Reservoir Square parking fight tests Baltimore’s new anti-parking rules

Residents around Reservoir Square said they wanted the grocery store. What they did not want was a parking plan they more suited to a suburban shopping center than West North Avenue.

At the center of the fight is P. David Bramble’s 8-acre, $170 million mixed-use redevelopment on the 600-850 block of West North Avenue, between Park Avenue and the Jones Falls Expressway interchange. MCB Real Estate’s plan includes a 12,000-square-foot Streets Market, about 20,000 square feet of retail, and a request for 65 off-street parking spaces, more than the 36-space maximum allowed under Baltimore’s tightened code.

That gap has made Reservoir Square one of the clearest tests yet of Baltimore’s new anti-parking rules. The city repealed parking minimums in 2025, a change backed by Mayor Brandon Scott and Councilman Ryan Dorsey and designed to push development toward denser, more pedestrian-friendly patterns. The ordinance, Council Bill 25-0065, was adopted Oct. 20, 2025 and took effect Dec. 3, 2025.

The question now is how far that reform will go when a prominent project asks for more parking anyway. Reservoir Hill neighbors said they were not opposing the supermarket itself. Instead, they argued that adding more parking on a corridor already used by schoolchildren, pedestrians, transit riders, and cyclists would mean more congestion, more cars on North Avenue, and a greater crash risk in an area already under pressure.

That argument has a practical edge for people living and working near the site. More parking can make a grocery store easier to reach by car, but it can also draw more traffic into a block that city officials and developers have marketed as a transit-rich location. Reservoir Square materials say the site is within walking distance of the Metro subway, light rail, buses, and Amtrak. The development is also expected to add roughly 200 apartments, about 120 townhome lots in phase one, a new street grid, a neighborhood park, and more than $1 million in public right-of-way improvements.

The parking dispute is not separate from that larger vision. It is the policy collision inside it. Baltimore has spent the last year saying it wants a less car-centered city, but Reservoir Square shows how quickly that pledge runs into resistance when a major project on North Avenue is shaped by the market’s old assumptions about parking, access, and convenience.

The site has already drawn city attention beyond the grocery plan. Baltimore announced in August 2024 that the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development headquarters would move to Reservoir Square, reinforcing the project’s role as part of the city’s larger push to remake the former Madison Park North site and the surrounding North Avenue corridor.