Union County, NC Parking Rules: Abandoned Vehicles (2026)

Article 35 of the Union County Unified Development Ordinance lists activities that cannot be treated as accessory to a residential principal use, and the first is storing outside a substantially enclosed structure any motor vehicle that is neither licensed nor operational. Because the ordinance defines this as prohibited rather than merely limited, an unlicensed car, truck, or trailer, or one that will not run, cannot sit in a driveway, side yard, or open storage area in a residential district: it must be kept inside a garage or other substantially enclosed building, or removed from the property.

The prohibition sits alongside the article's broader accessory-use rules, which require a zoning permit for garages, carports, sheds, and similar structures and cap total accessory building square footage relative to lot size, from no more than the principal building's footprint on lots under 2 acres up to no cap at all on lots of 10 acres or more. The vehicle-storage rule applies regardless of lot size, since it turns on whether the structure sheltering the vehicle is substantially enclosed, not on acreage.