If parking relief is granted to just about every development, why require parking in the first place?

This article also appears in Streetsblog Chicago cofounder Steven Vance’s personal blog Steven Can Plan. He also runs the local development data website Chicago Cityscape.

The Chicago zoning code requires nearly every development, new or renovated, to provide on-site car parking. The code also provides relief from that requirement, most often in the form of cutting the requirement in half if the development is in a “transit-served location”. Further relief – getting closer to zero parking spaces required – can be requested via administrative adjustment to the Chicago Zoning Administrator. (Learn about other methods of relief from Chicago’s parking mandates.)

Sometimes, however, that administrative adjustment must be converted to an application for variation that’s heard by the Zoning Board of Appeals.

Pete Snyder, one of the co-leads of Abundant Housing Illinois, and I tabulated all of the requests for parking relief – by way of a variation application – heard by the ZBA from January 2022 through January 2025.

Here’s what we found in that 37-month period:

• There were 73 applications for parking relief (an average of two per ZBA meeting), which the board approved.
• A little more than half of the applications (39) explicitly mentioned the development being in a transit-served location.
• Those 73 applications requested relief from having to provide 661 car parking spaces.
• At $10,000 per surface parking space that reflects a savings of about $6.6 million in construction costs.
• Assuming all spaces would be on the ground, this is the equivalent of 3.5 acres of land which does not need to be acquired, or if already acquired can be used for other purposes. To give you an idea of how much land was saved by not requiring 661 parking spots, Bell Park in the Northwest Side’s Dunning community, one full block Chicago long and half a block wide, is about 3.5 acres.

• Each applicant pays $500 for the 72 variations and one applicant paid a $1,000 application fee for their special use.
• Most applicants hired and paid an attorney to handle their application. Lawyer fees vary and are not made known to the public, but for variations are usually multiple thousands of dollars. Lawyers typically charge more for special use applications.

Our understanding how much relief from costly parking mandates has been provided is incomplete if we only study variations.

The default method, at least for locations within transit-served areas, is to ask for an administrative adjustment, which has a lower bar for obtaining approval. However, we don’t have currently data about how many requests for an administrative adjustment were made during the period we looked at.

Another way to get parking relief is to apply for a rezoning and bundle the relief request within that application. Data on that is forthcoming.

Follow the parking reform advocacy work that’s going on in Chicago by visiting these websites:

• Chicago Parking Reform, a campaign by Abundant Housing Illinois
• Cut The Tape / City of Chicago parking reform

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