Parking repeal gives developers space

Opening a small business is never easy, but for many Richmond entrepreneurs, the city’s previous minimum parking requirements added extra hassle.

Two years ago, when restaurant Africanne on Main relocated from its longtime downtown location to a spot near Virginia Commonwealth University’s Monroe Park Campus, city parking regulations stalled the move for weeks, recalls co-owner and chef Ida MaMusu. She had to scramble to find two additional parking spaces to rent to meet the city’s then-minimum requirement of five spaces for her business.

“Now things [are] slow, prices [are] going up in food, and we still got this huge parking bill,” MaMusu says.

Stories like this from local businesses are part of the reason City Council repealed the requirements on April 24.

The parking minimums had mostly restricted small businesses and developers, rather than larger operations with bank financing that typically require a certain amount of parking regardless of local regulations, says Richmond Association of Realtors Vice President of Government Affairs Joh Gehlbach. “Our hope is that this will add units to the market because we are in a housing crisis right now,” Gehlbach says.

Councilman Andreas Addison, who introduced the repeal, says the former requirements represented an outdated, car-centric mindset that complicated the city’s goals to develop a more walkable and accessible urban landscape.

“When you put parking as a requirement in a spot located for a development, that doesn’t mean it’s the best place for parking to be in general for public use,” Addison says.

Given that half of Richmond’s buildings were constructed before 1947 (city parking requirements were first instituted in 1943), the repeal impacts a wide range of properties, says Kevin Vonck, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development Review. He hopes it will give developers options to share existing parking spaces and opportunities to repurpose unused lots. 

Brian Revere, president of Breeden Construction LLC, says that the flexibility the repeal will grant developers is a net positive, but it still won’t remove the need for parking altogether.

“Most of us still see this market as requiring some level of regular commuting outside of the city limits,” Revere says, “and the public transportation infrastructure is not here to support not having a vehicle.”