Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, writes about California’s recent reduction of parking requirements at many housing developments in the November newsletter about real estate and economic issues distributed by UCLA Anderson Forecast and the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate. He says that Assembly Bill 2097 is an important step in addressing how parking mandates undermine housing affordability and encourage people to drive more, while discouraging them from walking or using public transit. AB 2097 is unlikely to result in a wave of new housing being built without parking. Instead, eliminating mandatory parking requirements will allow for housing to be built on some parcels where it would have previously been infeasible. “Losing a few housing units here and there, or even the occasional parcel, may not seem like a big deal,” Manville writes. “Multiplied over many years and many thousands of parcels, however, these small losses add up.”