Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

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?