Link to full article in Crane's Chicago Business
In his day job, Nick Serra works to redevelop and preserve some of Chicago’s favorite housing stock: two- to four-unit multifamily buildings. Serra is the founder of Grace Street Renovation Lab, which acquires underutilized brick buildings, particularly when there are opportunities to add units to the building.
Often referred to as “two flats,” “three flats,” and “four flats,” these buildings provide a large chunk of Chicago’s housing stock across all neighborhoods, and are frequently available at relatively affordable prices. As part of Chicago’s architectural vernacular, they’re aesthetically iconic, representing what many residents have in mind when they reference “neighborhood character”.
While Serra’s work on these types of buildings aligns with many Chicagoans’ stated housing goals, these types of small-scale multifamily projects face significant barriers. One of the largest is parking requirements. With its current requirements around building parking on new housing, Chicago is introducing costly, unnecessary challenges for new modestly-sized apartments.
Fortunately, this problem has begun to receive increasing attention. Most prominently, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Cut the Tape initiative calls for the elimination of parking requirements in Chicago.
This is a strong idea. In order to support Chicago’s iconic two, three, and four-flats, Chicago should reform or altogether eliminate minimum parking requirements. Such a reform aligns with Chicago’s architectural character and history, and would both maintain and help resupply Chicago’s stock of 2-4 unit multifamily buildings.
Lately, this type of housing has risked becoming an endangered species, both via conversions to single-family homes and outright demolition. Recent legislation has aimed to limit and disincentivize such “deconversions”, in an effort to protect our existing multi-family housing stock, and allow Chicagoans to continue benefiting from an abundance of these multifamily buildings.
However, legislation incentivizing the rehabilitation or creation of two-four flats has largely been absent. Eliminating parking requirements is one important place to start. Chicago’s parking requirements create barriers to the production or rehabilitation of 2-4 unit homes in four key ways.
First, parking requirements limit the amount of housing that can be built, even when the zoning technically allows for more units. At its core, parking creates a problem of geometry — cars simply take up a lot of space. For example, Serra recently worked on a project in Humboldt Park where the zoning would have allowed seven units by right. However, because the parcel could only fit five parking spaces, only five units of housing were built — unnecessarily limiting new housing supply.
Second, parking has considerable hard construction costs. Underground spaces average $67,500 per space, garage spaces average $25,000 per space, and surface parking spots average $6,500 per space. These all result in increased construction budgets and increased rental prices.
Third, allocating space to parking carries an opportunity cost. With ~15% of a lot allocated to parking, there is less room for dedicated outdoor space or livable square footage for additional housing.
Finally, while Chicago does provide an avenue to reduce parking by requesting a zoning variance, this process is costly and uncertain. A zoning attorney must file the variance, approval takes three to five months of holding time, and a variance request may still be ultimately denied. All these factors culminate in less housing units, higher costs per unit, and barriers to modernizing aging buildings.
Things weren’t always this way in Chicago. Chicago only began to require minimum parking spots in the 1940s and 1950s, as city planners started to panic about rising car ownership. This decision may have seemed reasonable at the time, but gave little attention to the potential downsides for housing supply and affordability.
Much of Chicago’s recognizable two, three and four-flats had already been built by this time, and many of these properties have no parking at all. Ironically, the introduction of minimum parking requirements made large portions of the existing housing stock difficult or impossible to build.
In recent years, Chicago policymakers have advanced some reforms recognizing this mistake. As one example, the city has recently reduced parking requirements near transit stops, a promising first step.
Chicago should learn from other cities, too. Currently, it risks falling behind other cities which have altogether stopped mandating minimum levels of parking. Take Portland, Oregon, which has recently seen a surging development of moderate-cost, small multifamily housing, after reforming its zoning code to encourage more small-scale neighborhood density. Importantly, Portland also recently eliminated their minimum parking requirements — one of many cities to recently do so. As a result, the great majority of Portland’s new buildings with 2-6 units have not included any off-street parking. When it comes to small-scale multifamily housing and strict parking requirements, it’s difficult to get both.
Ultimately, ending minimum parking requirements is more about enabling flexibility than forcing any particular change to housing development in Chicago. If residents still highly value having a place to store their car, small local home builders can and will pay the price to include parking spots.
But plenty of Chicagoans choose not to own cars, and we should plan our cities to support more choices — not restrain housing by imposing costly requirements. This is particularly true as rents rise in Chicago, and expanding the number of homes becomes increasingly important to help ease cost pressures.
For well over a century, two-flats, three-flats and four-flats have been a workhorse in Chicago’s housing stock. To make sure these buildings continue to play a valuable role, it’s time for the city to move on from minimum parking requirements.
Zak Yudhishthu is a housing and urban policy researcher based in Chicago. He writes about these issues at pencillingout.substack.com.