This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the easiest ways for communities to enable new housing and other dynamic development is actually quite simple.

Get rid of minimum parking requirements.

Instead, argues Nolan Gray, author of arbitrary lines,

cities should let property owners figure it out for themselves.

Whenever I see glorious architectural firm designs with you know the little fake people walking around and

enjoying themselves and at these various like venues that are going to be built

like expensive shopping centers or arenas or stadiums.

Inevitably when you see the aerial shot or the aerial design,

huge parking lots.

I mean massive parking lots. I mean massive parking lots and just driving around my

small town the stores are so far from the street because of huge parking lots and I wonder because these parking

lots are rarely ever anywhere near half full.

How who makes that decision? How does that decision get made? Right, you look around the American built landscape and there's just loads and loads of parking and there's two possibilities here the first possibility is all

this parking really is just demanded by the market right like if you want to start a

business or you want to build housing maybe you do just have to have loads of

parking but as you know and and many people have observed this a lot of that parking goes unused right and so it would be kind of strange of if the market was just building loads and loads of parking that even on Black Friday is not even fully used, right?

So another possibility and one that I'll argue is what's the main factor here is that

in many cases local governments often require off-street parking to be built as a condition

for receiving permits.

So these are rules called minimum parking requirements, which

...