This is Part 3 in a multi-part series on the impacting of new housing rules on Coquitlam homeowners.

It’s 2029, and you live just outside a transit oriented development area.

The life in your neighbourhood, once quiet, is now replaced by the sound of construction as developers race to build new homes to meet the quotas set by the provincial NDP government.

You’ve noticed that the street parking in front of your house is constantly occupied. Friends can’t find a spot to park when they visit. And, there is constant traffic in your once quiet neighbourhood as drivers circle waiting for a spot to open.

This is, potentially, the future for many residents near SkyTrain stations.

Why?

Since the dawn of the automobile, municipalities have required new homes to include enough parking spots for the residents that live in them.

As an example, the two towers being built on Westwood Street in Port Coquitlam will have 552 apartments but 657 parking spots - more than 1 parking spot per apartment.

However, in response to some municipalities dragging their feet on approving new housing projects, the NDP took a sledgehammer to municipal housing bylaws, in this case Bill 47.

One key change was the elimination of the requirement to include parking stalls in new housing developments near SkyTrain stations.

“Requirements for parking can add to the costs of building housing and reduce the incentive for the public to use transit,” states the Provincial Government on their website.

“To remove parking as a potential barrier to building more homes in these areas, local governments are not able to require off-street residential parking spaces in TOD [Transit-Oriented Development] Areas.”

Translation: Developers no longer need to provide parking stalls for residents.

To put it another way, they can build a 50-storey tower with a fraction of the stalls they would have been required to include under the old rules.

In some ways, this is good news.

Parking is expensive to build. Really expensive. According to Metro Vancouver, the cost of a single parking stall in the region can be $137,000, representing upwards of 34% of the total cost of construction.

For a first-time homebuyer, that has a demonstrable impact on their mortgage. The cost of a single parking stall would add over $800 to a monthly mortgage payment and require an extra $36,000 in income to qualify.

In short, eliminating the need to build parking can drastically reduce the cost of construction, making projects viable and reducing costs for homebuyers.

Further, the world is clearly changing. First time homebuyers have grown up in a world with a plethora of transportation options including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Skip the Dishes, and Door Dash.

For longer commutes, residents will be within a short walk of a SkyTrain station.

However, as the grizzled veterans on Coquitlam’s City Council have seen, parking can get very contentious.

At a recent City Council meeting, Councilor Hodge discussed his experiences.

“People can be looking at a one bedroom [apartment] and have two cars and the realtor says, ‘look at all the parking on the street.’ The realtor selling the building next door says, ‘look at all the parking on the street’, and suddenly we've got more people eyeing that parking spot than there are parking spots.”

He also shared that during his time at Council he has seen conflicts over on-street parking.

“[I’ve seen] developers on the same night bringing forward applications and their on-street parking management was showing the same parking spots being claimed for both developments.”

If the experience in nearby municipalities is any indication, the parking wars are about to start.

One Reddit user laid out the challenges they were experiencing in Vancouver:

“Simply building a new highrise and limiting the number of parking spaces doesn't stop a family from owning a car, it just pushes parking responsibility out into the street. You just need to look around downtown to see what an absolute nightmare it is trying to find a parking [spot] anywhere, and it's just going to get worse, even in permit spaces with people having to park a few blocks away from their home.”

Another user in Metrotown shared their experience living near three towers being constructed:

“For the last 8 months the street parking has been taken over from one end of the block to the other by construction workers & trades parking. By this time two years from now, when the 3 towers are occupied with 3000 people each, it’s going to be a nightmare.”