BETTER UTILIZATION IN LAND DEVELOPMENT

BETTER UTILIZATION IN LAND DEVELOPMENT

We believe that one of the easiest ways to get more housing in our city, as well as to make it more walkable, is to update our codes so that developers can better utilize the land they own to fit more structure on the parcel. The primary thing preventing this, as well as adding costs to development – and therefore to housing prices – is that we have arbitrary mandates to provide minimum levels of off-street parking, even in places where businesses are close to transit or a walking distance from large neighborhoods. This campaign seeks to change our codes so that individual developers and neighborhoods can make decisions about how much parking is needed, instead of an arbitrary number forcing them to do what may not be best for them or the community at large.

Join us in working toward ‘better utilization in land development.’

For more resources on this topic, check out The Parking Reform Network.

“Parking is expensive to build. So, if you require that every new apartment includes a certain number of parking spaces, as many American jurisdictions do, you are adding a tremendous burden to the provision of affordable housing and homeless support.”

-Henry Grabar,
‘Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World’

-Donald Shoup,
Distinguished Research Professor - Department of Urban Planning, UCLA

“Most cities tend to mandate parking everywhere, and they tell you exactly how many spaces you have to provide before they’ll allow you to open a business or build a house — and it’s mostly based on pseudoscience.”

SAYING YES TO ENDING PARKING MANDATES

Our initiatives are based on simple concepts, like having more freedom to safely walk or bike, but they are accomplished through concrete steps. This initiative specifically requests that the City of Knoxville update our codes to remove burdensome mandates for parking spaces based on arbitrary numbers. Because forcing unnecessary parking adds costs to housing and makes our city less safe to bike and walk in, neighborhoods and designers should freely determine how much parking is best for new developments.

REMOVING

PARKING

MANDATES

HELPS THE

ECONOMY

According to a January 2023 article from The National Law Review: Municipalities lose vital property tax revenue by having an overabundance of parking. Sandpoint, a small town in Idaho, provides an interesting case study. Worried about the destruction of historic buildings to build parking, Sandpoint eliminated all downtown parking requirements. In addition to spurring the development of small businesses, the change incentivized a growing tech startup to stay local and renovate an old lumber facility as its new tech campus, leading to a property assessment value increase of over $2 million. The property had ample parking as it stood, but if the parking requirement were still in existence the startup would have had to double the lot size to avoid fees, potentially pushing it to relocate. Consequently, the new campus brought more jobs to Sandpoint, a positive economic driver.

HOW TO SAY YES

  • The easiest way for you to show your support for this initiative is to email us and join our organization. It’s free, and the more people our movement has behind it, the more powerful our collective voice becomes when we speak to the City or to the Planning Commission. In your email, make the the subject line ‘YES, PLEASE’ and provide us with your basic details like name and street address. Your address will stay private, but it helps us know where in town our supporters are. We may use your name for petitioning purposes.

  • If you want to take immediate action, alongside joining our movement, go to https://www.knoxvilletn.gov/government/city_council and find your City Council representative and email them. Tell them you support parking reform and YES! Knoxville’s BUILD Initiative to remove costly and unneeded parking mandates in our city!

  • Want to help us do ground work advocacy? This may involve showing up to neighborhood meetings to explain your desire to safely walk, bike, or take transit in our city, it may involve using graphic design skills to design brochures and flyers, it may involve helping us recruit more neighbors to support this initiative. Who knows! But if you want to be directly involved in the BUILD Initiative, email us with the subject line ‘BUILD TEAM’ and we’ll get in touch!