COQUITLAM - New rules under consideration by the City of Coquitlam could reduce a monthly mortgage payment on a new 2-bedroom apartment by up to $200 per month. The reduction would come by reducing the required number of parking stalls.
“Staff are proposing to change how we calculate parking requirements for apartments, moving away from parking being required dependent on bedroom size and towards a per unit flat ratio,” said lead transportation engineer, Mark Dylag, in a presentation to City Council. “Typically, this will result in a modest reduction in parking requirements, lowering cost for developers.”
Currently, Coquitlam mandates that residential apartments have 1 parking stall per bedroom. However, City officials shared that parking spots currently available in the City are under-utilized, leading to unnecessarily high costs for new housing developments.
According to a report by Metro Vancouver, the cost to build a single parking stall can reach $137,000. In the example provided to Coquitlam’s City Council, the number of stalls required per condo would fall from 1.5 parking stalls per unit to 1.25, significantly reducing the cost to build a new apartment.
Impact on Affordability
The Metro Vancouver study notes that the cost of parking is rarely "passed along" as a simple discount on the sticker price of the condo; rather, it dictates whether the project can even be built. However, for a purchaser, the math changes significantly:
Qualifying Income: For every full parking stall required, a household needs an additional $31,000 to $36,000 in annual income to qualify for a mortgage. A 0.25 reduction in the parking burden effectively lowers the "income entry bar" for a unit by roughly $8,000 to $9,000 per year.
Monthly Payments: One full stall adds approximately $800 to a monthly mortgage payment. Reducing the requirement by a quarter-stall could save purchasers roughly $200 per month in mortgage costs.
The proposal had a mix of reactions from the leaders around the Council table.
Councilor Dennis Marsden expressed strong support saying, “This makes good sense. I think you got it right. Good work.” And added, “It's probably one of the more contentious issues we've had in my time at the table because everybody has opinions on it. It's either too much [or] it's too little.
Councilor Craig Hodge shared concerns he’s hearing from Coquitlam residents about the challenges some of them are facing with the pace of development and the lack of parking, “We've got problems down the road if we don't allow enough parking,” he said. “I would prefer that nobody had a car. That's not going to happen in my lifetime and it's not going to happen in the lifetime of most of these buildings.”
He went on to say, “So we've got to make sure that we provide enough parking both for the people moving into these new buildings, but that we don't create any more disruption in our neighborhoods, because this is what we're hearing as we grow, we're hearing pushback from people who live here today that say we're not providing adequate parking and we're not providing adequate transportation for the new development.
He further added, “And so I don't want to err too much on the side of parking reductions until we see what's working and so far what I'm seeing hasn't been working.”
The new rules were brought to Council for feedback and are part of an ongoing effort to update the rules around parking. The next step is for City officials to revise their proposals based on feedback from the Councilors and bring forward Zoning Bylaw amendments at a future Council meeting.