Introduction

Why parking requirements matter

On December 5, the NYC city council passed the City of Yes (COY) rezoning plan, the largest zoning change in many decades. This is designed to enable more housing development, estimated at 80,000 new units over the next decade. COY changes a huge part of the code (see our overview), and parking requirements turned out to be one of the most contentious changes.

For new development, NYC often prescribes a minimal number of required parking. For example, a single-family home might require one parking spot, while a 20-unit building might require ten. There's strong agreement that these requirements increase construction costs, because they simply force developers to build parking even if it's not used. 

The initial draft for COY proposed fully eliminating the requirements. which would've made this blog post much shorter. However, the final compromise only provides a partial reduction in requirements.

In this post, we give you a way of understanding the new requirements:

1. A quick rule of thumb to understand whether parking is required
2. A decision guide for calculating the requirements exactly
3. An impact analysis
4. The detailed requirements by zoning district (in the appendix)

A rule of thumb to remember the changes

The changes were bigger than we thought, so let's summarize the impact: 

1. In the inner transit zone (Manhattan + LIC), parking requirements have been fully eliminated
2. For multi-family development, parking requirements have been, in practice, eliminated, in all three zones. The waivers are so large that the requirements should not affect decisions.
3. In low-density districts (R1-R3, contextual R4 and R5), you need to check your transit zone:
   1. Outer transit zone: Reductions for R3 and above
   2. Beyond outer transit zone: No major changes

Below, we'll give you the detail on how we come to this conclusion, but if you are looking at multi-family development, this should be good news, and even more importantly, news that's easy to understand.

What’s Changed Under City of Yes?

The new rules

With the City of Yes, the city has been divided into three zones:

1. Inner: The inner transit zone (Manhattan + Long Island City) -- No parking requirements
2. Outer: The outer transit zone, per map -- Reduced parking requirements
3. Beyond: Everything else -- Partially reduced requirements
   
   

Finding requirements: A decision guide

Finding your new requirements goes like this:

1. Which transit zone am I in (inner, outer, beyond)?
2. If inner: No requirements
3. If outer or beyond, you go to the tables below: 
   
   1. Find your zoning code
   2. Identify the requirements as % of the number of units
   3. Check waivers
   4. Check footnotes  for additional reduction and waivers: This could be "Qualifying Residential Sites" (e.g. near subway station), lot area or lot width.

Examples: Understanding the rules in Practice

We put the results in table form, showing you both the two zones under COY and the rules before COY passed.

In this example, the Beyond zone shows up unchanged, but the Outer Transit zone sees the requirement reduced by 50%.

Now let's look at something with more density, maybe an R5 with 5 units:

This shows that the new rules have lower parking requirements in all zones. We'll get back to this, this could make a huge difference.

How big a Deal are the Reductions?

It's more of a reduction than we initially believed.

Reason 1: All zones sees reduction

The 3-zone compromise was often interpreted as follows: "Parking requirements will be largely maintained in areas outside of the above geographies." (note: not a criticism of this high-quality article).

Even in the outer zones, parking requirements are reduced. We can't yet fully gauge how much this matters in practice. For example, if the vast majority of districts in the outer zone are still at 100% requirements, then obviously nothing did change. But a cursory look at the zoning map shows a lot of R4 and R5 districts in the outer zone, and thus large reductions in requirements. We will get back to this. Our key goal, always, is to give you a full, quantitative overview of the importance of the changes.

Reason 2: Multi-family practically eliminates requirements

The waivers are so large that, in practice, parking requirements don't matter anymore. Let's take an example from the outer transit zone: In an R6 district, the parking should cover 25% of units, with a waiver of 15. That means that one can build up to 60 units without any parking. And this is far beyond what's common for R6, which usually has between 5-20 units.

And even if we leave the inner transit zone, we would only need to add parking after the first 20 units. Which is, in practice not a constraint even if the building has more than 20 units, because the developer would want some level of parking in the outer neighborhoods.

Conclusion

With the COY changes, parking requirements have, in practice, been eliminated for multi-family development. This is good because that's likely where they had most construction impact. Under COY, there are still some zoning districts that prescribe that every unit must have parking, but that's likely a small cost, because those districts also have big lots and plenty of space to offer parking.

If you want to develop multi-family units, your process now became much easier, since you can focus on building the parking that you deem most profitable, which might often be no parking at all.

Of course, finding out the exact details can be hard, and our goal is to provide simple guidance, at the lot level. We expect that, in a few weeks, we can include the parking requirements in our zoning overview, so that you won't have to remember the complex tables below.

If you have any questions about this article, the requirements, or how Zoned Insights can help you, please contact us.

To get updates on new blog posts, please subscribe to this blog.

Appendix: The new rules in detail

Outer Transit Zone: Reduced Requirements

See page 364 of the zoning code (warning, 100MB)

Beyond outer Transit Zone: Full requirements

See page 366 of the zoning code (warning, 100MB)

Footnotes:

1. For #zoning lots# in R7-1, R7A, R7B, R7D and R7X Districts, the parking requirement per standard #dwelling unit# shall be reduced to 30 percent where the #lot area# is 10,000 square feet or less.
2. For #zoning lots# in R7-2 and R7-3 Districts, the parking requirement per standard #dwelling unit# shall be reduced to 30 percent where the #lot area# is between 10,001 and 15,000 square feet and waived where the #lot area# is 10,000 square feet or less.
3. For #zoning lots# in R8, R9, R10, R11 and R12 Districts, the parking requirement per standard #dwelling unit# shall be reduced to 20 percent where the #lot area# is between 10,001 and 15,000 square feet and waived where the #lot area# is 10,000 square feet or less.
4. For #qualifying residential sites# in R1 through R5 Districts, #accessory# off-street parking spaces shall be waived where the number of #dwelling units# is 75 or less.
5. For #zoning lots# existing on December 5, 2024 where the #lot width is 25 feet or less, no parking shall be required. In addition, irrespective of the #lot width# of the #zoning lot#, in R4B Districts, one #accessory# off-street parking space shall be waived.