When a city sets a parking minimum of 1.5 spaces per unit and a developer builds to that exact number, two decisions have been made: how much concrete to pour, and nothing about what to charge for it. The first decision is enforced by zoning. The second defaults to tradition — which is to say, it mostly doesn't get made at all.
The result is a predictable pattern across multifamily portfolios: structured parking built at $52,000 to $73,000 per space, priced at a flat monthly rate that hasn't changed meaningfully in years, with roughly 40% of spaces sitting empty on an average night. The asset is on your balance sheet. The revenue isn't showing up in your NOI.
That gap isn't permanent. But closing it requires treating parking as a managed revenue line — which is different from treating it as a facilities problem.
The cost of the concrete
Parking is one of the most expensive components of a multifamily project and one of the least scrutinized once construction is complete.
A 2025 analysis of construction cost data across 17 U.S. cities found that underground parking now costs an average of roughly $73,000 per space — ranging from about $40,000 in Washington, D.C. to more than $110,000 in Portland, Oregon — not including land or soft costs. Aboveground structured parking averages roughly $52,000 per space. For a 150-unit property required to provide 1.5 spaces per unit, that's 225 spaces: at average underground cost, more than $16 million in parking structure alone.
The burden doesn't stop at construction. Research covered by Multifamily Dive found that a typical 145-unit apartment building is required to include roughly 102 more parking spaces than its residents actually use — adding more than $2 million in excess construction cost per project. That capital gets deployed against demand that doesn't materialize, absorbed through higher rents, lower returns, or both.
The parking minimum set the floor. Nobody asked whether demand would cover it.
What occupies the structure
Research across multiple geographies consistently finds multifamily parking underused relative to supply.
Studies of transit-oriented developments in the Bay Area found that while properties supplied an average of 1.7 spaces per unit, peak demand reached only 1.3 — meaning roughly one in four built spaces sat empty during the busiest hour of the week. In King County, Washington, researchers found an oversupply of 0.58 spaces per unit at suburban sites and 0.22 at urban ones. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) has studied multifamily parking in Greater Boston across four research phases since 2015 and consistently found it overbuilt and underutilized.
The headline: at peak occupancy, roughly 4 in 10 spaces in multifamily developments are empty on average.
This matters because an empty space isn't neutral. It costs money to light, clean, insure, and maintain. It represents capital earning nothing. And it signals a mismatch between what code required and what drivers actually need — a mismatch that widened as car ownership declined in denser markets while minimum ratios held steady.
The pricing problem
The utilization gap would be easier to dismiss if parking were cheap to provide. It isn't. The more consequential problem is that operators who do have tenants paying for parking are frequently charging far less than the market will bear.
A 2025 analysis by Neighbor — a marketplace with direct visibility into pricing across 240 multifamily properties in 10 major U.S. markets — found that parking spaces are systematically underpriced in 8 of the 10 markets surveyed. The average property prices parking at 3 to 4 percent of monthly rent; Neighbor's analysts found the market-clearing rate sits closer to 8 to 10 percent. The missed revenue is not small: they estimated the average property in the study was leaving roughly $100,000 in annual NOI on the table, with optimization potential reaching $189,000 in Miami and over $63,000 in Los Angeles.
The same data revealed pricing variation of up to 300 percent for comparable spaces within the same neighborhood — a spread that reflects operators pricing to internal convention, not market conditions.
California's AB 1317, which required unbundled parking for new buildings of 16 or more units in most major counties starting January 1, 2025, was partly motivated by the same asymmetry: bundled garage parking was effectively costing tenants an average of roughly $1,700 per year — a cost they couldn't opt out of and that operators couldn't measure as a separate revenue line.
Bundling parking into rent doesn't protect the revenue. It hides the revenue — and makes it impossible to optimize.
What the regulatory shift reveals
The wave of parking minimum eliminations in 2025 and 2026 — more than 100 cities have now reduced or eliminated minimums, including Denver in August 2025 and Chicago in July 2025 for transit-rich areas — is letting the market answer a question that mandates had been answering for it.
Washington state's ESSB 5184, passed in 2025, capped multifamily parking requirements at 0.5 spaces per unit. A Sightline Institute analysis of 868 Washington developments found that when given flexibility, developers built 40 percent less parking than previous mandates had required.
That's not developers cutting corners. That's the market expressing what demand actually looks like when a mandate is no longer overriding it.
If you've been building to minimums in a market where minimums are now declining, the implication is direct: you may have more parking than your residents need, and you may be charging less for it than comparable space in your market commands.
What operators can actually do
None of this waits for a new building. The correction starts with the structure you already have.
Unbundle parking from rent — even if you're not required to. When parking is folded into the base rate, you can't price it to market, you can't enforce it against non-using tenants, and you lose the signal about who actually values a space. A separate parking line item — phased in as leases renew — creates the conditions for real management.
Price to the local market, not internal history. The Neighbor data found 300 percent spread in pricing within single neighborhoods. Your rate isn't set by what you've always charged — it's set by what comparable operators are charging today. Survey the market and close the gap.
Monetize chronically empty spaces. Spaces your residents don't lease can be sold to transient parkers, rented to nearby workers or residents of buildings without parking, or converted to higher-value uses — EV charging stations, tenant storage, car-share staging. These aren't fringe use cases. They're revenue that exists in the gap between your supply and your occupancy.
Enforce what you charge. An unmanaged structure defaults to whoever parks first. Plate-based management — reading license plates on entry and matching them against paid accounts — closes the gap between who's supposed to park and who's actually parking. Enforcement isn't punitive; it's what makes pricing meaningful.
The operator's view
Parking minimums solved a planning problem: they guaranteed that new buildings wouldn't push overflow demand onto public streets. They never solved an economics problem. They never asked whether demand would materialize, or whether the spaces would earn back what they cost to build.
The buildings are built. The spaces exist. What most operators haven't done is decide what to charge for them, who gets them, and what to do with the ones that sit empty five nights a week.
That's a management decision — not an infrastructure one. The asset was always there.