The Huge Effect of Parking Policy on How We Live
A century of decisions about where we put our cars has remade the American landscape and profoundly affects our lives and well-being.
Paved Paradise
How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
Penguin, 368 pp., $30 (hardcover) / $18 (paperback, forthcoming)
JUST ABOUT EVERY URBAN PARKING LOT once housed a building. Unpack that one curious fact and you can learn a lot about how the logic of cars as the default mode of transportation is inherently at odds with the logic of cities as dense, vibrant, bustling places.
If you take only this insight away from Paved Paradise, a fascinating, pithy, and information-packed book on the seemingly arcane topic of parking, author Henry Grabar will have succeeded. But there’s much more here. Grabar treats parking with a rare, exacting, possibly unprecedented seriousness. Architects build parking grudgingly and without much design effort, and planners would rather ignore it entirely. It is, in a word, unsexy. Yet it might be the single most important factor to consider for anyone who would answer James Howard Kunstler’s indignant question: “Why is America so fucking ugly?”
Grabar, a writer at Slate, makes an argument that may be new not only to most everyday Americans, but even to some urbanists, housing advocates, and zoning reformers. It isn’t zoning—at least not on its own—that has produced the bland but still uniquely characteristic American landscapes of hollowed-out cities, dreary commercial strips, tiny buildings floating in seas of asphalt, menacing distances, and choppy, piecemeal, circular errand runs. It is parking. (Urban parking lots had already begun to eat away at traditional cities before modern zoning put its stamp on the suburban landscape.)
Coming in for special analysis and criticism is a type of local ordinance known in the planning field as a “parking minimum”: the number of parking spaces for new residential or commercial construction that need to be allotted per…unit of square footage? Number of things in a business that the customer will use? Number of employees? Actually, Grabar informs us, it could be any of these. “The laws don’t always use the same baseline: sometimes your parking is dictated by the objects inside the building (cribs, bowling alley lanes), sometimes by the size of the building, and sometimes by the number of employees.” Parking minimums, not unlike many elements of a modern zoning code, are essentially pseudoscience, displaying an almost comical degree of precision without significance.
The section on the absurdity of this stricture is certainly entertaining, as are many other passages in the book. But this and similar restrictive ordinances have had a dramatic and destructive effect on the American built environment and on small business and entrepreneurship, arbitrarily putting a huge amount of the nation’s existing structures and urban fabric off limits for renovations, adaptations, and new uses.
But while parking restricts some building or renovation plans, it grows others into exaggerated disproportion. For instance, why is the scale of so much modern residential development so massive, leading to not-unreasonable complaints that new buildings will dwarf their existing surroundings? “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 1970 and 2021,” Grabar finds. Instead, the kinds of apartments that did get built were those “whose design was dictated by parking placement,” such as the so-called “Texas donut” design in which a ring of apartments circle a parking structure. Grabar offers up an apt metaphor: “Parking,” he writes, “is a mutant strain of yeast in the dough of architecture.”
Why do so many cute classic buildings on old Main Streets sit derelict or disused? Because a renovation entailing an alteration of a building’s use can activate codes that the existing structure/business were exempt from for having antedated them: The dingy old auto shop was grandfathered into an exemption from the current parking code, but a café taking its place would be held to the requirements. This forces enterprising small developers and business owners to come up with new parking as part of their proposed renovations, which raises a frequently insurmountable obstacle: The new parking cannot be found without demolishing another nearby structure, or by incurring a cost that might threaten the plan’s forecasted profitability.
Finally, why are there so many vacant lots even in economically healthy cities? Grabar tells us that Los Angeles is full of unbuildable lots because the parking requirements are impossible to meet, financially or in terms of space, something that is true for most American cities overall. Parking requirements have rendered existing traditional cities unusable as raw material for development rather than only as blank slates; they’ve broken the continuity of the physical and geographical history of these places, disregarded the reasons for how and why they were built in the first place. A radically different pattern is now required, one that is at odds with these places as they exist. “Los Angeles banned itself,” says a tour guide in old downtown LA.
None of this is theoretical, pedantic, or overstated, as critics might attempt to argue. Grabar illustrates exactly what it actually means: A pastor is greatly delayed in opening a church—in a vacant structure, in a neighborhood that could use some foot traffic, within walking distance of most of his congregation—because the old building doesn’t have enough parking to meet the new requirements. A family is destroyed because a fun business idea results in years of administrative holdups and growing debt. And for every story like these of obstructed plans, there are a thousand stories of enterprises that never got beyond a dream, and homes for real people and families whose proposals never reached a board or committee.
If one curious fact is that every urban parking lot is haunted by the ghost of a grand old structure, another is that a plurality, at least, of the structures in any given city are illegal under that city’s own code today.
ALL OF THIS SEEMS CONVINCING ENOUGH until you remember what it feels like to roll up to a curb absolutely packed with parked cars, or to get jammed inside a full parking lot (hi, Trader Joe’s!) or to descend, Dante-like, into the bowels of a dark, dank garage only to find that not one single space remains.
Intellectually, these are mere inconveniences and annoyances. But emotionally—perhaps physiologically—they are low-grade sources of stress and anxiety. “It’s not hard to grasp what makes parking a fixation,” Grabar writes. “Without a place to park, you can never get out of the car.” This is at once obvious and profound. The car bestows the freedom to move, but the built environment must provide the freedom to stop. It is almost impossible, in that moment of frustration, to disentangle somebody denying you a parking space from your intense feeling of entitlement to one. And the fact is that for decades, we have been entitled to parking spaces—at the expense of urban vitality, housing affordability, and anybody who doesn’t or cannot drive.
“By making parking spots as obligatory as bathrooms, the city . . . forced housing to bear the costs of driving,” Grabar writes. Fine, you might think—but where will everyone park otherwise? The answer to that question involves a deeply conservative insight into the dynamic nature of human behavior, which will always ultimately thwart the expertise of engineers, social and traffic alike.
We drive, in large part, because we can park. ‘Where will everyone park in a parking-free building?’ is the wrong question. “Precisely because they offer access to places where car ownership is optional, buildings without sufficient parking are among the most in-demand structures we have,” Grabar writes. Just as traffic engineers have concluded that it is impossible to highway-build your way out of highway congestion, city planners in the twentieth century learned that it is impossible to parking-build your way out of urban street congestion. Highway capacity begets driving; easy parking begets driving. If you build it, they will drive.
Yet rather than acknowledge the existence of carless families—buildings without parking fill up, after all—and allowing that knowledge to change our approach to planning, it is easier for many people to see a conspiracy of “nudge”-minded enviro do-gooders to force them out of their cars.
GRABAR NEVER QUITE EXPLORES IT, but underneath all of the policy issues, there is clearly a set of deeper, almost metaphysical issues. Consider the moral implications of the conflation of cars with people; the subtext that people who manage to get around without a car are loafers or cheaters; the idea that urban amenities like walkability to shopping and dining are prizes to be earned and not essential components of normal neighborhoods.
The ultimate insight to which Paved Paradise points is that our parking policy, our highway policy, and our transportation system fundamentally aim to do something that grinds against basic human realities. Hiding behind the arcane parking minimum, the underpriced curb in the unaffordable city, the reams of byzantine regulations, and so forth is something that amounts to a sort of revolutionary ideology.
The difficulty with the question Where will I park? isn’t that it is trivial, but that answering it requires relearning a lost conception of what, precisely, a city is. It requires no longer viewing the car as a sort of prosthetic of oneself or others. It requires us to think in ways that might counteract the terror of being trapped in a steel cage with nowhere to pull over and get out.
Or, maybe, not putting ourselves in one so often in the first place.