Picture some of Kansas City’s most iconic neighborhoods, where you might go for a stroll on a warm evening to get ice cream or a beer.
Brookside. 39th Street. River Market. 18th and Vine. Westport.
All of these neighborhoods — largely built before 1950 — would be illegal to build under today’s zoning laws.
Soon, the Kansas City Council may consider legislation that aims to change those regulations.
The ordinance, in the Neighborhood Planning and Development Committee, would abolish Kansas City’s minimum parking requirements in the urban core of the city, including most areas south of the Missouri River and north of 85th Street.
Proponents — including urban planners, pedestrians and local developers — say that the parking requirements make it difficult to open small businesses or construct much-needed housing in places like Midtown.
But a handful of Midtown neighborhood associations have shown up in force to oppose the ordinance. They’re concerned that without these requirements, developers would crowd them out of street parking in historic neighborhoods that don’t have driveways.
The price of too much parking
Kansas City has required any buildings constructed since 1951 to provide a minimum amount of parking, depending on the building’s use.
A residential building is required to provide at least one parking space per housing unit. A concert venue is required to provide one parking space for every four seats.
The requirements are higher for restaurants and bars.
A restaurant needs 10 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet. For reference, Q39 is 5,600 square feet — requiring 50 to 60 parking spaces.
The city requires twice as much parking for a bar or nightclub. The Quaff, for example, is 7,500 square feet, which under current rules would require it to provide about 150 parking spaces. But since the building was built before 1951, it is exempt from parking requirements.
Some city leaders believe that such “parking minimums” are stopping businesses from opening and are getting in the way of new affordable housing.
Fourth District Councilmember Eric Bunch, who is co-sponsoring the ordinance with the City Planning Department, said there are two key reasons why he thinks it’s an important step to take.
First, he said, is that parking minimums are preventing empty storefronts from being filled.
“Say an existing building changes from an office to a restaurant,” Bunch said. “In order for that business to open that new restaurant or bar, they would have to (either) identify more parking or go through a whole process to get a variance.”
That could mean demolishing a neighboring building to make way for a parking lot or hiring a team of lawyers to navigate the city’s zoning process and ask for an exemption. Otherwise, the storefront could simply remain vacant.
The second reason, Bunch said, is that parking minimums have caused construction costs to balloon on new developments.
A surface parking lot can cost $10,000 per parking space. A parking garage — like what would be necessary for larger apartment buildings — costs between $30,000 and up to $100,000 per parking space.
The Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance estimates that an above-ground parking garage translates to $150 to $250 per month per parking space, depending on loan rates. That cost is then baked into the rent that tenants eventually pay.
So if a developer wants to construct 200 apartment units, they will need to spend anywhere from $6 million to $20 million on parking alone.
“How does that help us achieve our affordable housing goals?” Bunch said. “That could be the difference between that project getting built and not.”
Spillover parking crowds out neighbors
But if Kansas City developers are no longer required to build parking garages for housing or restaurants, where are people going to park instead?
That’s the question troubling the Midtown neighborhood associations that have turned out against the proposed ordinance. They say that their streets will be full of spillover parking from nearby projects, making it impossible for them to find a spot when they get home from work or a night out.
Amanda Butler, the president of the Volker Neighborhood Association, said she believes that the parking code needs to be updated. But she’s concerned that the city’s proposed overhaul could lead to developers making parking decisions that crowd current residents off of the streets.
“We sit right across the state line from the KU Medical Center, and we have a ton of spillover parking issues (already),” she said. “Just expecting that developers are going to do the right thing for the community, rather than for their investors, is a concern — especially seeing the direction that the city has gone with development in the last few years.”
Volker Neighborhood Association was one of eight neighborhood associations that signed a letter of concern to the City Council over the parking ordinance. The neighborhoods include Hyde Park, Plaza Westport, Rockhill Homes, Valentine, Coleman Highlands, Old Hyde Park and Southmoreland.
But others take a different perspective.
Bobby Evans, a Volker resident who has spent 10 years as a city transportation planner in Kansas City and Honolulu, supports the parking overhaul.
He cited one big reason: The actual research supporting the city’s parking ratios is surprisingly thin.
For example, he said the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ recommendations for how much parking to plan for a movie theater is based on one study from decades ago in Phoenix.
“Parking takes up a lot of land, and it’s really expensive, so we should be a little bit more thoughtful about it,” Evans said. “You’re letting some book pile on to a list of reasons why a development can’t happen.”
He said that constructing too much parking can paradoxically make spillover parking even worse. That’s because constructing a parking garage can be so expensive that, in order to recoup the costs, the owner has to charge high rates for people who use it. Many people, in turn, will park on nearby streets to avoid paying a parking fee.
As an example, he pointed to the same example as Butler — the University of Kansas Medical Center, across the state line, which has been spilling parking into the Volker neighborhoods.
At KU Medical Center, an annual parking pass for staff and students costs hundreds of dollars. To use the garage, the annual fee ranges from $443 to $1,876.
“It’s kind of counterintuitive,” he said, “If they built less parking, maybe they wouldn’t have to charge so much, and then it wouldn’t cause spillover parking.”
Parking before public transit, or vice versa
Butler also expressed concerns that Kansas City would be eliminating parking minimums before residents had other ways to get around.
She said the Midtown Neighborhood Alliance certainly supports expanding public transportation and making the city more walkable. But she worries that the city would make a mistake by eliminating parking requirements without providing more public transit service as an alternative to driving.
And the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority warned the City Council that the bus funding level in this year’s proposed budget could force it to cut one-third of bus routes.
“Everybody in Midtown, neighborhoods included, we support better transit,” she said. “It’s just that a sweeping policy change like this should follow the infrastructure needed to support it.”
Kevin Klinkenberg, the executive director of Midtown KC NOW, a nonprofit organization supporting development in Midtown, favors the parking revisions.
He believes that more population and businesses are necessary in order to support more public transit. And getting rid of parking minimums will enable more businesses to open and more housing to be constructed.
“We’re never going to have the public transportation we want,” he said, “until we have more people living in the city and more businesses doing business in the city.”
In 1950, he said, Midtown had 73,000 residents. Since then, the population has cratered, down to 28,000 in the most recent census.
“We have much less transit service because we have one-third of the population that we used to have,” he said. “It feels like a Catch-22, but really it’s not. The reality is, we’ve got to grow. We can’t grow with one hand tied behind our back with things like these parking rules.”
Committee will take it up again in two weeks
The City Planning Department presented the parking ordinance to the Neighborhood Planning and Development Committee on March 10, where it was met with 24 residents testifying in favor or against the changes.
Opponents included seven Midtown residents and neighborhood association leaders, and proponents included 17 Midtown and downtown residents, including students, urban planners and developers.
Two candidates for the 6th District at large in the upcoming 2027 City Council elections testified on the ordinance — Chad Grittman in favor of eliminating parking minimums, while Tiffany Moore said some neighborhoods need better infrastructure, public transit and parking enforcement before the city should eliminate parking minimums.
Ultimately, the committee decided to hold the ordinance for another two weeks. That, committee members said, will allow staff to explore changing the boundaries of the “urban core” where parking minimums would be eliminated, as well as to explore the creation of neighborhood parking benefits districts.
A parking benefits district is a concept where revenue from parking meters in a neighborhood is redirected to pay for community improvements within the district.
For example, if someone pays for street parking in Hyde Park, that parking meter revenue could help pay for street cleaning, crosswalks and sidewalk improvements.
Bunch told The Beacon that over the past few years in his neighborhood in Midtown, there have been as many as 500 to 600 new residents moving into formerly empty buildings. He’s felt the growing pains of that, but he said it’s a good problem to have.
“When people get out of their apartments and they walk down the street to get their car, you get to interact with them,” he said. “You see them walking their dogs. You see them getting ready for work in the morning. We see the same people walking our kids to school every day, and we get to interact with them as they’re walking to get to their car.”
Additionally, when more people are walking on the street to their cars, rather than taking an elevator directly to the parking garage, Bunch said that makes neighborhoods safer because more people can watch for illicit behavior.
And if and when it becomes a problem for residents of the neighborhood, he said the city can intervene by creating permitted resident-only parking zones or parking benefit districts to make sure neighborhoods feel the benefit.
“That is an objectively good thing,” he said. “Now, is that worth the headache that some people experience? I think it probably is, but when it’s not, there are strategies to help that.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
