What parking requirements cost: construction cost per space, land consumed, and the rent needed to carry spaces that residents may or may not use.
Parking is the clearest example of a rule with a price tag. A required parking ratio tells a developer how many spaces to build per home, and each space has a construction cost that rises steeply from a surface lot to a structured garage to an underground level. Those spaces are financed with the same debt and equity as the apartments above them, so their cost is carried in the rent whether or not the residents own cars.
Parking also competes with homes for land and for building volume. A site that must hold a certain number of spaces holds fewer units, and a podium garage changes the structure of the whole building. This section quantifies the cost of a space, the rent needed to carry it, and what changes when requirements are reduced, unbundled or eliminated.
A developer does not choose the rent; the rent a new building needs is the sum of what its capital and operations cost, and the finishes are a small part of that sum.
Parking
Surface, tuck-under, structured or underground: each kind of parking space has a construction cost, and each dollar of it must be recovered in rent. We work through what a parking requirement adds to a 120-unit project.
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