have eliminated parking minimums statewide, which failed despite bipartisan support.

Advocates for the statewide elimination of parking minimums argued space used for parking would be better used to build housing; that parking minimums require developers to spend tens of thousands of dollars to construct parking spots that drive up the cost of housing; and that the market is a better decider of the amount of parking needed than arbitrary government rules.

Chuck Marohn, the founder of nonprofit advocacy group Strong Towns and a critic of parking minimums, said the requirements are often mischaracterized as a ban on building parking space.

He said the rules are a relic of the zoning codes that characterized the fast development of suburbs in the mid-20th century. Planners studying parking needs at the time would look to new and successful areas, trying to replicate the results. For example, they might study a successful suburban shopping mall and count the parking spots to determine the number of spots per square feet required of retail in another city. Other cities might then copy that ratio.

"Nobody writes their own code. Everybody copies someone who copies someone who copies someone who copies someone," Marohn said, leading, in his view, to arbitrary requirements that don't fit cities' needs.

A coalition including the League of Minnesota Cities and the City Engineers Association of Minnesota (CEAM) opposed the bill.

Marc Culver, CEAM's legislative committee chair, said his organization opposed the statewide bill's blanket moratorium on parking minimums because it was too one-size-fits-all.

"It's going to have unintended consequences when it comes to parking on-street, people not being able to park their car when they really need to, near their place of business or near their home," he said. He also listed concerns about snow plowing with more cars on the street, and the ability of emergency vehicles to get down streets.

Culver said he feels differently about cities recalibrating their own parking minimums based on need.

"The trips per unit change over time, and the number of cars that people own changes over time, so I think that's good," he said.

Neighborhood parking

In 2022, Edina reduced its minimum parking requirements for certain types of developments, City Council Member Kate Agnew said.

Agnew, who previously served on the planning commission, remembered much discussion was sparked by the Lorient building near 44th and France avenues. The debate was over whether or not a proposed restaurant could arrange for after-hours parking with neighboring businesses to accommodate its needs instead of building more, she said.

Earlier this year, Richfield reduced parking minimums for multifamily areas and some other developments. Council Member Sean Hayford Oleary said he had originally pitched eliminating minimum parking altogether, but didn't have the consensus to move ahead. He said he sees the recent reduction as a way to incrementally reduce unneeded parking.

"We have to spend a lot of public dollars subsidizing housing to allow it to be built, so anything that makes housing more expensive to build that isn't absolutely necessary, is something that we want to look at reducing," he said.

Hayford Oleary pointed to Aster Commons, a supportive housing facility that received a variance to build 11 parking spots for 38 units, with developers arguing many of the complex's residents will be youth and young adults emerging from homelessness who are more apt to use transit and bikes than cars.

The developer estimated savings of $800,000, achieved because the variance eliminated the need for an underground parking garage.

Richfield resident Alex Asmus doesn't agree with Hayford Oleary. As someone who has a degree in construction management, Asmus said he believes reducing parking minimums will give developers an incentive to build less parking than needed because it doesn't generate much revenue for them.

Asmus said the council's emphasis on adding large apartment buildings has made parts of Richfield, including his once-quiet neighborhood, busier than they were designed to be, something he's concerned lower parking requirements could exacerbate. Because many neighborhoods in Richfield don't have sidewalks, pedestrians and kids on bikes use the streets, and more cars parked on streets present more obstacles. And in the winter, he said, snow plows struggled to get through.

"Cars have just flooded into our neighborhood," he said. "We have a lot of young children, when they try to exit their driveways on their bikes into the street, cars fly by and they can't see a child coming out of their driveway. Because there's so many cars parked, it's hard to have that kind of visibility."