Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

Good driving is courteous, but good parking is cutthroat. Driving is the central motif of hundreds of pop songs; if there’s a song about finding a parking spot, I haven’t heard it. (“Big Yellow Taxi” is the best I could do.)

Drive till you qualify for a mortgage, and then spend the rest of your life driving to work.

But that is the nature of parking desire; it is so forceful it obviates, in the moment, any external organizing principle that might separate the car from the curb.

Time-share owners unpacked their horror stories of low-income housing. They complained that the project, which had been under way for six years and promised for twenty-two, had been forced upon them with no warning.

Can I please ask: please think about housing people more than housing cars. That’s all I have to say. Thank you.”

If you find yourself in her position, negotiating with neighbors over parking spaces, you have already lost.

Neighbors who demand that new projects come with more parking are essentially levying a tax, one that drives up the cost of new homes and stops a countless number from being built at all.

parking requirements for new buildings function as a protection racket, forcing new neighbors to pay for what old neighbors get for free on the street.

You’ve got three cars in the lot, and I don’t have a parking spot,” he says shortly before he opens fire.

“Little Flower, Little Flower, send me some of your parking power.” “Mother Cabrini, don’t be a meanie, please help me park my machiney.” “Hail Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking space.”

The worst placard abusers were the police, and the police ran the parking enforcement.

“Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”

Victor Gruen, the inventor of the mall. Gruen built the model for suburban development and brought it to cities. He never forgave himself.

“I’m often called the father of the shopping mall,” he concluded in one of his last published interviews. “I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.”

It would really be too bad if it were all tax-exempt public property.

Why should I pay when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free? —George Costanza, “The Parking Space,” Seinfeld

University of California head Clark Kerr used to say a college president’s job was “providing parking for faculty, sex for students, and athletics for the alumni.”

We had a great business because there was no transparency.”

“It’s not that there’s not enough parking,” he said. “It’s that there’s too much, and you don’t realize where it is.”

The meter deal would go down, wrote the Chicago Tribune op-ed board, as “one of the dumbest and most despised decisions in the council’s history.” And this from a city council that had sent two dozen members to prison over the past thirty years.

When the Chicago City Council signed off on the meter deal, they didn’t just trade away parking revenue. They traded away Chicago’s streets themselves. They lost control over rates but also control over the curbs—how they could be used, and by whom. Wall Street ran the streets now, and if Chicago didn’t keep its parking meters right where CPM wanted them, the city would have to pay up.

The lawsuit alleged the city was violating the First Amendment by treating the church differently.

Once there were parking lots Now it’s a peaceful oasis. —Talking Heads, “(Nothing but) Flowers”

One student set Shoup up with a Twitter account, @ShoupDogg. A former student named Kevin Holliday started the Shoupistas Facebook group

A beautiful ice sculpture and they end up with an ice cube. An ice cube in a tray of parking.”

Do not build the church for Easter Sunday,’ ”

Nobody on the ground knows that ITE has changed their tune. Lisa in zoning doesn’t care. She needs a number, and the book says four hundred parking spaces.”

The story of the parking meter begins in the 1930s with a revelation on the part of an Oklahoma City newspaper editor named Carlton C. Magee: get the nine-to-five crowd to park ten, five, or even two minutes away, and you could save easy-access curb spaces for deliveries and customers. Eighty percent of the cars parked curbside in the state capital belonged to employees at downtown businesses. So Magee invented the Park-O-Meter, which replaced the inefficient and unreliable “chalk the tires” practice. Oklahoma City did a trial with one side of the street metered and the other unmetered. The city manager reported the results: “On the unmetered side is confusion, cars jammed together, fenders being bent, cars being pushed in front of fire hydrants, and traffic being impeded by those who are trying to back into cramped parking spaces, while shoppers can hardly find parking spaces open. On the metered side is order, sufficient room for every car to be parked and driven out quickly and easily, and there are usually parking spaces open so that shoppers can park within a block of any store or bank.” By 1938, there were meters in eighty-five U.S. cities, and by 1955, all big U.S. cities had metered business districts and retail shopping streets.

Plus ça change

The Valley of High Parking Requirements. Anything between sprawl and high-density development was impossible to build because it was impossible to park—surface parking would take up too much room; structured parking would cost too much to build.

The librarians wanted to pave the sculpture garden for parking; preservationists were aghast. Robert Alexander, partner of the SoCal modernist Richard Neutra, chained himself to a rock in the garden in protest. The librarians got their parking lot. The fountains and gardens were demolished, and the sculptures vanished.

Downtown living to him meant that you don’t have to get behind the wheel to buy a toothbrush.

Preservationists who wished to see old buildings find second life and antipreservationists who wanted to see new buildings everywhere.

The small-city restorationists of the Strong Towns movement. Architects who subscribed to the Congress for New Urbanism, the movement for traditional town building founded by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, who with Jeff Speck called parking minimums the “single greatest killer of urbanism in the United States today.”

Transportation planning was really behavioral psychology.

“Parking would be the hip replacement,” Jane said, “when you really just need to do a couple bridges every day.”

The store’s cramped lots have become a comedic touchstone: “May your dreams always be bigger than a Trader Joe’s parking lot.”

“I don’t like to say illegal,” he corrected himself. “Unpermitted.”

Single-family zoning was supposed to be the great, untouchable foundation of American local politics.

At the Tenth National Conference on Housing in 1929, one speaker declared that the dirty old backyard, of all places, could be repurposed to offer “charm and sanctuary from a too noisy world”—away from “front porch promiscuity.”

In 1999, planners in Portland, Oregon, developed zoning laws to require the car house be subordinate to the human house, dubbing the garage-thrusting style the “snout house” because the garage stuck out toward the road like the nose of a pig. “Basically, we want a house to pass the ‘trick or treat test,’ ” City Commissioner (later mayor) Charlie Hales said at the time. “So when kids come around to trick or treat, they actually get a sense that somebody lives in the house, and they can find the door. Imagine that.”

Buddy Holly had supposedly given birth to garage rock in Lubbock, Texas, but Southern California’s ubiquitous car holes would go on to nourish bands like Weezer, Incubus, Blink-182, and Linkin Park.