Parking is one of those issues that is at once both mind-numbingly mundane yet fiercely contentious. The debate over where we put our cars, and who should pay for it, is characterized by deeply-held beliefs—beliefs that are often at odds with the actual impact of these forgettable patches of asphalt.
Whether heading to work, school, or running errands, most Norwalkers drive. Because we typically use our cars to get around, we expect a parking spot to be available wherever we go. This expectation led Norwalk, like many American cities, to enact mandatory parking minimums. Parking minimums require developers to provide a certain number of off-street parking spots, usually free of charge, for every new structure.
It seems reasonable enough—shouldn’t we insist that developers accommodate drivers? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. As economist Donald Shoup put it, free parking comes with invisible costs.
Firstly, off-street parking mandates drive up home construction costs. This makes housing projects more expensive, pushing landlords to charge higher rents to make up the difference. Mandates often discourage the construction of homes entirely—homes that Connecticut urgently needs. Second, parking minimums typically overestimate demand. Studies show that these mandatory lots sit half-empty most of the time.
Third, mandatory parking minimums create an infrastructure that is hostile to multimodal transportation. Endless blacktop and multi-lane roads make walking, biking, or riding transit inconvenient and unsafe. This results in induced demand: everyone drives not by choice, but because the alternatives are unviable. When everyone has to drive everywhere, we all get stuck in the resultant traffic.
While some argue that free off-street parking benefits working-class residents, the savings are a mirage. Parking minimums create a feedback loop that incentivizes car dependence—“free” parking burdens people with purchasing, insuring, and maintaining a perpetually-depreciating vehicle just to get around.
Some believe that going car-free or car-light in Norwalk is impossible, but many already do. In 2024, nearly 50% of Norwalk households owned only one car or none at all. The perception that every adult Norwalker needs their own automobile is one rooted in intuition, not fact.
Clearly, mandatory parking is a “common-sense” policy that doesn’t make much sense. Thankfully, state-level reforms are helping Connecticut communities walk away from this outdated practice. HB 8002, a housing bill supported by most of our state delegation, offers a way forward. The legislation grants small-scale developers the freedom to provide whatever parking they deem appropriate rather than shackling them to arbitrary quotas. Crucially, the law preserves local control by allowing municipal governments to exempt certain areas from this shift. In these parking-exempt zones, towns can require off-street parking regardless of the structure built.
To align with these provisions, Norwalk’s Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) voted last week to preserve local parking minimums in the areas shaded on Map A. Unfortunately, maintaining parking minimums in these specific zones was a mistake.
Reducing parking minimums works best in areas well-served by public transit, where people can travel easily without a car. Strangely, P&Z’s parking-exempt area mandates off-street parking in neighborhoods where Norwalk’s transit service is at its most reliable (See Map B). NTD’s 2025 route redesign improved bus speeds and ridership, yet it is almost exclusively along these robust routes that P&Z decided to keep parking mandates.
Many Norwalkers loathe the apartment towers that have gone up recently, and would prefer new housing be built at a smaller, more human scale. That is why P&Z’s decision to maintain parking minimums in neighborhoods zoned for duplexes and triple-deckers—the “missing middle” housing many claim to support—is so perplexing.
If we want to build the homes people desperately need without harming Norwalk’s small-city character, we should be making it easier to build small-scale multifamily housing—the kind of homes that made New England so charming a century ago. P&Z’s decision does the opposite.
P&Z’s vote to maintain parking minimums is reflective of popular opinion. Many say Norwalk isn’t ready for parking reform, that our neighborhoods just aren’t “there” yet. If that’s true, how do we get “there,” exactly? If we can’t reduce parking minimums because everyone drives, but improving pedestrian and bicycle safety incites angry backlash, what can we do? In the face of rising home prices and carbon emissions, it seems many of us believe that these issues will simply resolve themselves.
I urge P&Z to revisit and revise their parking-exempt region. If Norwalk must enforce parking minimums, we should do so in neighborhoods far from transit, where cars are a necessity. Mandating parking along our bus routes, in areas well-suited for small-scale multifamily development, is pointless tinkering—the kind which increases rents, pollution, and time wasted in traffic.
Parking reform is being embraced across the country, in cities as diverse as Hartford, Raleigh, and Missoula. Why does it work in those cities, but it can’t in Norwalk?
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