GED Practice Test 4

Should Cities Drop Parking Requirements? Two Views

Passage 1: Parking Rules Raise the Cost of Housing

For decades, most American cities have required developers to build a minimum number of parking spaces with every new building, often one or two spaces per apartment and sometimes more for restaurants and stores. These rules were written with good intentions, but they now do more harm than good.

Parking is expensive. A single space in an underground garage can cost $50,000 or more to build, and developers pass that cost on to residents through higher rents, whether or not those residents own a car. In effect, a renter who rides the bus helps pay for a neighbor's parking space. Parking requirements also limit what can be built. On a small lot, the space needed for cars can make an apartment building impossible to fit, so the lot stays empty or becomes a parking lot itself.

Cities that have dropped these requirements offer encouraging evidence. After one West Coast city eliminated parking minimums near transit lines, developers proposed small apartment buildings on lots that had sat unused for years, and many chose to build fewer spaces than the old rules required. Developers did not stop building parking; they simply built the amount their tenants wanted.

Eliminating parking minimums does not ban parking. It lets the people who pay for a building decide how much parking it needs, instead of a formula written decades ago. If a city wants more affordable housing, removing this hidden cost is one of the simplest steps it can take.

Passage 2: Not So Fast on Parking

Supporters of eliminating parking requirements describe the change as a simple matter of letting the market work. But the market does not account for everyone affected by a new building. When an apartment complex opens with too few spaces, the residents who own cars do not disappear; they park on nearby streets. Neighbors who have lived on those streets for years suddenly circle the block looking for a space, and small businesses lose customers who cannot find anywhere to stop.

Advocates often point to cities with strong transit systems, where many residents can get by without a car. Yet in most American communities, buses run infrequently, and jobs, schools, and grocery stores are spread far apart. In those places, a household without a car faces real hardship. Building as if residents will give up driving does not make transit better; it only makes parking harder to find.

There are also questions of fairness. Older adults and people with disabilities often depend on being able to park close to their homes. A building with little or no parking may be technically open to them but impractical in daily life.

None of this means current rules are perfect. Some requirements are clearly too high, and cities should review them. A reasonable approach would be to lower minimums near frequent transit while keeping them in areas where most people must drive. Eliminating requirements everywhere at once trades one rigid rule for a gamble whose costs fall on people who had no say in the decision.