Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

“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.