🚨BREAKING: Governor Ron DeSantis says he will allow Florida voters to vote to ABOLISH PROPERTY TAXES. Do it EVERYWHERE! "If you own your home, to truly OWN it, you have to own it FREE and CLEAR of the government - you shouldn't have to pay rent to the government!" "We're gonna place a question on the BALLOT that is gonna allow Floridians to vote themselves relief from property tax." "Your personal home, we really believe, should not be subject to tax. It's an unrealized gain." "People say, 'that can't be done.' My question is, why can't it be done? [Broward] County, Florida. 1.9 million people. NO net population growth over the last 5 years, but the budget has increased 60%!" Democrats and Socialists are taxing us to death and destroying our country. Virginia will suffer just like Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington State, Colorado, and California.

Mandated parking creates wastefully large lots that go underutilized while driving up the cost of housing , increasing untreated runoff, and making my neighborhood much hotter than those built in the traditional development style. The government plays an important role in ensuring buildings are safe and that they don't harm their inhabitants or those around them. Mandating parking goes far beyond that mandate: it is the government regulating convenience rather than safety. We have a housing crisis in Virginia, not a parking crisis. Please pass HB 262

I support HB262 from Del. Simonds and oppose HB888 from Del. Shin. HB262 appropriately removes unnecessary requirements for local businesses that stifle investment by local entrepreneurs. In Newport News alone, after the removal of parking minimums in certain cases, several new businesses in the Hilton historic district have popped up, including a local pizza shop and a local wine shop. Several large vacant parking lots in other parts of the city on Jefferson Ave have been converted to commercial space. Overall, it has been really good for the city, and I'm sure that will continue. HB888, however, over-legislates and unnecessarily complicates this issue. This is an unnecessary government restriction that should not exist. There is no logical reason to continue to lay out various cases for restrictions when the benefit is clear, and it is clearly not the role of the government to dictate parking to businesses. While it may be an OK medium-term step in changing existing legislation, I see this half-measure as over-complicating a simple issue.

I support HB 262 to prohibit parking requirements. Parking mandates are well understood to stifle the building of homes and businesses because they significantly add to the cost of construction and take up land that could be used for other purposes (e.g. more housing). The increased cost of building housing is often passed on to the renter or resident, increasing the cost of housing. Parking mandates cost cities money, too, by increasing impermeable surfaces and runoff, generally increasing the amount of streets and roads per capita, and resulting in more liabilities for the city. This bill is a critical part of a larger effort to reduce car-centric city design and emphasize dense development with reliable transit opportunities for all residents.

Removing parking mandates is not only pro housing but it's also pro business, pro environment, and pro historic preservation. Local businessowners, homebuilders, and property owners should have flexibility to decide what parking makes sense for a specific site. They are more attuned to the markets need for the amount of parking and in fact more incented to build the right amount of parking than government is. Parking mandates are frankly made up relic of the 1950s and government should get out of the way to regulate something that the market clearly can do right. In Falls Church, a city of 2.2 square miles - we relaxed parking requirements for small businesses and within 1 year, 15% of the applications were small businesses able to open because of relaxed parking requirements. Imagine that across the Commonwealth. We've received no complaints about the lack of parking or overflow onto streets because the reality is there is plenty of parking available - even in a dense community like Falls Church - and this makes way for more creative solutions like shared parking arrangements and better curb management. We will not be the first to modernize parking - Richmond, Newport News, Roanoke, Charlottesville and even Onancock VA have done it. Other states have done so across the US - it even passed unanimously out of the House in North Carolina last year and their Senate is poised to take it up. And the results across the county show that the market responds accordingly - it doesn't get rid of parking - it just gets rid of the mandates. Parking still gets built, but not too much such that it makes way for more housing, more businesses, more green space and trees.

Support

I support HB262. Minimum parking requirements are arbitrary numbers that hinder urban development and perpetuate a car-centric pattern of land use that is hostile to those of us who travel by foot, bike, and public transit. Parking is expensive, and building less or no parking can make affordable housing and small businesses financially viable when the cost of parking lots or decks would be too high and take away valuable space from buildings. If there is a need for parking, developers are able to determine how much is appropriate without restrictive mandatory minimums. Richmond ended parking minimums in 2023, and there is still plenty of parking here (in many areas, too much parking). Let's encourage land use that benefits people, not cars!

While serving on City Council in Richmond, VA, I led our effort to eliminate parking requirements citywide. This process was lengthy as it took almost 3 years to explore the impact and create the ordinance that eliminated this outdated requirement. Truth is, Richmond studied 50 development projects and totaled the parking required for each building which was just under 8,000 off-street spaces. Those 50 projects built more than 13,000. While everyone complains about parking, truth is there were more than 5,000 built than was required. But the reality is that a requirement creates restriction and possession. Because each project is required to build parking, it can serve only their use. By eliminating a parking requirement, we can not explore shared parking options and creating public benefit for places that parking is needed. Not parcel by parcel or project by project. This is an outdated policy that isn’t addressing the problem. I’ll end with this question: has our existing parking requirements ever made our parking problem better? Just like building another lane on the highway isn’t going to fix traffic either. It’s time we look forward to the need to build more housing and not let outdated policies increase costs of construction or have great sites for development that are currently surface parking lots sit empty at night because they support an antiquated and outdated parking policy from the 1970’s.

I write in support of HB262. As a resident of a city which purposefully increases the cost of development (and thereby increases the cost of living) with minimum parking requirements that have not been changed since the 1960s, the removal of such requirements is one of my highest priorities. Minimum parking requirements are not meaningfully supported by any urban planning study, unnecessarily increase development cost, and are the result of racist planning practices implemented in the 1960s to prevent integration. Localities which have removed minimum parking requirements have seen increases in development, likely because parking spaces can costs thousands of dollars per space. As these parking minimums were created haphazardly in the 1960s, and often haven't been reviewed since, they often make little sense. For instance, here in Falls Church, the installation of a two pinball machines may require a parking space per the city's code. Eliminating such minimums would make navigating local requirements easier for developers and local businesses by eliminating confusing and outdated parking code sections. It should be noted that removing parking minimums will not be the end of parking. Instead, rather than having the government approve of a formula for parking, private persons can determine the need for parking at their property. This allows developers to consider the parking needs of their community before having to invest thousands of dollars into parking, and prevents the parking surplus which currently saps the development potential of cities in Virginia.

Please save Virginia from over-parking and support HB262. Currently parking mandates, many of which are left over from racial segregation, are destroying our great commonwealth. They are making housing more expensive, prohibiting new small businesses from opening, and serve no one. Thank you.