Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

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