Parking vs. the Walkable Building
There is strong support for walkable neighborhoods and incremental, small-scale development. But our codes, particularly parking requirements, don't support this type of growth. Strong Towns describes some ways to "test drive" the zoning code, to see if actually building a small scale, walkable building is feasible under current code. Their findings-- among other things, off-street parking requirements, among other things made it very difficult to actually build structures that promote walkablity.
““Let’s make car storage the primary function of our city!” exclaims absolutely no one ever. Unfortunately, the zoning code does. Which is why most cities say they want walkability, but require a ridiculous amount of off-street parking.”