Impact Report 2023
1. Letter From The President
2023
Was a watershed year for parking reform.
We saw:
- 18 U.S. municipalities repealed parking mandates, including Austin, Texas; Duluth, Minnesota; and Richmond, Virginia.
- Parking policy reached mainstream audiences via flagship sources like NPR, The New York Times, and CNN.
- The success of Henry Grabar’s book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.
- Real impact from prior reforms, such as 68% of new housing in Buffalo having less parking than required before reform.
Across the U.S. and abroad, people are discovering that parking reform is a common-sense way to unlock safer streets, create more liveable and walkable communities, and address the housing and climate crises.
2023 was also a watershed year for the Parking Reform Network. We tripled our fundraising and were able to hire our first staff members. We launched the viral Parking Lot Map. We hosted more than 10 in-person events and sent 50 weekly newsletters. All of this was made possible thanks to 550 individual donors and over 60 volunteers and interns.
The most important word in “Parking Reform Network” is “network.” We are member-powered and exist to connect and support the folks making parking reform happen. Thank you for investing in this movement!
Tony Jordan – President
2. Legislative Wins
18 U.S. municipalities repealed parking mandates in 2023:
While we were not directly involved with every city, our members and partner organizations often were.
Our partner organization Austin Parking Reform Coalition made headlines in November when Austin, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to repeal parking mandates. We’re proud to have supported the work that led to this historic change by helping fund an on-the-ground organizer in 2022 and continuing our support throughout 2023 by funding social and organizing events and sharing our expertise with the main organizers.
“The Austin Parking Reform Coalition is so grateful to the Parking Reform Network, whose support and guidance was central to eliminating parking mandates in Austin. This reform will lead to profoundly positive impacts in our city for decades to come. We encourage advocates in other cities across the country to join and support PRN. This is one of the best steps you can take in bringing parking reform to your city.“
We anticipate that Austin’s parking mandates repeal will contribute to the progress they’ve already made in lowering housing prices thanks to other pro-housing reforms.
Duluth, Minnesota, also offers a compelling case study for our impact. Since being crowned “climate-proof Duluth” in 2019, the city has seen population growth and increasing housing unaffordability. In spring 2023, we consulted with a city council member who was interested in repealing their parking mandates. In August 2023, our president, Tony Jordan, consulted with city planning staff, followed by a presentation to the Duluth Planning Commission. Two months later, the city council repealed all parking minimums. In early 2024, building off of the momentum from Duluth, PRN co-presented at the press conference for the Minnesota People Over Parking Act alongside the bill’s sponsor State Senator Omar Fateh, Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, and other Minnesota lawmakers.
Finally, the 10 reforms passed in Oregon also show a promising trend in parking reform: how to reach a tipping point through statewide action. As reported by Catie Gould from our partner Sightline Institute, changes in state rules prompted many cities to take the simplest route of repealing their parking mandates citywide.
3. Parking Reform Goes Mainstream
2023 saw an unprecedented leap in media recognition for the parking reform movement. We’ve transitioned from seeking media attention to being proactively sought out as a credible authority. Prominent publications, such as The New York Times, Scientific American, The Washington Post, Slate, Big Think, NPR, and CNN now routinely discuss parking reform and cite us as a trusted source of expertise.
“Founded in 2019, the membership-based Parking Reform Network includes roughly 550 planners, consultants, academics, environmentalists and others, Tony Jordan, the network’s president, said in an email.“
“Other cities — seeing that “the sky did not fall,” as Mr. Shoup put it — followed suit. Some reduced minimum requirements, others did away with them altogether and still others went so far as to set parking maximums, according to the nonprofit group Parking Reform Network, which has been tracking the moves.“
“Last year, 11 cities ended their minimum parking mandates, including Raleigh, Anchorage and Lexington, Kentucky, according to the Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit group that researches and advocates for parking policy changes.“
Henry Grabar’s book, Paved Paradise, also made waves in 2023, bringing parking reform to mainstream audiences. Its popularity was further cemented by a nationwide book tour, which included our well-attended members-only Q&A gathering with Henry Grabar. In addition to shining a spotlight on parking reform at large, we’re grateful to Henry for including a chapter about the Parking Reform Network.
As the growth of the parking reform movement has taken off in traditional and social media, we’re thankful for all of our friends across the internet who help share our message to new audiences. We were thrilled when popular YouTuber Ray Delahanty, known as City Nerd mentioned us in a video. Ray is a PRN member, a strong supporter of parking reform, and graciously contributed to our fundraising campaign by sharing a personal message with our membership about why he supports us.
4. Prior Reforms are Working
New data in 2023 continue to show that parking reforms passed in prior years are working. In both Buffalo and Seattle, 60-70% of the housing built since their reforms passed would have been illegal to build before, as reported by our partner Catie Gould at Sightline.
Notably, 70% of all new buildings in Seattle continue to include off-street parking, and 83% in Buffalo, showing that the sky doesn’t fall after removing parking mandates. Builders are taking advantage of the flexibility that parking reform has restored in these cities. While most new buildings continue to include off-street parking, the removal of arbitrary minimums has lifted a major barrier to affordable housing and more walkable and sustainable communities.
New data from Portland, Oregon, shows parking reform is also crucial to unlocking missing middle housing, such as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), aka “granny flats”. 79% of new homes permitted through Portland’s middle housing legalization did not include off-street parking, which was previously required.
5. Building Community
Our commitment to bringing people together was the driving force behind why our membership grew more than 120% in 2023. Throughout the year, we’ve hosted and attended a variety of events, from panel discussions to casual happy hours for networking. These events have provided platforms for ideas to flourish and relationships to be built.
To further foster a sense of community and keep our members informed and engaged, we significantly expanded our communication efforts. In 2023, we published 50 of our newsletters, a key tool in our outreach strategy. Thanks to compelling content that resonates with our audience, we successfully doubled our newsletter readership, connecting more effectively with both new and existing supporters.
Our approach to building community has been multifaceted, embracing a diversity of formats to ensure broad and inclusive engagement. We hosted several organizing roundtables, which brought together partners and advocates alike leading to successful campaigns, such as our Hour of Action letter-writing campaigns with our partners at Climate Changemakers. Additionally, our presence was felt nationwide through multiple in-person appearances, from panel discussions at major conferences to socials and happy hours. These gatherings have not only bolstered our network but have also strengthened our collective resolve to drive change.
6. First Staff and New Volunteers
We hired our first two staff members in 2023! Paula Acero joined us in May as our first full-time employee. Paula is an organizer focused on providing value to our members by hosting things like our new member orientations and our organizing events. Etienne Lefebvre joined part-time at the beginning of the year and has led our communications work, including our newsletters, and he has taken on many other roles.
These hires were made possible entirely by member-driven donations, rather than grants. Thank you!
We expanded our volunteer Board of Directors from three to seven by adding Ann Cheng, Evan Manvel, Laura Fingal-Surma, Raynell Cooper, and Eric Arellano. The board has been focused on helping to shift the organization into its next phase of professionalization and scaling our impact.
Finally, an amazing group of over 60 volunteers and interns made our work possible. You can read about them in our newsletter here. We remain primarily a volunteer-driven and member-driven organization, and we are incredibly grateful to each of you who made this watershed year possible.
7. Viral Map Projects
This year, we launched the Parking Lot Map, showing how the U.S.’s 103 largest cities waste their most valuable real estate on surface parking.
The Parking Lot Map and its analysis sparked dozens of friendly media articles, including in car-dominated cities. The map was a hit on social media, and was even the focus of a CityNerd video at the start of 2024!
This map was entirely proposed, developed, and managed by volunteers, led by Thomas Carpenito. Thomas reached out in January 2023 to share the project. Throughout the year, Thomas and a volunteer team—including David Hunt, Ellen Schwartz, and Tung Lin—rapidly added new cities.
We also improved and scaled up our Reform Map, which tracks where parking reforms have happened globally. Thanks to a team of volunteers, including the prolific Samuel Deetz, we added over 1,500 entries. We rewrote the underlying technology for the map, allowing us to improve the mobile experience and to lay a foundation for improvements in 2024.
All of our technology is open source and volunteer-driven.
8. Finances
Fundraising
We are incredibly grateful to have tripled our fundraising in 2023. This allowed us to dramatically scale up our impact, including by hiring our first staff.
Aside from a few large donations, the majority of our fundraising continues to come from grassroots donors and members. Thank you!
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
| Total donations | $17,800 | $43,000 | $159,800 |
| Total # donors | ~200 | ~400 | ~550 |
| Total # donations | 240 | 486 | 1619 |
| Avg. donation | $74 | $88 | $99 |
Expenses
| Total | $96,600 |
| Operations, e.g. website, professional services, supplies | $15,200 |
| Payroll and intern/volunteer stipends | $48,200 |
| Outreach, e.g. literature, art | $9,500 |
| Events and travel | $22,300 |
| Grants to local groups | $1,300 |
Room For More Funding
While our organization has seen impressive growth in 2023, we have even bigger dreams and we remain funding constrained in 2024.
Our bare-bones budget in 2024 is around $250,000 per year to continue the organization as-is. This includes a $150,000 grant of restricted funds from Arnold Ventures to hire a policy director and start a paid internship. We hope to raise at least $100,000 in 2024 from other sources, including membership, to sustain the organization.
However, we are aiming to grow our annual budget in the next one to two years to around $700,000. That would mean raising around $550,000 per year from sources outside of the Arnold Ventures grant. We are hoping to raise around $160,000 per year through membership and donations. This would allow us to:
- Say yes to more travel opportunities that will spread the message of parking reform
- Give more substantial grants to partner organizations on the ground
- Better retain staff through improved compensation and benefits
- Attract a more diverse internship pool by offering paid internships
- Properly hire Tony Jordan with a modest salary (he currently receives only a small stipend)
- Hire an administrative assistant to allow staff to focus on higher-leveraged tasks like presentations
All donations help us reach this goal. Member donations of all sizes are particularly useful because they are unrestricted, unlike most grants, so they give us flexibility. Beyond the impact of the money itself, donations also help show the movement’s size, which better positions us to win grants.
This budget goal is not binary: we are able to partially implement most of the above changes if we only fundraise a fraction of the $700,000 target. For example, $350,000 per year would accelerate our impact much more than the current budget of $250,000 per year.
We encourage you to reach out if you have questions about giving.
9. Our Mistakes
Every year, we plan to share our major mistakes and lessons learned in the spirit of continual improvement.
Internship Program Size
Since our early days, interns have played a key role in developing the organization, such as contributing research for the Parking Mandates Map. We also want to invest in the next generation of parking reformers, and we want the internship to give valuable experience to interns.
However, in 2023, we grew the internship program too quickly. We had unprecedented interest in the program, and we took on 31 part-time interns throughout the year. However, we did not have enough bandwidth to give a compelling internship to every intern, and we got feedback from interns that some were confused or frustrated with lack of direction. Having such a large intern class was also demanding for our 11 volunteer mentors and our staff. There were some very compelling internships in 2023, but overall, the program was not as successful as we would have liked.
One key lesson learned is that pursuing an opportunity requires more than enthusiasm. The organization needs to also have the capacity to pursue the opportunity. Further, anything we do has an opportunity cost of alternatives we could have prioritized. Even though many students were excited to help us, we did not have the resources to set them up for success.
In 2024, we are revising our internship program to focus on better recognizing our bandwidth, ensuring that we have enough mentors for each intern. Our new policy director will also help us revamp and lead a more focused internship program.
More generally, we are trying to be strategic in 2024 about what we say yes and no to, as we grow from the initial stage of rapid prototyping and experimentation to a more mature organization.
10. Looking ahead
Our focus for 2024 is on sustainable growth. We want to build off of the momentum of 2023 to better educate the public, support our partners and members, and increase our organizational capacity.
In early 2024, we hired our first U.S.-based staffer, Daniel Herriges, as a policy director. Daniel will dramatically increase the organization’s capacity and help us more closely monitor and support partner organizations and advocates. We’ll also be hiring our first fully compensated interns to support the policy director.
We’re excited for more people to continue learning about parking reform. Efforts like presenting at South By Southwest (SXSW) in 2024 and the book from our partner, Strong Towns: Escaping The Housing Trap, will help spread the word.
We anticipate continued progress with municipalities and even state governments enacting parking reform. While it’s impossible to predict which communities will enact reforms, we’re excited by the introduction of The People Over Parking Act in Minnesota and statewide reforms in Colorado.
2024 is also, of course, a pivotal U.S. election year. Regardless of what happens nationally, we remain committed to the fight for sensible parking policy and will continue to take a nonpartisan approach.
Thank you for joining us on this journey. Parking reform is the domino that needs to drop to create places that are sustainable, vibrant, and accessible to people of all abilities and means. We’ve made so much progress already and the best is yet to come!