Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

It’s not hard to grasp what makes parking a fixation: without a place to park, you can never get out of the car. A parking space is nothing less than the link between driving and life itself, the nine-by-eighteen-foot portal through which lies whatever you got in the car to do in the first place. Whoever said life was about the journey and not the destination never had to look for a place to park. Every trip must begin and end with a parking space, and in no uncertain terms. We expect parking to be immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most important, free. This is unique. It would be unimaginable to hold any other good or service to the same standard. We expect parking to be perfect.

Many communities govern parking by unwritten codes you learn the hard way, or by intricate hierarchies, such as the one at the University of California at Berkeley, where the only way to secure a free, reserved parking space on campus is by winning a Nobel Prize.

The “parking shortage” functions as a political cudgel to shut down new business and keep out new neighbors.

garages increase the cost of affordable housing by 27 percent. The obligation to provide parking makes it impossible to reuse older buildings, compelling needless demolitions, or work with smaller properties, leaving infill parcels fallow.

I’ve read more books about car culture than I care to count, and many have not aged well. Their disdain for the suburbs and the people who live there is condescending at best and, in light of today’s urban real estate prices, newly classist. I come to bury that rhetoric, not to praise it. This book proposes an honest reckoning with the subsidies and externalities of cars, but it is not anticar.

The CCC was part of a burgeoning, powerful California slow-growth movement, which successfully restricted development in some pristine natural areas, such as Big Sur. But it had a malevolent counterpart: a group of metropolitan homeowners who brought that righteous sense of preservation to urban and suburban neighborhoods. Using tools like parking requirements, single-family zoning, historic preservation, minimum lot sizes, and lawsuits under California environmental law, the state’s homeowners wrote the playbook for how to exclude new neighbors—and look righteous while doing it.

Which is why, ironically enough, Ginger had to rebuild that parking lot in Solana Beach. Because without parking, there’s no beach access for the millions of Californians pushed inland by coastal housing restrictions. The fewer people permitted to move to places like Solana Beach, the greater the egalitarian cachet of its free parking. So the California Coastal Commission, charged with preserving the coastline, is also the state’s greatest defender of beachfront parking lots.

When Ginger talked about choosing between housing for people and housing for cars, she was not being metaphorical. She was describing a literal trade-off she makes in every pro forma, the spreadsheet of expenses and revenues that determines how a developer uses her land. Parking costs money and takes up space. More parking means less housing.

To understand the way that the parking shortage suppresses the production of affordable housing, it is not enough to know that there is a mothballed project like the Pearl in every suburb. You must realize, too, that for every Ginger Hitzke there are ten builders who will not even bother.

Residents who have chosen to live in older buildings in older neighborhoods depend on the public parking supply and do not want to share it. In these places, 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. This parking anxiety leads the way to Malthusian thinking about neighborhoods and cities: when the impact of new neighbors is measured out in parking spaces, every place starts to look crowded.

In many cities, for example, permit zones have balkanized the curb parking supply between low-occupancy curbs in single-family neighborhoods and congested curbs on neighboring blocks with apartment buildings. Parking zone gerrymandering can give some residents privileged access to busy neighborhoods. To make matters worse, residential parking permits are sold for peanuts and without regard for the parking supply. It costs just $50 to store your car on the streets of Washington, DC, for the year, and in some neighborhoods the city sells four times as many permits as there are street spaces. To clear up this mess, the District could auction off a fixed number of permits—or, more cynically, it could turn permits into limited, tradable assets whose value would increase, rather than decrease, as the city adds new residents, giving existing permit holders an incentive to say yes to new neighbors.

In a postwar report on “decentralization”—the flow of business, people, and money to the suburbs—the Urban Land Institute, the national organization of real estate developers, concluded that parking was “the most important single problem facing the central business districts of large cities today.”

Planners continued to cling to the idea that the downtown revival was just a parking lot away. And they planned accordingly. By focusing on how hard it was to park, they made policy of Yogi Berra’s aphorism “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”

The flaw in Gruen’s downtown designs, and indeed most machinations of postwar urban planners, was that they tried to compete with suburbia on its terms: by offering a calm, clean, single-use shopping destination that could be easily accessed by car. At that point, suburbanites might as well have gone to Southdale or Northland. And so they did.

By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.

Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed to regret what he had wrought with the Interstate Highway Act; ramming the big roads through American neighborhoods had never been his intention. But more than the highways or the slum-clearance projects, it was the need for car storage that ate through American downtowns. By 1972, the Detroit City Planning Commission made a downbeat assessment of how the Motor City’s downtown had wound up dedicating 74 percent of its land to vehicle movement and storage: “The automobile has an insatiable appetite for space. It needs about 300 square feet when stored in its home quarters; 300 square feet when stored at its place of destination; and 600 square feet on its way. It further needs about 200 square feet for those places where it is sold, repaired, and serviced. Thus an automobile needs 1400 square feet of living space. That is equal to the living space of a family unit.”

A third is the urban heat island effect. Pavements and roofs absorb energy from the heat-generating elements of urban life, such as buildings and vehicles, which means that cities both warm up faster and cool down slower than natural areas.

That is not the biggest reason for UHI.

Parking policy may help explain America’s status as a global outlier in driving. In 2017, per-capita car ownership in the United States (about 800 vehicles per one thousand inhabitants) was only moderately higher than in Western Europe (about 600 vehicles per one thousand inhabitants) or Canada (about 655). But Americans drove twice as many miles each year as people in peer European countries. This is not because our country is so large—we also drove 60 percent more than Australians and Canadians. It was at least partly because we built a country with exceptional rewards for driving and punishments for getting around any other way.

Take the country’s five most crowded major cities: 2013 gas consumption was 110 gallons per person per year in New York City, 215 in San Francisco, 188 in Boston, 206 in Chicago, and 168 in Philadelphia, well below the national average of 349 gallons a year. The figure was 434 in Charlotte, 520 in Dallas, 556 in Kansas City, 582 in Houston, and 687 in Orlando.

Parking built into houses and apartments is a greater predictor of car use than density, transit, or any other neighborhood attribute.

No city of any size could have permitted everyone to come by car and retained a vibrant downtown. To take an extreme example: in 1966, one transportation scholar calculated that if everyone who commuted to Manhattan every day drove alone in a car, storing those vehicles would require a five-story garage the size of Manhattan below Fifty-Second Street.

Part of the problem for aldermen like Scott Waguespack trying to assess Morgan Stanley’s bid with a back-of-the-napkin calculation was that no one really knew how much parking should cost. While parking experts viewed meters as a tool to manage contested curb space, most residents had rightly come to see them as a sneaky, punishment-oriented moneymaking device. In 2016, for example, the country’s twenty-five largest cities collected $1.3 billion from illegal parking citations—about as much as they collected from meters and lucrative garage taxes put together!

The big divide in the architecture of Chicago is not between prewar and postwar, or downtown and the neighborhoods, or residential and commercial. It is between those structures built BP (before parking) and AP (after parking). Before parking, stables were so loathed that the city required builders to get the permission of every property owner within six hundred feet to build one in a residential neighborhood. Chicago BP is the metropolis of the imagination: Art Deco skyscrapers, elevated trains, corner bars nestled inside neighborhoods of three-flats and Victorians, low-slung corridors of uninterrupted commercial storefronts stretching halfway to the state line. Chicago AP looks like run-of-the-mill suburban sprawl: chain stores lurking behind salt-crusted parking lots.

Parking was something to kvetch about, an animating subject lower than the weather and the traffic on the totem pole of small talk. But Shoup, who rode his bicycle to work each day through the streets of Los Angeles, had the cutting perspective of an anthropologist in a foreign land. He saw how parking hit a nerve. He collected newspaper clippings of parking space murders in a sheaf in his office, dozens of them each year. No clear-cut rain forest could upset an LA liberal more than an endangered bank of parking spaces.

You could read the whole postwar parking history of U.S. cities this way: it was because cities had been reluctant to free up curb space with market-clearing pricing that they had to resort to more extreme measures, such as demolitions, money-losing public garages, and parking requirements.

An apartment building, he said, did not generate car trips any more than a banana generated fruit flies. An apartment building sitting atop eight stories of garage, on a street without sidewalks, linked by a six-lane, fifty-miles-per-hour arterial to a commercial area that is 70 percent parking by surface area would attract car trips. But the car trips were not an inherent feature of the building any more than the fruit flies were of a banana. It was the context that determined the way people would travel. This was obvious when you compared “trip generation” of identical apartment buildings in Houston and New York City. But it showed up in more subtle ways, too: a study of Philadelphia grocery stores showed that locations with visually obvious parking drew more drivers from the surrounding area than supermarkets that directly faced the sidewalk. Yet in Corvallis, as in most cities, parking was required by law and bundled into your rent. You’d have been a chump not to use it.

In 2011, an experiment on a larger scale began in San Francisco, a city that had recently claimed to have the highest auto density of any major city in the world—more than ten thousand per square mile.

Forbidden cities, everywhere. What makes this all the more strange is that for the most part, such parking-challenged structures—like Mark Vallianatos’s beloved Highland Park ex-hotel—no longer provide the naturally occurring affordable housing they did when those buildings, and neighborhoods, were widely considered obsolete. Instead, precisely because they offer access to places where car ownership is optional, buildings without sufficient parking are among the most in-demand structures we have. In virtually every U.S. city, the most expensive neighborhood is a prewar, mixed-use streetcar suburb that would be illegal to build today. That scarcity ensures their high price point. No one would think, for a second, that we had built too many places like Highland Park, like Los Feliz, like downtown LA . . . to say nothing of parking-challenged places like Brooklyn’s Fort Greene or Boston’s Back Bay or Chicago’s Lincoln Park. So why did we make it illegal to build more of them?

In a 2012 study of thirty-two California families, researchers found that just eight of them stored the car in the garage—for the rest of them, the garage was too full of stuff.

The green, in this case, was mostly paint—though the triangle was also ringed with plants spilling out from heavy concrete planters to keep the cars from reclaiming the space. “It is a New York City traffic principle that any street space not occupied by a car will become occupied by a car unless protected by a physical barrier or law enforcement agent,” she wrote.

I wished for others to share my epiphany, to recognize the tremendous potential of all the land that lay hidden beneath the chassis of a thousand parked cars. And then the monkey’s paw part: As I began to write this book, the coronavirus pandemic shut down half the world. But for the ambulances, traffic vanished, and the air cleared. Some lucky few had fled to the country, but most urbanites were left with the unsettling experience of an empty city. The cramped feeling of an apartment without public life; the silence of streets without cars. As if someone had pulled the plug from a tub, traffic drained out of cities overnight. Streets were deserted. Lots, garages, and curbs were empty. Suddenly, the fact that virtually every commercial and civic space in the country had an asphalt shadow next door looked like a stroke of genius.

In 1975, the Netherlands experienced 20 percent more car deaths per capita than the United States; by the twenty-first century, the Dutch had 60 percent fewer car deaths per capita. Amsterdam had been transformed from gridlock into a city so oriented toward people (and people on bicycles) that it no longer served as a useful point of comparison—too unrealistic.

Coupled with the capital’s investment in buses and trams, it was working to get people out of their cars: transit use rose by double digits between 2010 and 2020. Paris’s vast portfolio of garage spaces (about six off-street spaces for every one at the curb) was emptying out. Some were yielding to underground mushroom farms. In another, I heard a man practicing the saxophone. Najdovski wanted to get rid of the public garages, too: “They’re like vacuum cleaners for cars,” he said, pulling in drivers from the city’s suburbs.

In the United States, the pandemic changed the dynamics of parking. No longer would peak-hour traffic and high parking rates send commuters to mass transit. Downtown parking garages recovered faster than trains and buses as wary workers returned to the office in cars. On the one hand, the future of mass transit looked hazy. On the other, some Americans were freed from their lengthy commutes and newly invested in their neighborhoods, where trips were shorter and street space was being seized for people. A surge in online shopping left brick-and-mortar parking more oversupplied than ever—and double-parked delivery vans all over the place.

At times, as I reported and wrote this book, the path forward from a policy perspective seemed clear. Abolish parking minimums and let developers build the amount of parking their clients want. Break garage rents apart from apartment rents so carless tenants don’t have to subsidize their neighbors’ driving. Recognize that more parking means less housing, especially affordable housing. Let different uses—an office and an apartment building, a school and a movie theater—share parking. Charge for the best street parking, and use parking prices and enforcement not to generate cash and cycles of punishment but to manage city streets. Invest the proceeds in the neighborhood. Let architects design environments where people can walk. Ask drivers to bear some of the externalities of automobile use. And turn some of that extra parking into something new.

I can understand how this claim is compelling if you cannot picture a world of better parking, where housing is affordable and easy to build, driving is optional, streets are pleasant public spaces for children and the elderly, and a parking spot is readily available when you need it. Most of us cannot, because we are so deep within the parking crater we cannot see beyond its edges. I think again of the woman in Boston who is afraid to go the grocery store. Wasting away, but keeping her parking spot. Parking is access. But it is access of the most superficial sort, one that often papers over deeper inequities we’re unwilling to address. Ample parking at the ball fields feels like a requirement because the roads are too dangerous for parents to let kids ride their bikes. Free parking near campus looks good for students who can’t imagine living close enough to walk. Easy parking in wealthy neighborhoods is a lifeline for workers who will never be allowed to live nearby. And acres of parking downtown feels like a right to commuters and shoppers when the bus comes only once an hour. In each case, parking stands for a primitive kind of access that both overshadows and impedes a more profound and widely held right to the city.