This article has a clear explanation of why parking mandates push up housing costs in cities.

Off-street parking mandates add hundreds of dollars a month to people’s rent, even for tenants who don’t drive, who then have to subsidize their neighbors’ parking in the building’s garage. One reason for this is that off-street parking is incredibly expensive to build, especially now that building material costs keep rising, and are expected to rise even more with President Trump’s tariffs.

But the other reason is that parking just takes up a lot of space in a building. All the space devoted to a garage and all the related internal building infrastructure takes up room that can’t be devoted to more homes and living space. Not surprisingly, when cities remove parking mandates, builders add more housing and less parking to projects.

In some cases, the cost of building an underground garage for the required parking spaces ends up being the real limit on how tall a building can be. On paper a builder might be legally allowed to add more units than proposed, but if providing the parking for them is too unaffordable, they’ll opt for a smaller building.

I still think self-driving (and self-parking) vehicles will solve this particular problem in the long term, because vehicles will be able to park themselves in very tight spaces. The technology has arrived in the world’s most advanced countries (not the U.S. sorry, we are behind and falling more behind.). But it might take a generation for laws to catch up, and we are going to be stuck with a lot of wasted space for a long time to come.