Edmonton parking minimums and what they mean for infill housing

The city of Edmonton is looking for public feedback on its residential parking rules. This comes after the province forced the city to return to minimum parking requirements for infill housing. Can you start by explaining to us what exactly we mean by parking minimums? So in the past, as part of the zoning regulations across North America and other countries, we had parking minimums. That if you're building new housing, let's say a one-bedroom apartment or a house, then you provide X number of parking units that was required. So if it's an apartment building with 200 units, they would have to provide, let's say, 0.75 units per stalls per dwelling or more. And now with that in mind, it was done at the time that most mobility was by private automobile. And then as cities changed, especially places like New York and to some extent Toronto and Montreal, you would see that people who were living in central parts of the city would not need cars as much. So they were living there, probably working there, walking or biking to work, or public transit, and they didn't rely on cars. So there was no need for specifying that you must provide X number of stalls per dwelling unit. So when they removed this, they removed the minimum parking requirement in the city of Edmonton. That doesn't mean that they said that now no more parking is required. So that probably is a confusion. Eliminating minimum parking requirement doesn't mean that you are now scot-free and you don't need to provide. It has to go by location. It has to go by the streetscape, the curb use of space and all that. So it's very spatially variant. One law applied to an entire city or a province becomes very difficult because the circumstances are highly spatial, highly varying, and it has to be decided place by place basis. But at the same time, if you do place by place, that slows down the approval processes. right like you have to review everything so there are pros and cons it's not an easy thing to solve right because it would be neighborhood by neighborhood and and it could be something like a driveway or underground parking for a building these are the sorts of things we're talking about that where we would be looking at so how did the removal of parking minimums in 2020 impact the development of housing in Edmonton so when you so let's say you let's focus on infill only so you have one uh lot of land parcel of land it's not that big and now you're allowed, let's say, in combination with the infill regulations, you can put a duplex, triplex, or in many cases, an eightplex, right? So now you can consume all of that land to construct dwellings and dedicate no space for parking. So even if there's eight people living in this eightplex, you don't need to have eight stalls? It's not required anymore. There's no minimum parking, which means that in some instances where these individuals would have households or families would have cars, one or more, that would go on the open space on the curb side. And that would then be dealt as, because curb space is in Edmonton, anybody can use it. The challenge is if there's not enough cars and there's enough space around and the neighborhood is not affected, this is a very good policy. It only becomes a problem when you have too many cars parked at one intersection or one block face and it interferes not only with those who are residents there and long-term residents but also with snow removal but also with the flow of emergency response vehicles fire engines and whatnot so you have to be like the city will or must have already done because they're very smart people they must have done studies to see if it interfered and by how much so then how could reintroducing these minimums then affect the long-term affordability of housing because that's what the province is pushing the city of Edmonton to do? Yes, so that's another element. These minimum parking requirements result in higher cost. Let's just look at a parcel of land where you could build eight plexes, so you can take the land price and divide it into eight units. Now you have to provide four parking spots, so you can maybe go down to four units. Then the same land price has to be divided amongst four dwellings, which means that the cost per dwelling will go up. It would have an impact on the price of housing because the land would be distributed amongst fewer units. So yes, affordability in terms of... But then people are not buying it. It's mostly rental. That's another thing. Most of these infill developments are rental dwellings, so there may be some impact on rent, but people can charge more rent than what is already available, and Edmonton is fairly a decent place for affordable rental. Now, I know you said this really differs to different spots in the city, depending on what's available, what curb space is available and that sort of thing. But what kind of developments do you think really need dedicated parking spaces? I would say this is what we have to see, that it has to be decided based on, like, if you're building 200 units, let's say it's entirely apartment or residential, chances are that one-fourth or less would have cars. Now, if you were only on a block face, a constraint between two intersections, where will those cars go? They will be parked on that place. So, yes, it differs by the scale of development. If there are large-scale residential, industrial, or other developments, it could be commercial developments. People may go, imagine if somebody puts up a Walmart or a Costco with no parking. Right. I mean, they wouldn't do it because the price of the parking is internalizing the cost of goods you buy there, but that's a different story. But that wouldn't happen. So the scale of development should dictate. I mean, if you're just replacing one home with another home, then you don't need as much changes. But if you're replacing one dwelling with 200 dwellings or two or three land parcels put together and now you have got a big apartment building, then you have to think through it. And I think the minimum parking requirement, when they eliminated it, this has to be made clear. It doesn't mean that now as a builder, as a developer, as a homeowner, as someone, you are not required to provide any parking. They just have transferred that decision to you and you make the best decision based on the locality and the development you're making. But it doesn't mean that you have a license to produce, to provide no parking. It's just that that constraint has been removed, but the decision has been transferred to you. So now the province wants... But couldn't it be argued, though, that you, like a developer, if they can make more money off of building an Apex with no stalls whatsoever, couldn't it be argued that they are now able to just not have any parking? It depends upon the developer. If you're an established developer with deep roots in the city, you don't want bad publicity. But if you're a one-off developer based somewhere in the other part of Canada and you just got this project, you do it, you don't care. You finish it and you leave. But again, at the same time, as you mentioned, these are rental properties. They will stay with you. So if there's a backlash, it would impact rents, it would impact occupancy, it would impact your cash flow. So again, these are complicated things. When it was passed in, I think, 2020, it was in the midst of COVID. No one was looking outside at the curbside or whatnot. These things were realized later. And I think the city would have done analysis. And if you want to do, like anybody can do the analysis. The 311 data set is available, publicly available. There are about 3 million observations, 311 calls from 2024 to date. And you could see that a lot of complaints come for parking or unattended vehicle, abandoned vehicle. These are one of the top ten complaints people have across the wards in the city. How feasible do you think it will be for the city to implement the changes because the province is pushing for them to go back to parking minimums and then in tandem with getting all this feedback from people who live here? My hope is that this shouldn't come as a dictate from the province to the city and the city be forced to comply. My hope is that this comes as a conversation and a dialogue between the city planners and the provincial regulators and then they make this decision based on informed decision-making using data, complaints, evidence of where the problem lies and come up with a solution that is spatially heterogeneous enough to meet the local needs and meet the local concerns and it provides people the ability to use their streets as they intended. You can provide the City of Edmonton with your feedback on the residential parking program until November 15th. you can go to engaged.edmonton.ca.