DENVER — Denver City Council will decide Monday night whether or not to eliminate minimum parking requirements in place for apartments and businesses around the city.
The City of Denver said the goal behind cutting parking minimums is to boost housing construction, cut time city planners spend reviewing development applications and reduce traffic congestion.
The City of Denver’s zoning code requires market-rate apartments to have one parking space per dwelling unit and restaurants to have nearly four parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of indoor space. If approved, the new ordinance would eliminate those minimums and let developers choose how many parking spots, if any, to include in building plans.
The City of Denver said it needs to change its parking rules to comply with a state law passed in 2024 that prohibits cities from having minimum parking requirements for multi-family complexes. However, some residents said they support parking requirements since it can be hard to find parking in the city.
“I mean, with all the new businesses — which are great — coming in, we love the neighborhood because of that, but [parking is] now overflowing into the neighborhoods for sure,” longtime Berkeley neighborhood resident Jay Klein said.
A recently published study by the University of Denver shows cutting minimum parking requirements would boost housing construction by about 8%, or an average of 450 more homes per year, in certain economic conditions.
"In a relatively unfavorable environment, which I would say we are in, because of high interest rates and the cost of borrowing and the cost of construction, that the margins for developers are very small, and therefore reducing the cost of development by reducing the parking requirements actually has a relatively larger effect. But it's not giant," Susan Daggett, director of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute at DU’s Sturm College of Law, said.
The City of Denver said cutting parking minimums would remove red tape around the apartment permitting process. City leaders said staff spend hundreds of hours each year reviewing whether development applications meet parking requirements. Daggett said with no parking mandates, developers could spend less time and money putting together parking studies which could cut building costs.
Denver City Council will discuss the ordinance during a public hearing on Monday night at 5:30 p.m.
