Effects of Urban Fabric Changes on Real Estate Property Tax Revenue Evidence from Six American Cities

Parking serves as the terminal facility for automobile-oriented transportation systems, but the impacts of its provision are often left unstudied. Providing too much parking in cities can undermine long-term transportation and development goals by creating a sparse or fragmented built environment. This study examined the changes in parking supplies, development characteristics, and travel mode shares in the past 60 years in six medium-sized cities. In three of these cities, parking supply increased significantly during the study period; in the other three cities parking supply increased only slightly. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate how these changes in parking supplies have affected the tax revenues in each city. An analysis based on geographic information systems was used to calculate the tax revenue of all properties in the study area of each city. Tax revenues generated from parking were quantified and were compared with tax revenues from nonparking uses on a proportional basis. Across the six cities, land occupied by surface parking contributed between 5% and 17% of the tax revenue that land occupied by taxable nonparking uses contributed. The analysis characterized an important concession involved in devoting large areas of land in the center of a city to surface parking.