No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.
Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.
Ironically, I still share your opinion about over regulation, but we can’t ignore the other argument.
"Follow the money" always works.
Builders want (reasonably enough) to increase profit. Marble countertops add a few thousand in cost but now you can sell these as luxury units for tens of thousands more! So it's profitable, so it happens.
Building parking space instead of additional units is not profitable, so it won't happen unless required.
Parking is.
Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.
And even if this does drive up parking costs to match rents, is that such a bad thing? Why should we legally mandate that developers subsidize parking?
We have an abundance of parking required by law and not enough housing units - removing the requirement should encourage more money to be invested into anything but parking no?
Seems like letting businesses decide whether or not it's worth opening a business with the available parking would cause one of two things to happen:
1. We wind up with the actual correct amount of parking required for a given set of businesses - instead of some arbitrary amount dictated by legislatures decades ago. 2. Everyone is tired of the lack of parking and votes to increase public transit funding.
Once we have apartments with and without parking on the market, we'll see how much more people are willing to pay to get parking, and future developers can build accordingly.
Queens NY has this problem pretty severely. Zoning requires parking past 7 stories in building height, so every building is 7 floors at maximum density with no parking. Residents often find themselves circling their neighborhoods for hours looking for parking. Living without a car and being fully-dependent on public transit absolutely sucks in most of the borough.
I live in small (2,000ish households) New England town with some streets that predate automobiles. Nobody is really space constrained. The housing 3 miles a way is at least half the cost of my town.
The public transportation is poor and it took about 25 years to build less than 3 miles of bike path.
Should my town ditch off-street parking minimums in an attempt to increase housing supplies?
Clearly the answer is no then.
That doesn't make space-constrained Austin's answer an automatic yes either though. The city is very car-dependent. The starting point isn't "take away peoples' ability to have a car". It should be "make it more attractive not to have a car".
Changing parking minimums comes far down that road.