Why are there so many empty parking lots in Tucson? Outdated codes.

El Con Mall in Midtown Tucson is home to a movie theater, a Target, a Home Depot, a Walmart, a Ross, a Burlington, a Marshalls, and an empty building that once housed a JCPenney store. The indoor shops and the food court haven’t existed for decades, but there remain thousands of parking spaces — mostly empty — that some Tucsonans argue could be put to better use.

Last Black Friday, arguably the biggest day of the year for mall traffic, Matthew Boepple visited El Con Mall and found the majority of its parking lots still largely vacant.

“If these spaces aren’t being filled on Black Friday, then they’re never going to get filled,” Boepple said.

Boepple runs an Instagram account called Car-Free Tucson, where he advocates for less auto-centric urban design and fewer parking lots, which he says would be better used as affordable housing sites instead of sitting empty year after year.

“It just seems like there’s a better use for the land, especially in the housing crisis,” Boepple said.

Tucson is one of many cities bound by mandatory minimum parking codes, which require a certain number of spaces per building type on what Boepple calls an “arbitrary” basis. 

Some examples: one parking space per 100 square feet of restaurant space, but one parking space per 50 square feet of bar space. For golf courses, three parking spaces per hole. At the cemetery, there must be one space per 25 burial plots (lest the plots’ occupants have to fight over where to park).

Though exceptions are granted in some cases, the city’s parking requirements are a vestige of outmoded World War II-era urban design, said Tucson’s city Planning Administrator Daniel Bursuck.

“We’ve kind of noticed that our zoning code is outdated,” Bursuck said. “We have all of these policy documents that tell us we want certain types of development, and we’re just not getting it. We’re getting drive-throughs, we’re getting self-storage, (more) auto-centric development.”

For the past two years, Tucson’s city planners have been at work on the Community Corridors Tool, an effort to reimagine the zoning code to make the city more pedestrian-friendly and allow for more flexible development of housing, businesses and mixed-use spaces.

In a December study session, city officials proposed that the initiative would require business owners to submit a parking statement that considers shared parking opportunities, alternative transportation access, and community impacts instead of one-size-fits-all mandatory minimum parking requirements.

The CCT is still in planning stages, though officials plan to present their findings to the mayor and City Council in the coming months.

“One of the key things that we’ve seen really all over the country (is that) additional parking, all it does is add increased cost, add increased issues related to stormwater runoff, increased heat. It’s one of the key portions of this, but we’re trying to kind of help with a whole bunch of other things in order to really start to change the type of development that we get here in Tucson,” Bursuck said.

Raleigh, N.C., Buffalo, N.Y., and Sacramento, San Jose and San Francisco, Calif. ,have all removed mandatory parking minimums in recent years, and some cities have implemented parking maximums, which create a cap on the number of parking spots available to developers.

“There’s a lot of peer cities, peer regions that we can look to that have already figured out how to set up newer policies and codes,” said Emily Yetman, executive director of Living Streets Alliance, a local organization that advocates for bikeable, walkable Tucson streets. “We don’t even have to start from scratch.”

Yetman thinks the new zoning codes are a “powerful” step in the right direction to help make the city more walkable, create more affordable housing without costly parking requirements and develop a more robust public transit system.

“If you have too much parking required, you can’t get the density that you need to support transit,” Yetman said. “The idea is to disrupt the loop cycle, and the reliance on cars to begin with. If we keep building a city built for cars that requires a car to get around and get anywhere, then we’re going to keep needing to have cars to get around.”