Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

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).