Pittsburgh has company. The same day, the Cobb County, Georgia, Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 to allow ADUs in residential backyards, two years after a similar proposal was withdrawn in the face of neighborhood opposition. Park City, Utah, approved detached ADUs on larger single-family lots on Oct. 1 to comply with a new state law. In September, Bloomington, Indiana, eliminated parking minimums citywide and shrank minimum lot sizes on a 5-3 vote.
More is coming. Oak Park, Illinois, is weighing a plan to allow duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in every residential neighborhood. Bellevue, Washington, is finishing a parking overhaul ahead of a state deadline. Dallas has begun a zoning rewrite it expects to adopt in 2027.
None of this is untested. These cities are arriving at reforms others adopted years ago, which means there is now a record to check.
Start with parking. Buffalo became the first major American city to eliminate parking minimums citywide in 2017. University at Buffalo researchers tracked 36 major developments in the two years that followed and found that 47% included less parking than the old code would have allowed. Mixed-use projects built 53% fewer spaces than previously required. Just as telling, single-use developments often built more parking than the old minimums demanded. Builders didn’t abandon parking. They built what their tenants needed, which is exactly what a mandate prevents.
Austin offers the clearest evidence on rents. Over the past decade the city loosened zoning, eliminated parking mandates citywide in November 2023, legalized more ADUs and expanded density bonuses. The Pew Charitable Trusts found that Austin added roughly 120,000 homes from 2015 to 2024, expanding its housing stock by 30%. Median rent fell from $1,546 in December 2021 to $1,296 in January 2026, below the national median. The decline wasn’t confined to new towers; rents in older, lower-cost buildings fell about 11%. Demand matters too, and construction there has since slowed. But Pew found Austin saw the steepest rent declines of any large American city from 2021 to 2026.
Minneapolis, which ended single-family-only zoning in 2019, is a more complicated case and worth taking seriously for that reason. Economists Helena Gu and David Munro estimate that rents there ran 17 to 34% lower than they would have without the reform. But they found no construction boom, and they attribute much of the effect to softer demand. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reports that inflation-adjusted rents have fallen nearly 20% since 2020, yet new development has stalled because rents are now too low to cover the cost of building.
That is a caution, not a reason to wait. Zoning reform removes a legal barrier. It does not repeal construction costs, interest rates or the many other regulations that add to the price of a new home. Oak Park’s own feasibility study found financing gaps of $110,000 to $220,000 for small neighborhood multifamily projects even after rezoning, and critics there have seized on the figure. But it argues for lowering costs further, not for keeping the ban. A city cannot get housing it has made illegal.
The most contested piece in Pittsburgh was the affordability incentive, which replaced an earlier proposal to require affordable units in larger developments. The least contested pieces, TribLive’s Julia Burdelski reported, were eliminating parking minimums and expanding ADUs. Those are also the reforms with the longest track record elsewhere. Whether a voluntary height bonus produces affordable units is an open question, and to its credit the council is asking it. Councilman Bob Charland has introduced a bill requiring regular public reports on how many market-rate and affordable units developers produce under the program.
Bottom line for city halls: The reforms with the strongest evidence behind them are also the cheapest. Ending parking mandates and legalizing ADUs and small multiplexes cost a city nothing but the will to let property owners build. Cities that haven’t acted should start there, attach as few conditions as possible and measure the results the way Pittsburgh now plans to. The question for council members isn’t whether these reforms are radical, it’s why their city still forbids what Buffalo, Austin and Minneapolis allowed years ago.
