Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

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.