Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

Our cities are full of moonscapes for the purpose of storing cars. From the perception of scarcity was born an abundance so great it became the single largest use of land in some cities. Between 1950 and 1980, when Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in the United States, LA County was adding parking spaces at an almost unimaginable pace—850 new spots every day for thirty years.

parking is the primary determinant of the way the place you live looks, feels, and functions. While there are still some corners of this country where parking is worth fighting for, in most of the nation the fight was over decades ago. Parking is plentiful. The country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments. More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person. It is this sea of parking, in which destinations bob like distant buoys, that renders mass transit, biking, and walking difficult or dangerous.

Despite or perhaps because of its growing ubiquity, parking declined from a major field of research and interest to an unloved backwater. Parking is as absent from the training of architects, planners, and engineers as it is from the culture at large. It’s overlooked even by the governments and institutions that depend on its good order, marooned between the technical domains of transportation and land use. “Like a bastard child that no one wants,” according to one longtime parking executive. The weight we place on good parking in our personal lives is surpassed only by our ignorance of its systemic consequence. I have been reporting on cities for more than a decade, and I have never seen another subject that is simultaneously so integral to the way things work and so overlooked.

One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance. We take our vacations to places where we can get out of the car—Charleston, Disneyland, Manhattan, Miami Beach, Rome. Housing prices reflect the desirability of such destinations, making anything but a brief stay off-limits to all but a moneyed few. The promise of this book—the promise of fixing the parking problem—is not to force the reader out of her car but to let her forget it now and then for a moment. In a world with better parking it would be easier, not harder, to find a spot, and much easier to live in a place where you would not need to drive quite so often. In a world with better parking kids could walk to school and grown-ups to the grocery store. In a world with better parking, there might be fewer places to park, but in place of those old parking spots would emerge a city so much richer and fuller and fairer that you would not think twice about what had been lost.

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. They were astonishingly effective at keeping new residents out of coastal cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Of course, people didn’t stop coming to California. Newer, younger, and poorer residents just spilled out away from the coast, into fire-prone forests in the north of the state and scorching deserts in the south. Drive till you qualify for a mortgage, and then spend the rest of your life driving to work.

Almost every letter mentioned the sanctity of the parking lot, and the savvier writers made it the center of their argument. Badmouthing the poor was a little unseemly, but complaining about parking was morally unimpeachable. After all, that lot was the staging ground for the junior lifeguard program! Did Ginger expect local teens to learn CPR in a dank garage?

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. This dynamic occurs in distant suburbs and urban cores, but most often it happens in older, midrise, walkable neighborhoods where street parking is hard to come by—in other words, neighborhoods built before parking was required, with a set of nearby amenities to match. 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.

All this pavement has direct environmental consequences. One is simply the cost of producing it all: the production of cement is responsible for almost 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and lots and garages are part of that total, as is all the infrastructure required to serve the sprawl. A second is the loss of natural land to suburban development. America lost 460,000 acres of wetlands, for example, every year in the 1950s and ’60s, and 290,000 acres a year in the ’70s and ’80s. This transition is associated with steep declines in animal density, especially of birds and bugs. This is happening even in the oldest and slowest-growing parts of the country: Massachusetts, for example, developed more land in the last five decades of the twentieth century than in the three hundred years prior to 1950.

The most important environmental consequence of all that pavement is all the driving it incentivizes. Transportation is America’s largest source of greenhouse gases, with drivers in Texas alone accounting for half of 1 percent of global carbon emissions. Ground-level air pollution causes hundreds of thousands of deaths every year and is linked to a number of public health problems including lower test scores in children and Alzheimer’s disease in older adults. Sprawling settlement patterns are associated with higher levels of obesity. Cars crashes are the leading killer of young Americans and injure three million of us every year—including many pedestrians and cyclists, among whom minorities and low-income Americans bear the brunt of the damage. Not surprisingly, car-centric environments lead to the most injuries for both drivers and pedestrians.

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.

free parking in busy destinations creates shortages, which compel arriving parkers to cruise for spots, which puts hundreds of millions of miles on the road each year, or double-park, which generates traffic congestion. This traffic is not the product of a lifestyle trade-off. There is no social benefit to be weighed against the lost gasoline and lost time. It’s pure waste. One study from 2017 found that U.S. drivers spent, on average, seventeen hours searching for parking every year—$345 per person in wasted time, fuel, and emissions—and the numbers were much higher in big cities.

parking creates sprawl. Because neighbors fear parking shortages and parking laws render urban building sites expensive or simply unworkable, the parking problem acts as a limit on residential and commercial density. This begins site by site, as each restaurant and shop devotes most of its square footage to parking and apartments are stifled by the demands of parking architecture. But it soon expands to define the character of a neighborhood, and even a city, which becomes hard to navigate without a car. This is true for people who cannot afford to live in parking-challenged, close-in neighborhoods and opt instead for far-out suburbs. But it is also true of people in those same inner neighborhoods, because their friends and colleagues, and with them the metropolitan center of gravity, its birthday parties and Apple Stores and pet food shops, are slowly sliding into the car-dependent periphery.

requiring mandatory parking at all sites doesn’t just make the city physically harder to navigate on foot; it also functions as a huge giveaway to drivers. A little bit of every bar tab, the receipt from a child’s toy, the price of a pedicure: every dollar you spend out there in the world is paying for the provision of those free, required parking spaces, whether you use them or not. Not surprisingly, all this free or cheap parking—at your house, at your office, on the street, in public lots and garages downtown—induces people to drive. (And exerts a relative financial penalty on those who don’t.) As Homer Simpson explains, “If we buy a new car, we get our parking validated for free!”

As respondents to travel surveys often make clear, parking in America is free 99 percent of the time. But building it is expensive. Surface parking can cost $5,000 a space. Even in low-cost cities like Phoenix, the median cost of a new structured parking space is more than $19,000. Meeting Phoenix’s super-high parking requirements on the lower floors of an office building takes the cost of the project up by 45 percent. The parking scholar 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.

This trajectory suggests a chicken-and-egg question. Is Hartford in a rut because parking lots have consumed the cityscape? Or did the cityscape fall apart into parking lots because Hartford was struggling? You can pose the inverse question about thriving, parking-challenged cities like New York, Boston, Portland, and San Francisco: Are real estate values high because they are dense, vibrant environments? Or are they dense, vibrant environments because real estate values are too high to sustain surface parking lots?

Despite America’s surplus of free parking and Americans’ related hatred for paying for it, commercial parking is a lucrative business because parkers receive a great deal of help on both sides of the ball. Supply of parking is subsidized because developers are required to build lots and garages but rarely consider them sources of revenue. As a result, parking companies—most of which do not own the properties they operate—aren’t obligated to recoup the capital costs of garage construction ($30,000 to $40,000 a stall, a line item long since dissolved into the developer’s pro forma) and are free to print cash from a lease that requires little in the way of supplies, labor, upkeep, or advertising.

Waguespack suddenly realized: 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.

When McKenna-Foster learned about the ITE’s books on parking, driving, and development in graduate school from his professor Michael Manville, who had trained under Shoup, it blew his mind. These texts were responsible for the look of everything around him. “I’ve always hated these big-box urban hellscapes, and you’re gaining this secret knowledge that shows you, it’s all based on nothing. The ITE is based on junk! This false precision reproduced over and over. You open the hood of the car and it’s this junk engine made of Styrofoam cups and straws.” It was not just that the parking minimums were bogus. The very idea of parking minimums was backward.

The problem, Shoup argued, wasn’t that there wasn’t enough parking. It was that it wasn’t priced properly. Curbside parking in the best locations tended to be free, while cavernous garages a few blocks away charged entry. Retail employees and office workers arrived early and took the best street spots, and when customers or clients arrived, they found no space at the curb. Studies estimated that approximately 30 percent of traffic in congested central business districts consisted of cars looking for parking. Commercial property owners heard these complaints and lobbied local governments to build more off-site garages—or demanded that rival merchants build their own private lots. These fiefdoms did comparatively little to assuage the overall supply crisis, though, since drivers often looked first to park at the curb. They also contributed to traffic, since even running nearby errands required moving the car from one private lot to the next. This was the high cost of free parking. Charge higher rates for the best spots and lower rates for the worst spots, and everyone would fall into place according to the amount of time they needed to park and what the parking was worth to them.

Meanwhile, the initial function of meters—to impose order on the streets by pricing a scarce resource—was subsumed by a new focus: making money. Of course, this had always been part of the meter’s utility for local governments. But since politicians were reluctant to raise meter rates, the primary way that meters put money in city coffers by the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t from payments but from penalties. In fact, cities didn’t even need meters at all to make a ton of money off parking—in a perverse way, the free-for-all engendered by removing the meters encouraged illegal parking, citations for which became a major component of revenue-driven policing. In a review of this practice in Ferguson, Missouri, published after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, the Department of Justice told of a low-income woman who parked illegally one day in 2007. She received two citations and a $151 fine, plus fees. She attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, which the court refused. Then she missed her court date, resulting in an arrest warrant and an escalating series of fines. In the seven years that followed her parking ticket, the woman was arrested twice. She spent six days in jail. By the end of 2014, she had wound up paying the court $550 but still owed $541. All for a parking ticket. Counterintuitively, this state of affairs is exacerbated by cheap or free parking, which creates the supply constraints that make it necessary to break the rules, and haphazard ...

By simultaneously searching for parking spots themselves and measuring turnover time at the metered curb spots, they could multiply search time by the number of new parkers to obtain an estimate of total time spent looking for parking in the neighborhood. The figure was thirty-five hours every hour. The average cruising distance was a half mile. This single neighborhood, with its fifteen blocks of 470 underpriced meters, was generating 3,600 extra miles of extra driving every single day. A “reserve army of the unparked” in constant circulation. It added up to almost a million miles of driving a year, just looking for parking in one Los Angeles neighborhood. And Shoup and his team couldn’t even count all the Angelenos who, heading for a doctor’s appointment or a movie, drove around the block before settling for a garage. Putting various studies of road use together, Shoup concluded that nearly one third of all the cars in parking-scarce neighborhoods were looking for a place to park. If it takes three minutes to find a parking spot on a block, that block is generating sixty thousand extra driving miles each year. Shoup was like a Renaissance scientist, stumbling on the lost works of the twenties, thirties, and forties where parking was recognized as a complex and vital field of study and the parking meter venerated as a powerful tool.

Developers had two laws that explained “just about everything in the physical arrangement of Edge City”: An American Will Not Walk More Than Six Hundred Feet Before Getting Into Her Car To Park an Automobile Takes Four Hundred Square Feet Putting those two axioms together with the high cost of building parking structures, Garreau explained why all these Forbidden City buildings were missing from postwar American architecture: they had vanished into what the apartment builder Payton Chung called the Valley of High Parking Requirements. On one edge of the valley were single-family homes, fast-food restaurants, low-slung commercial box stores—all the familiar building types that could be comfortably “parked” at ground level, even if parking took up 60 or 70 percent of the property. On the other edge of the valley were high-density, high-value properties like offices, hotels, malls, and condos that could afford to build structured (or even subterranean) parking garages. Anything in between 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.

In any case, parking was the immovable object at the heart of neighborhood architecture, not just socially, as in Solana Beach, but technically as well. “Parking is like eggs,” one builder said. “You can’t buy just one, you have to buy a whole floor. . . . If you have to build one-and-a-half floors, you’ll build two floors.” Mostly, America just stopped building small buildings. Parking requirements helped trigger an extinction-level event for bite-sized, infill apartment buildings like row houses, brownstones, and triple-deckers; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021. What apartments did get built were clustered in megastructures whose design was dictated by parking placement. One popular model is the “Texas donut,” in which a ring of apartments encircles a five- or six-story parking garage (this is the type of building you see in the cool neighborhoods of growing cities).

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 2015, citing an MPC study and quoting the organization’s president, the Emanuel administration eliminated parking minimums on nine square miles of land on or near Chicago transit. The ordinance covered only a tiny fraction of Chicago’s 218 square miles, but those nine square miles included eighty-two thousand parcels whose location on busy commercial strips and near L stations made them exceptionally well suited for Chicagoans without cars. That summer, 2015, the first new apartment building to take advantage of the parking-light ordinance opened on the vacant lot near the Paulina Brown Line stop. In the next three years, the city approved more than twenty-four thousand residential units in those areas. The share of large buildings including a parking spot for every unit fell by half. In 2019, the city expanded the law to cover bus routes.

My Chicago apartments existed because of this reform

Grubb concluded that parking is anathema to housing affordability. That was both because of the cost of building, he told me, and because of the cost of driving: in 2021, Americans spent more than $800 a month or nearly $10,000 a year on new-vehicle ownership, according to AAA. (Median per-capita pre-tax income in Charlotte, for comparison, is $40,000.) The high cost of getting a car for each adult has created a cottage industry of subprime auto loans—high-interest, long-term debt. America’s outstanding car balance almost doubled in the ten years between 2010 and 2020, from $740 billion to $1.3 trillion, eclipsing credit card debt, and dealers now make more money on loan interest and insurance than they do selling cars.

“To further put that into perspective,” Cunningham told me in 2020, “we determined that we owned a portfolio of twenty thousand parking spaces. On any given day, approximately half sat vacant. To put it in even greater perspective, when we calculated how much it cost us to build that, it cost us one hundred million dollars just to build the vacant ones. One hundred million dollars in investment sitting fallow, nobody using it. And that’s just in our portfolio! It’s forever wasted. Millions and millions and millions of dollars in concrete and steel waste. It is just obscene. “Urban Atlanta, that’s thirty-eight a space,” he said, meaning: $38,000 for every stall in the garage. “Cut five hundred spaces? You do the math. It’s twenty million bucks!” This was typical. In Las Vegas, an above-ground parking garage built to code added 50 percent to the cost of the building. In Los Angeles, 32 percent. If the garage was underground, those figures rose by double digits.

Retrofitting suburbia was going to be hard, but there was reason for optimism about a future in which families might move from three to two cars, or two to one: Journeys to work accounted for just 15 to 20 percent of trips, even before the pandemic. More than half of all trips in big U.S. metro areas were under one mile. In other words, half of all trips could be accomplished on foot, on a bike, or on a small electric vehicle, if roads were designed for that kind of travel. A surprising number of Americans already lived within half a mile of a retail cluster of more than twenty-five establishments, even in drive-alone cities. The share was 31 percent in Las Vegas, 40 percent in Atlanta, 55 percent in Los Angeles, and 67 percent in Miami. That number would grow if parking could be decoupled from housing and retail. Meanwhile, the rise of remote work, e-commerce, and small electric vehicles like e-bikes and scooters made car-light living easier than ever.

That garage units had become so common was evidence of the astonishing arbitrage between parking (required at every house, unused by most, with little market value) and housing (forbidden in most neighborhoods, desperately needed, and worth much more). People complained about parking, of course, but no one would ever pay very much for it. But housing was a different story. New arrivals to the Southland, Mexican and Central American immigrants in particular, desperately needed cheap accommodations. The amplest resource available to them was the Southern California garage. Because these dwellings were unpermitted, tenants often put up with substandard conditions and lived at the mercy of their landlords.

Just as license plate readers and cameras had eliminated the hassle of tollbooths, new technology was emerging that could make paying for parking just as seamless. Don Shoup had proposed the idea in a Times op-ed in 2018, noting that the city’s three million on-street spaces were 97 percent free and covered 6 percent of New York’s land mass. Seventeen square miles of land. Thirteen Central Parks. Pricing just half those spaces at $5.50 a day, Shoup calculated, would raise an astounding $3 billion a year, enough to bond a new subway line. The $5.50 number was not incidental—that was the cost of a round-trip subway fare. Yaruss took up the idea in 2019 with an op-ed in the New York Daily News that made a radical proposal: trade free parking for free transit. By metering all the city’s parking spots at $6 a day, he reasoned, the city would raise as much as the nation’s busiest mass transit system collected in fares each year. The estimate was conservative, since a free transit system could also abandon all the expensive machinery of fare collection (or continue to charge for commuter railroads)—and the costs of prosecuting fare beaters. It was progressive, since New York drivers were wealthier and whiter than their counterparts on the subways and buses. It was even, Yaruss dared to suggest, an idea that regular drivers (the gigging bass player, the locksmith, the UPS guy) might grow to like, since it would clear the curbs of all those cars that were used only a few times a mo...

If this was what a city could do with 8,500 spots, what could it do with 50,000? With 500,000? In a 2021 report, Transportation Alternatives made a pitch for reclaiming 25 percent of the street space New York had allocated to cars. What could we have? Thirteen new Central Parks. Five hundred miles of bus lanes; forty miles of busways; 38 million square feet of community space; better visibility at every intersection; a thousand miles of open streets; 5.4 million additional square feet for restaurants, businesses, and cultural institutions. Three million square feet for pedestrian space, wheelchair access, benches, bus shelters. Eighty feet on every block for loading zones and trash collection. And a block of space for play and outdoor learning outside every single one of the city’s 1,700 public schools.

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.