Defending Progress: How Bridgeport Protected Its Parking Reforms

On June 30, 2025 the Connecticut parking reform movement earned a crucial victory, turning back an attempt to re-impose parking mandates in the city of Bridgeport by a 5-4 vote of the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission. This was a massive win for parking reform in Connecticut, as Bridgeport is the state’s largest city, and a retrenchment there would have been especially demoralizing after Governor Lamont’s veto of HB 5002’s residential parking reform provisions. How it happened is a story of organizing and never assuming the fight’s been lost, no matter the odds.

Context: Initial Reforms in Bridgeport

Bridgeport is Connecticut’s largest city, with 148,000 residents, and like many small New England cities it suffered from a loss of factory jobs and the construction of urban highways through its downtown core during the 20th century. To get a sense of the scale, UConn master’s student Kristin Floberg found that “the number of commercial buildings within a short walk of the train station has fallen nearly 80 percent, the number of residential buildings has fallen 94 percent, while the number of tax exempt buildings has increased 250 percent.”

Above: Images from Kristin Floberg’s masters thesis on downtown Bridgeport.

Bridgeport tried all the usual silver-bullet projects to revive its downtown and adjacent neighborhoods over the years, including multiple waterfront stadiums and parking garages (and rumors of a downtown casino), but in 2018 the city finally took a step in the right direction: eliminating parking mandates for its downtown. 

Parking reform met the city’s Plan of Conservation and Development perfectly. The plan prioritized multimodal transportation, infill development, and rejuvenating the city’s numerous blighted and vacant parcels. Seeing that many of these potential infill sites could never be rebuilt with existing zoning codes, Bridgeport’s Planning and Zoning Commission created a new form-based code that eliminated parking mandates city-wide in 2021. 

Backlash to Parking Reform

Ironically, it was a parking reform success that led to the backlash against these reforms. 439 East Main Street, which is a 15 minute walk from Bridgeport’s MetroNorth train station and bus center, had been vacant for 50 years following a fire that destroyed the theater that used to be there. Fortunately, parking reform may help make redevelopment financially viable at the site, and a developer received approval to build a mixed-use, 74 home project at the location. The project would have no onsite parking, but the developer leased another empty lot 2 blocks away for those tenants who want parking.

Measured by the stated intent of Bridgeport’s reforms to spur redevelopment, this project was proof that parking reform works. But not every Bridgeport policy maker felt the same way. Incredibly, this single project triggered a heated backlash led by the City Council (the Council and their allies also attacked HB 7061, a parking reform bill that was making its way through the Connecticut legislature). The council’s reasons won’t surprise any parking reformer: detractors predicted apocalyptic congestion at the curb and argued that the city has a parking shortage. Others called it a developer handout and an attack on the poor, referencing a “single mother and sole breadwinner hunting for a parking space after a 3 to 11 shift.” The backlash—focused on this one project with parking two blocks away—resulted in 17 of 19 city councilors signing a petition to oppose HB 7061 at the state level and reimpose parking mandates city-wide. 

Bowing to this pressure, the Planning and Zoning Commission (in most Connecticut towns the council has no land use authority) introduced an amendment to reimpose parking mandates and scheduled a hearing for June 30th. The timing seemed disastrous for parking reform: everyone had assumed the governor would sign HB 5002 and eliminate parking mandates statewide, so there was little reason to worry about local attempts to bring them back. Between Governor Lamont’s veto and Mayor Joe Ganim’s unwillingness to publicly defend the local reforms in Bridgeport, the new amendment seemed like a fait accompli.

Organizing to save parking reform in Bridgeport

Saving Bridgeport’s parking reform was the work of multiple groups organizing over the course of a two week period. One group, led by Connecticut Parking Reform, reached out to a supportive Bridgeport City Councilor. They met to get a sense of the political situation and discuss strategies for the hearing, activating any allies they could. Meanwhile, the city’s Economic Development Office reached out to people and organizations already benefitting from the reforms. It was a scramble.

The June 30th public hearing was over 3 hours, with more than half of the speakers urging the commission to preserve the 2021 reforms. Parking reform supporters included: 

• Multiple local developers who spoke about specific, small-scale infill projects that were only viable because of the reforms, including a sixplex going up on a blighted lot with only four off-street parking spaces
• A member of the Bridgeport Housing Authority, who spoke about how their tenants often don’t own cars and said point-blank that reimposing parking mandates would throttle their plans for 200 new, deeply affordable units across the city
• A representative of Colorful Bridgeport, the city’s downtown special services district, argued that what the city needs is a parking authority to better utilize its existing assets
• A member of Fairfield’s (a neighboring city) Planning and Zoning Commission who wants to see a reinvigorated Bridgeport 
• A college-aged Bridgeport resident taking lab sciences classes and navigates the region without a car. He wanted the choice to live in a place where he did not have to pay for parking
• Multiple city councilors, including the president, who changed her mind after learning more about the connection between parking and housing
• A member of the city’s planning department, who pointed out that 57% of Bridgeport’s 55,000 households rent, and of those 32,000 renter households over 21,000 have 1 or no vehicle—including 8,000 with no cars 
• Statewide organizations like Connecticut Parking Reform and Desegregate Connecticut
• The city’s Economic Development Office, which was full-throated in its support for the reforms and reminded the commission that following the reforms the city auctioned off 13 infill lots for over twice the minimum bid

Messaging: what worked and lessons learned

The breadth of support was the first key to saving parking reform, but four arguments made by those supporters seemed persuasive to the commissioners who voted down the amendment: 

• The reforms are working; give them more time. The local developers and Bridgeport Housing Authority could point to actual projects underway to bring badly-needed housing to the city. Reimposing mandates risked all of those. 
• The reforms have worked in comparable cities. Casey Moran, Connecticut Parking Reform co-founder, put together a slide deck for members of the P&Z highlighting how parking reform was helping Hartford, Connecticut (a very similar city) develop its downtown. P&Z members nodded their heads to data about how new developments in Hartford were reviving the city.
• There’s a housing crisis in Fairfield County. As one supporter said “Having a car sometimes is a need, but having a roof over your head is an absolute necessity.” The connection between housing and parking seemed decisive, including for the City Council President’s change of heart. 
• Not everyone owns a car. Multiple speakers highlighted Bridgeport’s car ownership rates (21,000 households have 1 or no car), making parking choice an important idea. Use this handy US Census Tool to look up your community’s vehicle ownership by household data.

Ultimately, the lessons are both basic and important. Nothing can happen unless you organize and show up. There were only two weeks to galvanize support, and fighting the amendment to reimpose parking mandates seemed doomed. Nonetheless, multiple groups hustled to email, meet, and get people to show up to the hearing. Don’t assume you’ve lost until it actually happens.

The other two lessons: parking reform works, and people can change their minds. The arguments against parking reform in Bridgeport were based on hypothetical fear-mongering, while supporters showed up with evidence of actual projects helping the actual residents of the city. Even better were the diverse set of people making those arguments including local developers, residents, city employees, elected officials and advocacy groups. 

Organize, prepare, and show up—you never know what might happen.