'More Impactful Than Zoning': A Densified Dallas Snaps Into Focus As City Nixes One-Size-Fits-All Parking

A city known for its sprawl could be on the way to a long sought-after, more urbanized future thanks to new parking legislation that has developers looking at new housing options and predicting a healthy rise in redevelopment that would have once been financially prohibitive.

Dallas Parking Reform, passed by the Dallas City Council two weeks ago, eliminates nearly all of the city’s one-size-fits-all parking minimums, adopting a more flexible structure for required spaces off the street. The new regulations cut most minimum requirements by 50%, aiming to make way for more small businesses, cheaper housing and more walkable neighborhoods.

“Parking code might well be more impactful than zoning in the final construct of a city,” PegasusAblon founding partner Mike Ablon said. 

Ablon is among the developers who have long beat the drum for parking reform, pushing for years to update the city’s 60-year-old policy.

City officials began discussions on changing parking policy in 2019 and conducted a series of parking studies that told them the city has a plethora of unused spaces on any given day. 

In addition to offering a counter to car culture development, the updated regulations are expected to open opportunities for adaptive reuse projects in buildings that previously couldn’t meet the parking requirements, leading to more neighborhood restaurants, retail and housing options. 

And as the city rightsizes its parking infrastructure, Dallas Area Rapid Transit also has a series of projects in motion aimed at reducing the sea of empty parking at several of its light rail stations and increasing affordable housing in areas of the city with a dire need for it.

Revealing Parking Studies

A June 2022 city study of popular Dallas restaurants saw their parking lots getting strong use, peaking with a 92% full lot at S&D Oyster Co. in Uptown. But outside of eateries, numbers told a different story.

Retail parking dipped as low as 20% full in February 2020, and multifamily parking lots hit lows of 54% in a separate 2018 study.

Documents prepared for city council showed that wasted space doesn't come cheap for developers. The cost of creating a parking space can range from as little as $5,000 per space for surface lots to as much as $50K each in structured garages.

“With the cost of construction being what it is, an extra 100 spaces can be a lot of money,” Gensler principal Barry Hand said. “And if they're unnecessary, that could, in some cases, be the difference between a deal penciling or not.”

Dallas isn’t alone in seeking parking reform. The topic has become a national conversation, and a growing number of cities are doing away with minimums to promote economic development and housing production as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Walker Consultants Executive Vice President Casey Wagner said. 

Reduced requirements in Los Angeles County have led to a rise in housing production for that notoriously difficult-to-pencil market, he said. 

“I know Texans won’t like being compared to the West Coast, but it is even more difficult for potential projects to pencil in that region, so Dallas should see an increase,” Wagner said.

Similar reforms in cities such as San Diego, Seattle and Buffalo, New York, led to developers getting creative with small lots and reuse projects as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in construction savings, Wagner said. 

Seattle, which has relaxed minimums incrementally, beginning in 2012, estimates that 60 percent of the housing developed since would not have been possible under the old rules.

Dallas City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert said Dallas' reforms are a major milestone that was needed to meet the “evolving needs of the city.”

“By allowing right-sized parking, we can encourage a safe, walkable city with more room for homes, more opportunity for small businesses, and a more responsible impact on the environment,” Tolbert said in a statement.

‘Appropriate Densification’

While 14 of 15 Dallas City Council members were on board with the changes, there was one holdout.

District 12 Council Member Cara Mendelsohn was the sole vote against the parking reform plan, saying it fails to meet the needs of Far North Dallas. Mendelsohn called the policy “overly urbanistic” and argued the council didn’t get enough feedback from residents when crafting it.

Wagner cautioned that developers, lenders and city officials will need time to fully adapt, and new development could lag.

“The reform is a big step, but it needs to be paired with good parking management and transportation options: pricing, permits, transit, micromobility and solid [transportation demand management] policies,” Wagner said. “Otherwise, you risk getting the worst of both worlds — less off-street parking and no good alternatives.”

Hand said the city wasn’t the only culprit in Dallas’ formerly oversized sea of parking. Underwriters have historically pushed for more spaces as they looked to protect their assets, and that could be an educational process as well. 

“It's hard to find in Dallas or its surrounding suburbs parking lots that the outer edges are not empty and a parking deck that the top floor or two are not empty,” Hand said. “It's like the national animal of Texas.”

In the end, parking reform will create an opportunity for neighborhood restaurants and retail to actually serve their neighborhoods, Ablon said.

“Appropriate densification is really important for a city fabric,” Ablon said. “The more we duplicate the utilization of any infrastructure, whether that's roads, water, everything, the more sustainable the city is.”

The old parking regulations stalled infill and redevelopment for years, but the changes throw open the doors for developers to get creative.

“You can now repurpose buildings easier and take older buildings and give them a second life that you couldn't otherwise,” Ablon said. 

Already dense areas like Downtown Dallas will get even more so, and the typical suburban office building will likely see a reduction in the size of its tract, Ablon said. But developers aren’t going to build under-resourced buildings. 

“You're still going to get the parking you need, but the goal is to not overbuild parking so that nine out of 10 spaces are vacant at any given point,” Ablon said.

Developers know better than anyone how much parking they need for a project to work, Hand said.

In addition to increasing development opportunities, the updated regulations should also improve permitting efficiencies, according to The Real Estate Council President and CEO Jamee Jolly. The Real Estate Council consulted with the city on updating its permitting process with the cloud-based DallasNow system that went live earlier this month. 

Jolly called the city’s parking reform a “significant step” in efforts to create greater walkability and housing development in the city. 

Redevelopment At DART

Even before officials passed the parking reform regulations, DART had five projects in the hopper designed to reduce the number of spaces at their stations and increase housing options. 

“When DART builds out its system, we have just entirely too much parking,” DART Vice President of Real Estate & Economic Development Caitlin Holland said during Bisnow's Future of Downtown and Uptown Dallas event last month. “We have parking lots at all of our light rail stations that are anywhere from 5% to 30% utilized, so it's just parking deserts.” 

The first project aimed at turning that around is a $107M mixed-income apartment community at DART's Buckner Light Rail Station. 

Holland said her team is looking at folding former parking into new developments in a seamless way that promotes walkability. As an example, she pointed to the planned mixed-use development at Mockingbird Station. DART is working with Trammell Crow on that $117M development, which will feature subterranean parking and an 18-story mixed-income apartment tower on the surface. 

“That was made possible by both public and private funding, so we had to be more creative with the funding to be able to … minimize the parking to the extent we can and make it really efficient,” Holland said.

Those projects are expected to add to the wins from citywide parking reform. But experts said it’s hard to get a universally loved set of regulations.

“A one-size-fits-all regulation is never going to satisfy everyone, and probably the new rules are not going to satisfy everyone,” Hand said.

While the updates are steps in the right direction, both Hand and Ablon acknowledged no code is perfect, and it will be vital that the city is open to revising them going forward.   

“Let's keep our eye on the ball and see what happens,” Hand said. “If in 10 or 20 years we get great results out of it, let's tweak it again.”