Marble countertops aren't competing for space that you could otherwise use to build more apartments to sell/rent.

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.

Isn't this (part of) the point?

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.

Multiple means of egress from bedrooms, fire-rated walls between units, accessibility requirements, auto-closing doors, fire suppression systems, CO and smoke detectors, are all things that we could remove the requirements for and also leave to the businesses and builders to decide whether or not the market demands those things.

3. Businesses open up shop 5 miles away from downtown where they don’t have to deal with any of this.

> developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred

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.

What part of "one hundred times out of a hundred" did you miss? You don't end up with the choice because nobody builds parking.

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.

A better example would be where a "development" community's rain water goes. The areas booming right now in the south east usa will build the next development up 4 feet above the previous community and get approved through the county council permit process. Then the first big rain storm or hurricane comes by and the formerly dry community is now flooded out for the new community that got built, which also floods because drainage wasn't factored in.

Then parking spaces will be priced according to what the market wants to pay.

Eh, Milwaukee has fairly lax parking requirements (including no minimums for most downtown developments) but most developments have more than legal required. Developers are pretty open about the reason (it's not uncommon for neighbors to push back on parking due to traffic concerns): they lost money on the parking, but without the spots they can't rent the apartments at all. Walmart doesn't build parking because the city makes them, they do it because their target market has cars and won't visit without a parking lot.

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?

I understand both sides of the issue. My problem is the lack of context given to this solution for housing.

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?

> Nobody is really space constrained.

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.

It's not clear to me. I really wish you could take the effort to explain your thinking. If there is no place to park but your neighbor's yard how it would work in a civilized society and help housing costs.

Then you’ll end up with the building equivalent of the titanic which had a lot of luxurious amenities and decor, but skimped on the more boring stuff like structural integrity. You can see this in effect in parts of Asia. The closest example we have in the US is the Millennium Tower. There were regulations, (someone could correct me) but they decided to “bribe” their way out of it.

Ironically, I still share your opinion about over regulation, but we can’t ignore the other argument.

> No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.

"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.