We would have more and better parking if it were provided by the market instead of government fiat. The reason is simple: there’s nothing better for business than to provide just the right amount of parking.

Right now each business must include on its own lot a fixed number of parking spaces based on an unscientific government decree. Now, since you’re a resident of reality you’ve surely noticed that some places have too little parking, and some places have way too much.

This is the result of over-regulation. Businesses CANNOT provide less parking even if they don’t need it. Worse, when they need more than they can fit on site (and more than is required by code) they can’t get any credit for pooling their needs with someone who in reality needs less.

For instance, let’s imagine that you put an Einstein Bros. Bagels next door to Chuys. If you’ve ever been to Chuy’s you know there is never enough parking. Fortunately, Chuy’s doesn’t serve breakfast.

If Einstein and Chuys were allowed to work out a parking arrangement on their own terms, they could probably provide a just-right sized parking lot that would be full of bagel buyers in the mornings and fajita connoisseurs in the evenings.

The marketplace would provide better parking solutions than the government ever could. Removing parking regulations doesn’t mean removing parking, it means letting businesses FIX parking.

Thanks for the question!

There’s no “articulation” requirement, which in other cities bans the sort of imposing and/or sleek edifices that front the street, and there’s no surfacing/stylistic requirements at all.

Best of all, the new regs are optional, so if you don’t like the design standards you can still build to the old regs, which allow blank walls with a 5′ setback from the ROW. One of the downsides of Portland-style window/transparency requirements is you get a lot of pointless windows that exist for no purpose other than to comply with the design regs. Thankfully, we’ve avoided that particular extreme.

I still say we should eliminate all parking regs, entirely. Even in suburban locales where parallel parking is nonexistent (i.e. Westheimer and Voss), creative arrangements could still be worked out between adjacent stripmall/retail owners that would allow those pads to be developed out at a higher density, perhaps even with mixed use…

The rationale WAY back in the day was that requiring setbacks would leave enough space to widen the street in the future.

This came about in an era when most ROW’s (with the possible exception of downtown areas) were 50 feet wide or less.

Now the city requires all new development leave ROW proportional to the type of roads that are going through, so at least 50 feet on a residential street and often much more on a commercial street.

In other words, the reason it made sense has ceased to exist, but the regulation will never be revisited. In government it doesn’t matter whether or not what you’re doing makes sense, what matters is that “we’ve always done it that way,” so it’s no longer even getting critical thought.

One thing that has always confused me when talking about Houston development. What is the civic rational for minimum setback requirments? Besides possibly line of sight at corners.