Asheville Plans to Drop Mandatory Parking Rules to Boost Housing Construction

The vote that stripped one of the most expensive line items out of Asheville apartment construction drew not a single dissent.

Asheville City Council voted 7-0 in March 2025 to end mandatory off-street parking requirements for new residential developments in transit-supportive corridors and mixed-use zoning districts, including stretches of Merrimon Avenue, Patton Avenue, Haywood Road, and the River Arts District. Under the previous rules, nearly every new housing project was required to provide at least one parking space per unit before breaking ground, regardless of the lot size, the building's scale, or the transportation habits of future tenants.

For infill parcels along corridors like Haywood Road, where lots are narrow and land prices are steep, that one-space-per-unit mandate effectively killed projects before they reached a drawing board. Parking has long been one of the most expensive and site-limiting components of any residential development; eliminating the mandate is expected to reduce per-unit construction costs and give developers more flexibility in designing and financing smaller buildings on constrained sites.

The parking reform was part of a broader package of Unified Development Ordinance amendments Council took up at its March 11 meeting. That package drew sharper division. Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley and Council members Kim Roney and Sheneika Smith opposed measures that streamlined permitting for larger residential projects, raising the threshold for mandatory City Council review from 50 units to 100,000 square feet of gross floor area. Tensions escalated when Council member Sage Turner introduced a last-minute amendment to that threshold that Mosley said she had never seen. "Communities of color are not the primary recipients of housing at 80% AMI," Mosley said. "Historically, setting AMIs at this level has excluded long-term Asheville residents, disproportionately impacting households of color." Those broader measures passed 4-3.

The unanimous support for eliminating parking minimums reflected a more straightforward calculus: nearly one in 10 Asheville households owns no car at all, a figure housing advocates at Asheville for All cited repeatedly during the amendment process. Requiring every new building to dedicate space and capital to parking forces car-free tenants to subsidize infrastructure they do not use, an invisible premium baked into rents across the board. As a counterbalance, the amendments raised the minimum bicycle parking requirement for new developments from 5% to 10% of units.

The city's Planning and Zoning Commission had backed the full package unanimously, 5-0, on January 22, 2025, after Assistant Planning and Urban Design Director Chris Collins presented a conceptual mock-up showing how additional housing density could be layered onto Merrimon Avenue under the new rules. That mock-up gave Council a concrete visual for what removing the mandate would actually produce: buildings sitting closer to the street, with more of a lot devoted to housing instead of asphalt.

The amendments apply to commercial and transit-corridor zoning districts, not to residential zoning districts, meaning the rules for single-family neighborhoods remain unchanged. Residents with questions about how the changes affect a specific parcel can contact Planning Department Managing Planner Vaidila Satvika at vsatvika@ashevillenc.gov.