One of the major reasons existing residents often oppose adding more housing is that as more people move in it gets harder to find on-street parking. What if we added a new category of unit that didn't come with any rights to street parking?

My city (Somerville MA) included this in our 2019 zoning overhaul, but it does have some exceptions:

This policy exempts residents that may be 'choice limited', including:

• Persons with disabilities
• Occupants of affordable dwelling units
• Residents with extenuating circumstances

While this is a compassionate approach, it means we haven't fully disconnected housing construction from parking demand. For example, there's a proposal to build a 500-unit parking-ineligible building in Davis Sq (which would no longer be the end of the Burren). It's 25% affordable units, and opponents argue that if each has a driver this would be 125 additional cars competing for street parking. But would we really get that many?

A few years ago we got a similar parking-ineligible building in Union Sq, also a short walk from a subway station:

This is 450 units, of which 20% (90) are affordable. Ashish Shrestha submitted a records request to the city, and learned that only seven units have parking permits.

While the Davis project is a little bigger, this would suggest something in the range of 10 permits, much less than feared.

This makes sense: if you're in Union or Davis, with good public transit and bike options, living without a car is pretty practical. It also saves you a lot of money, especially for folks living in affordable units.