Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

We expect parking to be immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most important, free. This is unique. It would be unimaginable to hold any other good or service to the same standard.

At the center of our biggest cities, some of the most valuable public land on Earth has been exclusively reserved for the free storage of private cars. By paving so much ground, the metropolitan parking supply directs the course of floodwaters. Parking determines the size, shape, and cost of new buildings, the fate of old ones, the patterns of traffic, the viability of mass transit, the life of public space, the character of neighborhoods, the state of the city budget, our whole spread-out life in which it is virtually impossible to live without an automobile.

Laws that require every building to include parking prevent us from creating housing, especially affordable housing, because parking costs so much to construct and takes up so much space. In Seattle, for example, required parking makes up 10 to 20 percent of the cost of construction of multifamily buildings and drives up apartment rents by 15 percent. In California and Arizona, garages increase the cost of affordable housing by 27 percent.

Parking is a mutant strain of yeast in the dough of architecture, making our designs bigger, uglier, and farther apart.

Parking has made an awful mess of the American city, but drivers are not the architects of this system. In a way they are its victims. In its best moments, driving feels like freedom, but our inability to get around any other way is a kind of prison.

We are what we build, first because our buildings are an expression of our values, and second because, in time, those buildings come to set the patterns of our lives.

“Never has a public official who makes the approvals ever said to me, ‘How much will your rent increases be?’ Never cared about a single thing, but I cannot tell you how many times they ask where everyone will park when they come over for a birthday. No one cares about the quality of life for the tenants. I’ve never had someone say, ‘How tall are your ceilings? Are you doing the minimum?’ Ceiling height makes a big difference!” Instead, the focus was always on parking. “We care more about housing for our cars than we care about housing for ourselves. Period.”

A 10-year study of low-income apartments in the state concluded that structured parking adds $35,945 to the construction cost of every single new unit.

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.

Cities sought to emulate the suburban parking model and very nearly destroyed themselves in the process. It was a method that even its biggest evangelist, the mall developer–turned–downtown savior Victor Gruen, would come to bitterly regret. You could draw a direct line from the crowded curbs of the start of the twentieth century to the volcanic wastelands that constituted many American downtowns by its end.

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

he compared the postwar rebirth of Europe’s cities with the apparent disintegration of their American counterparts. Which continent had been bombed, again?

“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.”

Meanwhile, the Interstate Highway System, authorized in 1956, was said to be the largest public works project ever undertaken. Expressways destroyed black neighborhoods in cities like Syracuse, Baltimore, and Detroit. To the disappointment of some local officials, the big roads were not accompanied by federally funded parking garages, but they did entrench downtown’s dependence on suburban drivers, and the ruined properties alongside freeway trenches were soon torn down to make easy money parking cars. Federal spending subsidized driving, while cities scrambled to raise enough money to operate bankrupt streetcar companies.

Just one in five cities zoned for parking in 1950. By 1970, 95 percent of U.S. cities with over twenty-five thousand people had made the parking spot as legally indispensable as the front door.

By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.

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.

Not surprisingly, car-centric environments lead to the most injuries for both drivers and pedestrians.

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.

The community says they want more economic development, more housing, and all these ideas were dying and no one even knew about it. No one tracks the ideas that don’t happen. To watch as these dreams get pared down, hacked away. A beautiful ice sculpture and they end up with an ice cube. An ice cube in a tray of parking.”

An apartment building, he said, did not generate car trips any more than a banana generated fruit flies. An apartment building sitting atop eight stories of garage, on a street without sidewalks, linked by a six-lane, fifty-miles-per-hour arterial to a commercial area that is 70 percent parking by surface area would attract car trips. But the car trips were not an inherent feature of the building any more than the fruit flies were of a banana. It was the context that determined the way people would travel.

If it takes three minutes to find a parking spot on a block, that block is generating sixty thousand extra driving miles each year.

The Forbidden City was not a distant imperial fortress; it was all around. The familiar houses and apartment blocks of neighborhoods like Hollywood, Koreatown, and Mid-City; gated courts of stucco cottages grouped around grassy courtyards; handsome two-story houses in the style of old Spanish missions or Cape Cods, split into two (duplexes), three (triplexes), or four apartments (fourplexes). Hollywood apartment towers, with their schlocky appropriations of French châteaus or Chinese pagodas. Elegant, Bauhaus-inspired midrise apartment buildings. The Forbidden City is the everyday architecture of Los Angeles neighborhoods—the glamorous and the mundane, essential, quintessentially LA. All of it was illegal to build, because none of these buildings had enough parking spaces.

In a new home in Los Angeles in 2020, as in virtually every other city and suburb in America, a parking space was as obligatory as a toilet. In fact more so. A two-bedroom apartment did not require two toilets. But it did require two parking spaces.

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.

“You think architects design buildings, but actually we just arrange parking spaces,” the Angeleno architect Daniel Dunham joked to me in 2019. Dunham, who designed midrise, affordable apartment buildings for a Santa Monica–based firm, was only kind of joking.

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?

“Don’t say: ‘Parking requirements.’ The word ‘requirements’ indicates something is required, implicitly that it is needed. It is also value-neutral. Instead use: ‘Costly parking mandates.’ Remind people that parking costs money and land to provide. And use the term ‘mandates’ which implies a heavier hand.”

“If my firm, Grubb Properties, were to build a 300-unit apartment community with moderate rents in downtown Charlotte today it would cost in excess of $75 million. If we could build that same apartment community without having to provide parking, the cost would be closer to $60 million. This $15 million reduction in total cost would allow for an average monthly rent reduction of over $250, making the apartments affordable for a far greater percentage of Charlotteans.”

“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. And as David Cunningham pointed out, tenants often demanded parking allotments that went well beyond the code.

Journeys to work accounted for just 15 to 20 percent of trips, even before the pandemic. More than half of all trips in the U.S. were under three miles. 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.

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.

Mayor Bill de Blasio touted the program as a lifeline for the city’s endangered hospitality sector, which it was. But the change was much more fundamental: space that had for decades been reserved for free car storage was now being used by dozens of people every hour, with some parking spots generating hundreds of dollars in sales tax every day.

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.

In 1975, the Netherlands experienced 20 percent more car deaths per capita than the United States; by the twenty-first century, the Dutch had 60 percent fewer car deaths per capita.

At times, as I reported and wrote this book, the path forward from a policy perspective seemed clear. 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.

a substantial share of Americans did want to live in places they could walk around, and some were even willing to give up their cars to do so. The vast subsidy for car parking was just part of the way the deck was stacked in favor of suburban life, from the mortgage interest deduction to biased lending practices to gerrymandered school districts to cheap gas and other unpriced externalities of driving. But in spite of all that, the most expensive places to live in the country were, by and large, densely populated and walkable city neighborhoods. If the market was sending a signal for more of anything, it was that.

Parking is access. But it is access of the most superficial sort, one that often papers over deeper inequities we’re unwilling to address. Ample parking at the ball fields feels like a requirement because the roads are too dangerous for parents to let kids ride their bikes. Free parking near campus looks good for students who can’t imagine living close enough to walk. Easy parking in wealthy neighborhoods is a lifeline for workers who will never be allowed to live nearby. And acres of parking downtown feels like a right to commuters and shoppers when the bus comes only once an hour. In each case, parking stands for a primitive kind of access that both overshadows and impedes a more profound and widely held right to the city.