This is an absolute necessity in Houston. It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful externalities for everyone on the vicinity, in a more pronounced way than any similarly sized US city.
The trick here is that many of the rules are designed for maximum possible need, leading to a sea of lots that are never actually full. It’s silly to build all strip mallS with parking lots that will be comfortable in Black Friday if every store has a major holiday sales bias.
Building too much parking also has painful externalities, as walking, even from store to store, becomes problematic, and maintenance for those oversized lots is not free. It’s just that those externalities are legislated in as the status quo, so they are invisible unless you look somewhere else.
> It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more you prioritize car use with requirements for large garages, large surface lots, and large, wide, high speed roads, the more you make transit and walking slower and less effective, and the more you drive people into cars.
Houston has very high parking requirements that are actually even higher than what you are describing; even for "micro-apartments", an apartment size characterized by ~2-300 sq ft total space that could probably only fit one person comfortably, the Houston code requires more than one parking space per unit. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/Req...
One market-based hint that the parking requirements are too high in most cities is that developers nearly always only build the minimum; if more was required you'd expect more people to go and above minimum requirements.
Turning that around: a lack of public transport options creates painful externalities on new construction (mandatory large parking lots) and the city (must put in multiplane roads for every new block).
Houston doesn't have explicit zoning, which is true, but this doesn't mean that it's necessarily any easier to build dense housing if that's what the market demands.
- Deed restrictions effectively work as zoning by limiting what a given parcel can't be developed into, and they are city enforced; this restricts dense development, particularly in wealthy, high-amenity, high-convenience neighborhoods that might otherwise be more densely developed by natural forces.
- While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it does mandate a minimum amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes. Mandated parking will drive up the cost of dense development because the minimums are set very high, and it means you either have to give over valuable floor space for parking, you have to build very expensive underground or structured parking, or a combination of the two. By indirectly driving up the cost of dense development, minimum parking regulations makes less of it pencil out.
If dense living was not in demand and undersupplied (which I believe it is), dense apartments would not fetch more per sq ft than a house in a low density suburb, at least not successfully.