More trees, senior living, daycares, and lower-cost housing for Washington cities and towns - and less pavement.
In 2023 Washington state adopted a raft of bills unlocking more home choices, at more affordable prices, in cities and towns across the state. It was hailed as the year of housing.
The 2025 legislative session could be the year of parking reform, with the promise of taming rents and housing costs, curbing sprawling development, and prioritizing things communities want, like trees, affordable housing, senior living facilities, and daycares, rather than unneeded pavement.
Last week, Washington state housing affordability champion Senator Jessica Bateman introduced the Parking Reform and Modernization Act, SB 5184. The bill would cap how many parking spots local governments can require for new homes and commercial buildings, and give full parking flexibility to a set of building types that need it the most. The bill also has a companion in the House of Representatives: HB 1299, sponsored by Representative Strom Peterson.
Commonly adopted in the 1950s and '60s, parking mandates prescribe a pre-determined number of parking spaces for every new building, assigning unique quotas for hundreds of different uses, from churches to bowling alleys, butterfly breeding facilities to daycares. These regulations increase construction costs, outlaw traditional main streets and historic neighborhoods, block building conversions from one use to another, and make entire properties impossible to build on simply because they lack space for a sprawling parking lot. What's worse: many of those mandatory parking spots end up sitting empty. Despite the ubiquity of highly specific parking mandates in local permitting, city officials rarely know where the numbers originated but must enforce them nonetheless.
This legislation would set a new course by creating consistent statewide standards to unlock more opportunities for homes and small businesses alike. And to be clear, it would not ban parking: builders would still be free to include as much parking as they decide they need.
The bill is scheduled for a hearing are the Senate Housing committee on Friday January 24th.
What the bill does
In short, SB 5184:
Caps residential mandates at 0.5-1 parking space per home
Caps commercial mandates at 1 parking space per 1,000 square feet
Provides full parking flexibility for building types that need it the most
Applies everywhere in Washington, towns large and small
Expands existing transit exemptions for housing
Does NOT place any restrictions on how much parking people can build if they deem it right for their project to succeed
Caps residential mandates at 0.5-1 parking space per home
In the past two years, the Washington state legislature has legalized granny flats, fourplexes, and co-living buildings statewide. But outside of a tiny portion of urban residential lots near frequent transit that those bills exempted, excessive parking mandates continue to undercut home building.
In Pasco, for example, the rules require two parking spots for every apartment. In Marysville, code mandates six parking spots for a duplex. Meanwhile, nearly sixty percent of Washington renter households only own one car or no car at all.
To keep unnecessary parking mandates from hindering much-needed new homes and affordability, SB 5184 would prevent towns and cities from requiring more than 1 parking space per home. Counties and non-code cities would allow even more flexibility, with caps set at 0.5 parking spaces per home. This latter ratio would apply to larger cities, including Aberdeen, Bellingham, Bremerton, Everett, Seattle, Richland, Tacoma, Vancouver, and Yakima.
Allowing builders to go below one parking spot per home enables natural "unbundling" in multifamily buildings. When there are fewer spaces than homes, owners have to charge for parking separately, and that lets tenants who don't want a parking space save money on total rent. Single-detached houses in thos...

Ver todos los episodios