Well, Denver’s at it again. This time it’s courtesy of the Denver Post article covering the city’s latest urban genius move: changing the rules so new apartment complexes don’t need to include any parking. That’s right, developers can now stack people like Jenga blocks without needing to provide a place to put their vehicles. Because apparently, in Denver utopia, everyone just rollerblades everywhere and communes with kale.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Denver changed zoning laws to eliminate parking minimums in new residential projects near transit corridors. Because owning a car is so last century.
- City leaders claim this reduces housing costs and encourages public transit use – translation: we couldn’t plan traffic if our lives depended on it.
- Developers are excited they can skip parking construction costs by banking on residents using bicycles or shared rides… which works great until December.
- Critics warn that eliminating parking just dumps overflow into surrounding neighborhoods – yay for extended turf wars over street spots!
- The strategy seems less about affordability and more about behavior engineering; make owning a vehicle painful enough, and you’ll finally submit to riding RTD with the rest of the soy crowd.
My Bottom Line
Let me get this straight, Denver: you’re going to stack high-density apartments along train lines and then tell people good luck finding a spot for their pickup truck? Look, I get trying to cut red tape for developers – I’m all for that – but this isn’t streamlining government policy. This is social engineering wrapped in city planner word salad. They want you out of your car because they’ve already decided what’s best for you: surrender your individual freedom and climb on board the misery express – they call it public transit, I call it hell on wheels.
What the bureaucrats won’t admit is this: they hate cars because cars represent freedom. With your own vehicle, you go where you want, when you want, and that kind of freedom scares the control freaks downtown. So instead of fixing traffic flow or improving commuter options, honestly, they wipe out parking and pretend it’ll lower housing costs. Spoiler alert – it won’t. It’ll just flood neighborhoods with random sedans hunting curb space like it’s “The Hunger Games.”
Policies like this are why folks are leaving Denver faster than teenagers bolt from family dinners. You keep driving people nuts long enough – they drive somewhere else… preferably where there’s still a damn driveway.
