Larry has it right.
In MY neighborhood, a lot of densification could work fine, as we have houses with large frontages, 30-foot-wide streets that allow parking on both sides, and every current house has a driveway that holds two or more cars in addition to garages. It would be a long time before on-street parking was scarce.
But what about streets like Thurston in NE Olympia, or Dickinson in NW Olympia? These are very narrow streets (less than 20-feet), have no sidewalks, and already have parking congestion. If existing houses were allowed to add additional dwelling units without adding parking, these streets would become simply awful: no place to walk, no place to park, and no place to ride a bicycle without being terrified of a car or truck coming the other way.
The parking need is a block-by-block assessment.
As with the poorly-developed "missing middle" housing proposals, we really need to examine each block of our city to see if it can handle additional dwelling units.
We need to examine if there is street capacity, parking capacity, sidewalks, water and sewer system capacity, schools, availability of fire services and fire hydrants, and many other necessities that need to exist for additional housing to be acceptable for both existing and new residents.
No blanket changes should be done. Every block is a little different.
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