Tacoma Parking Policy Analysis

Seva Workshop supported the City of Tacoma’s long-range planning team during their exploration of parking code reform. Our role involved research, analysis, technical memo writeup, and legislative support. Seva’s analysis included a review of literature on the links between parking requirements and housing affordability, peer jurisdiction benchmarking and review, and detailed code analysis on corresponding topics such as bike parking standards and street frontage requirements. This work resulted in unanimous planning commission support for the elimination of parking minimums in Tacoma and the City has released draft code language for public comment, with a planned adoption and implementation of this policy change by early 2027. This project was completed as part of our larger, on-call long range planning contract with the City.