Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

The grayness of a city where it’s easy to park is embedded in the word parking itself, which once referred to curbside patches of greenery, tiny parks. Now it describes something like the opposite, the lifeless blacktop.

The obligation to provide parking makes it impossible to reuse older buildings, compelling needless demolitions, or work with smaller properties, leaving infill parcels fallow.

Julius Caesar introduced off-street chariot parking in Rome to reduce traffic.

for all the talk about roads and cars, every vehicle spends an estimated 95 percent of its life span parked.

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.

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

These stories are not anomalies—they’re just three of the stories that got the attention of a local reporter somewhere during the summer of 2020. 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.

While many parking disputes are one-offs, a good number involve older, heavily armed men who engage in confrontations again and again. They are less self-interested drivers than self-appointed sheriffs of the parking lot.

New York parking neurosis even got its own novel, Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out, the story of a man who snags great parking spots as a hobby—and then just . . . sits there,

One parking officer was assaulted by a priest in his collar; another went to the hospital only to learn his X-ray technician had been the attacker. Parking officer Dawn Davis had her arm sliced with a razor and required twenty-two stiches. She had also been hit by a car and had her jaw broken on the job. Which she had held for all of three years.

hydrants, or bus stops. And yet. City employees used a middle school playground as a parking lot until Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum stopped them in 2004;

The police were trying to make rigorous parking enforcement seem absurd, beyond belief, as crazy as feeding the homeless. But in a city where fewer than half of all households owned a car, the police seemed to be threatening New Yorkers with a good time.

Between the double-parking, the cruising for spots, the backing in, and the pulling out, McClintock calculated that curbside parking reduced the capacity of a typical downtown street by 30 to 50 percent.

By 1940, more than 80 percent of all traffic signs in American cities had to do with parking.

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

Just as Jane Jacobs was mounting her popular and wildly influential defense of the messy, lively American urban neighborhood, Victor Gruen was bitterly on his way to the opposite conclusion: “American cities, with their comparatively short histories and small traditions, offered people little beyond traffic jams.”

He had two main regrets about his malls. The lack of civic functions was the first. The second: “the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking.” It was the empty car that made the most noise.

“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.”

By 1968, two in three off-street parking lots in big U.S. downtowns were publicly owned; garages were almost 90 percent publicly owned.

In the mid-aughts, when the team of programmers at Maxis were working on the first new SimCity in a decade, they studied American municipal architecture, politics, and urban design to try to produce a compelling simulacrum. Lead designer Stone Librande used Google Earth to measure his surroundings. The biggest surprise he found was the size of the parking lots. “When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store,” he said. “That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.” In the game, he said, they tried to imagine that the parking was underground: “We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.”

Todd Litman estimates it costs $4,400 to supply parking for each vehicle every year, with drivers directly contributing just 20 percent of that—mostly in the form of mortgage payments on a home garage. With about 250 million passenger vehicles in circulation, that amounts to more than a trillion dollars in American parking assets. A different estimate pegs the annual cost of U.S. car storage between $189 and $554 billion, with drivers paying just $5 billion a year.

Between 80 and 95 percent of American workers get free parking at the office. When workers are forced to pay for parking themselves, the share of employees driving to work alone falls on average by 25 percent.

“Usually when I do a study, they tell us parking is jammed, and you find out maximum peak occupancy is 60 percent,” says Richard Willson, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona.

In Boston and its suburbs, a survey of almost twenty thousand housing units built since 2000 found that the mandatory garages were 30 percent empty at peak times—almost $100 million had been spent on forty-one acres of obligatory but unused parking.

Consider the parking-rich city of Hartford, Connecticut, which went from having 180,000 people, sixteen thousand parking spaces, and four department stores in 1957 to 120,000 people, forty-seven thousand parking spaces, and zero department stores in 2009—with the exact same number of jobs.

“Architects write me about parking lots, because they’re interested in seeing parking lot patterns and things like that,” the artist Ed Ruscha said of his parking lot photographs. “I’ll tell you what is more interesting: the oil droppings on the ground.”

By 1970, parking profits had enabled Kinney to expand into a holding company called Kinney National Service Inc., which owned (among other things) Mad magazine and the film studio Warner Bros.

“You’re the first person they see,” said another exec, straining for philosophy but sounding like a killer doorman, “and the last person they see.”

Millennium Park was Chicago’s new public square, and it had been built with over $100 million in donations from the city’s business titans and $208 million from selling off the city’s garages.

In 2017, a lawyer named Mark Vallianatos conceived a tour of Los Angeles he called “Forbidden City.” It sounded mysterious, perhaps even indecent, but it was something like the opposite: an architecture tour with a heavy dose of regulatory history. The premise was simple. Los Angeles banned itself.

Under Gilmore’s supervision, one vacant building after another was reborn as apartments. New residents supported little businesses downstairs, like video stores and restaurants, or the beloved Last Bookstore, which opened in 2005. Those businesses also got to play by the no-parking rules, and so they looked less like a strip mall and more like Main Street. Tom would offer free rent, sometimes for years, in order to jump-start the kind of street life he felt would attract residential tenants.

The Shoupistas were designers, environmentalists, developers, planners, pedestrians, and small-business owners. Restaurateurs and food trucks. Start-up founders doing e-commerce and hippies riding bicycles. People who didn’t drive or didn’t want to. They came from the Left, frustrated by a hidden nationwide subsidy for fossil fuels and enraged by the hurdles to building low-income housing, and the Right, thwarted by laws that told you what to do with your property with dubious justification. Preservationists who wished to see old buildings find second life and antipreservationists who wanted to see new buildings everywhere. Free marketeers who wanted dynamic parking pricing, and good-government advocates who wanted revenue for public improvements.

Jane ranked some of the local attractions by their approach to parking. At the bottom was the White Sox ballpark on the South Side, with its ring of lots. “I’ve tailgated there,” she said. “It’s fine because you’re drunk and you’re with your friends, but you have to almost forget where you are to really enjoy yourself. That’s what tailgating is. You have your beer, you have your friends, and you pretend you’re not in a parking lot.”

“Blind people shouldn’t have to pay for parking spaces that they don’t need and can’t use,” he wrote.

Walmart was downsizing its famous parking lots, so expansive the company welcomed RV drivers to pull in and get a little sleep. “Every time we re-evaluate, we pull [the parking requirement] down a little bit,” said John Clarke, Walmart’s head of real estate. “That means on a big store, we went from 1,200 to 800 spaces. It has a big impact: on the size of land needed for store, the cost of striping and cleaning the parking lots, just to light it at night. It’s a significant factor for the facility to have one less stall.”

The median house sold for $730,000 in 2019, making homeownership affordable to just 15 percent of the population. This was a policy issue for Trinidad Castañeda. He advocated for a Safe Parking Program, which made Fullerton the first city in Orange County to open a commuter lot to homeless Californians sleeping in their cars. He helped convince the city to abolish its fees on accessory dwelling units (ADUs), also known as backyard cottages, granny flats, or garage apartments, which led to local ADU permits jumping from three in 2018 to forty-four in 2019.

The City of Los Angeles developed an alternative to homeless shelters called “safe parking,” supervised parking lots where homeless people could park and sleep without fear of being arrested, robbed, or assaulted.

“Guess how many loading zones we have? Zero,” Howard told me in 2021. “The DOT keeps telling me they have to keep studying what the optimal number is. And I say, scientists have been studying the optimal number of hours a person should sleep for centuries, but we know it’s not zero.”

Some restaurants made more money in the pandemic summer of 2020 than they had in 2019—despite the absence of tourists and commuters. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers sat and ate in the street, turning thoroughfares into plazas from South Brooklyn to the Bronx, multiplying encounters with friends and neighbors. Streets with high concentrations of restaurants, like Koreatown and Little Italy, became semipermanent street festivals,

For all the talk of metamorphosis, by critics and fans alike, of the city’s three million curbside parking spaces, the restaurants had taken just 8,550.

Cars represented just 11 percent of trips in Paris but took up 50 percent of public space. He estimated that Hidalgo and the previous mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, had already gotten rid of twenty thousand or so street parking spaces. Hidalgo enlarged sidewalks and planted trees. She also pedestrianized the highways that ran on either side of the Seine River, creating two popular linear parks for strolling and socializing.

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.