Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration has a plan to make our city more vibrant, especially downtown: tax out the parking lots. This, coupled with existing incentives for land owners to build housing rather than let much downtown real estate essentially sit fallow, will create a more walkable, denser and friendlier city.
The tax would be implemented through an ordinance allowed by state law imposing 12% fees on surface lots and 6% fees in parking garages. This would add about $0.50 to a $3.85 parking tab, the price motorists pay to park for two hours in Riverfront Park, or $0.30 to two-hour, $5 session in Riverpark Square. Per state law, the money must be used to fund transportation projects like street and sidewalk maintenance.
But the real long-term benefit would be a revitalized – and safer, more populated, more prosperous, culturally richer – downtown core after surface lots are redeveloped into housing, commercial spaces, arts venues, hotels and the like.
Critics might imagine that there would be a lack of parking downtown if surface lots are redeveloped over the years. They might even see the efforts as counterintuitive if they adhere to prevailing logic that says less parking will draw less traffic and therefore less money to the downtown core.
The long term benefits may seem pie-in-the-sky, but once we consider the cartoonish inefficiencies of commercial parking, the effort begins to make perfect sense.
The blight of parking lots
A whopping 30% of land downtown is dedicated to car storage, and the effect is not neutral: parking lots are not housing – a salt in the wound of Spokane’s housing crisis. Parking lots do not provide jobs. They do not create community or contribute to culture.
Surface parking lots shaded in red. Source: City of Spokane.
Most of the time, these off-street parking lots sit pretty empty. Even in 2019 — that blissful pre-pandemic year when in-office work was more common — a study found that off-street parking usage topped out at 56% during the busiest times.
Parking lots also generate precious little property tax revenue. For instance, Diamond Parking paid $3,615.44 in property taxes in 2025 for this lot at 28 W Main Avenue, while the owners of 24 W Main Avenue next door – a building with housing and two small businesses that create jobs and community – paid $19,108.23. The lots are nearly identical in size.
