I think it’s important to stop calling this “zero parking” because that’s unnecessarily inflammatory and misleading at the same time. Start calling it market based parking, or capitalism, take your pick.
The proposal going up is for the city to stop imposing a rigid, cookie-cutter, one-size fits all set of minimum parking requirements, which have never been validated by any scientific study of community economic health..
The proposal is to let the free market function in Olympia by letting the people with the most to lose —- the developers and the lenders — decide for themselves how to do it, rather than dictating to them that they must supply so much parking per unit based on an unscientific cookie-cutter formula.
Say what you like about developers, but they are not exactly profiles in courage — they are absolutely not going to be building any residences with zero parking unless they have good strong evidence that they can get such units financed and then sell them.
And lenders make developers look like Navy Seals in terms of courage and risk-taking propensity. Financiers are not going to risk making loans to build projects where they feel that the market will not want the result. The lenders’ security is in the value of the built project (their collateral). Unless they see that the projects pencil out, — including the most important piece, market demand — we are unlikely to have many if any projects built with zero parking.
Our current top-down rigid parking minimum rules kill affordable housing projects because they say that, unless you can afford the land area to provide space for cars, you can’t even build space for people. It’s a very weird and sad situation we face, where we’d rather have people unhoused and living in tents and derelict RVs than allow residences to be built where the developer and the people financing the project carefully assess the risk and return and decide how much parking they need to supply to serve the residence.
The most likely outcome, after the howling dies down, is that, while there may be a rare residential infill project that gets built without parking, the average person visiting Olympia will not be able to tell that Olympia eliminated rigid parking minimums because developers and lenders will have every incentive to get the parking decision right for their market, and in most cases, that will mean providing plenty of parking for the way people are going to live. Where there is good access to transit, developers might build multi family with a lot less parking than is required today, but developers and lenders have no interest in building projects that will not hold value because they provided inadequate parking.
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