The City of Prague plans to improve conditions for real estate developers by lowering the number of mandatory parking places in residential and office buildings. Thanks to a new legal amendment, they will no longer have to build a mandatory garage space for each apartment. The amendment, which will now be open for 45 days for comments, would help real estate investors and developers, as well as those who want to do extensive reconstruction, writes E15.cz.
Investors of residential and office buildings in Prague will probably no longer have to comply with the mandatory number of parking spaces. They will be able to determine their quantity on their own. The same change will also affect larger reconstructions that require building permits as Prague wants to open the way to cheaper new and reconstructed flats. "We have decided to significantly reduce parking minimums. At the moment it is an unnecessary regulation that only makes construction more expensive or completely impossible. In certain locations in city centres, even three underground parking levels with expensive stackers need to be built. With this change, we will make it possible to build apartments without parking spaces for people who do not need a car at all," housing councillor Adam Zábranský explained the main purpose of the amendment.
The number of parking spaces is now determined by a calculation of the Prague Building Regulations (PSP), which was created in 2015. This is based on the number of residential units or, in the case of office buildings, the number of employees and visitors to the building. The resulting number of stalls is then adjusted according to the regulatory map of Prague, which takes into account the availability of public transport. According to Ondřej Boháč, Director of the Institute of Planning and Development, the overall revision of the regulations should reduce the number of mandatory parking places by about a quarter.
The proposal now goes into a 45-day comment procedure. "The deadline for submitting comments has been extended to give everyone enough time to study and make comments," said Deputy Mayor Petr Hlaváček. After incorporating the comments, the final form will have to be approved again by the council, which will now meet in a new formation according to the results of the last elections.
