We don’t have zoning in Houston, right?

A Chronicle article this weekend points out otherwise. There’s one land use that the City of Houston does mandate: parking.

The city has ordinances that require new or remodeled buildings to have a certain number of parking spaces. For stores, that’s 4 spaces for every 1000 square feet (for restaurants, that number is 8, for bars, it’s 10). That means, for example, that a typical 15,000 square foot drug store must have 60 parking spots.

If you have a new CVS in your neighborhood (and who doesn’t) keep in mind the expanse of concrete around it is required by the city. We are building parking for some theoretical maximum parking demand. And when have you seen 60 cars at a CVS? When have you seen your local grocery store parking lot completely full? Houston streets fill with water more often than Houston parking lots fill with cars. Is not finding a parking place really a worse disaster than a hurricane?

But why should we care? Because parking is never free. Parking comes at a very real cost to the building owner: aside from the cost of paving, there’s the cost of the land: Midtown property goes for $50 a square foot, so that’s almost $20,000 a parking spot.

Parking comes at a cost to the city, too. Every parking spot is a bit of land that can’t be occupied by a store or a restaurant. It’s land we build streets and utlities for but don’t get any sales tax revenue from. More importantly, it deadens the city. In Midtown, the city rules amount to requiring half of all lots to be occupied with parking (assuming one story buildings and no garages). That’s in addition to the 40% of the land that’s taken up by the streets, leaving only 30% of the land for uses that are actually worth going to. As a pedestrian, you have a certain distance you’ll walk. The more parking, the less you can do within that range.

In fact, the most vibrant areas of the city are those that don’t have enough parking. The Rice Village, the Montrose, and the north end of Downtown all require some hunting for a spot or paying for a valet. Does that stop people from coming? Obviously not. They may be annoyed not to find a spot right away, but they come because these places are interesting and cool and fun to be in, and that’s exactly because they aren’t 60% paved.

My point here isn’t that we should get rid of cars. If we dropped parking regulations tomorrow, most businesses, and all businesses in car-based suburban areas, would still provide parking (though maybe not quite as much.) If they didn’t, their customers would stop coming. Drivers are not a persecuted minority. We don’t really need such strict parking requirements. And in some places in Houston — Midtown is one of them — they simply don’t make sense.

There is hope:

City officials say they hope to make it easier to build urban-style developments in Midtown and other neighborhoods near transit corridors, such as the Main Street light rail line. While special rules for particular neighborhoods may be legally questionable, they said, rules linked to conditions such as proximity to transit might work.

This is the goal of an urban transit corridors initiative that began last month with a conference at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Wulfe, Rosenberg and others said city officials seem committed to making this approach work.

We’re already making special rules: Downtown, the Texas Medical Center, and Greenway don’t fall under the standard parking requirements. And it makes perfect sense to say that businesses and institutions within a short walk from a transit stop don’t need as much parking as those that are accessible only by car. The city’s urban transit corridors initiative will likely deal with this. That’s long overdue.

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