Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (2023)
Free parking causes almost everything wrong with American cities
The late Pope Francis may have been the most quotable head of the Catholic Church in living memory. His line about how "the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” certainly had a way of making the rounds every few years on Twitter. Another of his pointed observations on the state of the world appears as the epigraph of the first chapter of Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. "The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape." The following 350 or so pages constitute an expansion on that theme, and specifically on the part about parking areas, the overabundance of which has done so much to reduce the quality of life in cities — across the world, yes, but most visibly in the United States of America.
I admit that, when Paved Paradise came out two years ago, I wondered if the world really needed another book on that subject. After all, there was already The High Cost of Free Parking, chef d'oeuvre of Donald Shoup, the UCLA urban planning professor interviewed for every single article, explainer video, and podcast about the negative effects of excessive legally mandated parking infrastructure on the built environment. I even interviewed him on my own podcast, Notebook on Cities and Culture, which I started up soon after moving to Los Angeles in the early twenty-tens. As any fan of Shoup (or "Shoupista," as they call themselves online) will tell you, his book is far more readable and entertaining than an 800-page statistic-laden tome about parking policy has any right to be. As is the work, so was the man, who continued patiently and humorously articulating his diagnosis of the problem and his recommended solutions right up until his death this past February. Given that he was in his mid-eighties, the need for a successor had presumably been clear for some time, and in any case, The High Cost of Free Parking, originally published twenty years ago, hadn't had a revision since 2011.
Paved Paradise won't supplant The High Cost of Free Parking, but then, its lack of intent to do so could hardly be more apparent. One can trace the basic difference between the two books to Grabar's being a journalist and Shoup's having been an academic. In addition to its arguments succinctly and plainly stated — over and over again, from every possible angle, and through a host of simple but vivid metaphors often having to do with junk food — The High Cost of Free Parking also offers, to those in need of them, graphs, diagrams, a good deal of quantitative research data, and even economic formulae. Paved Paradise succeeds, and impeccably, according to the rules of reportage, explaining the relevant ideas from urban policy, development, and economics to the lay reader between the personal stories of various interviewees, most of whom advocate in one way or another for a world with fewer vast, mostly empty lots and garages, whose reasonable supply of parking is efficiently allocated by market prices. This cast of characters includes Shoup, of course, but also a few other figures of whom American urbanists may have heard.
In one chapter, Grabar writes of Mark Vallianatos, a Los Angeles lawyer who gives what he calls "Forbidden City" tours on the side. "It sounded mysterious, perhaps even indecent, but it was something like the opposite: an architecture tour with a heavy dose of regulatory history." Vallianatos' tours visit Melrose Place-style "gated courts of stucco cottages grouped around grassy courtyards," "Hollywood apartment towers, with their schlocky appropriations of French châteaus or Chinese pagodas," "handsome two-story houses in the style of old Spanish missions or Cape Cods" split up into several units, "elegant, Bauhaus-inspired midrise apartment buildings," and a variety of other "quintessentially LA" structures — all of them now illegal to construct, because they lack the number of parking spaces that have since come to be required by law. Though I left Los Angeles a decade ago, I've never surrendered my fascination with the city, nor my need to understand how it's taken what shape it has. Last I returned for a visit, I invited Vallianatos out for coffee, and we discussed, among many other things, how the relatively modest fifteen-story "mixed-use" tower in Seoul in which I then lived could never be built in Los Angeles. Why? Too little parking.
To some readers, that may not sound especially objectionable. They might argue that, given that Los Angeles is, as everyone knows, a "car city," it's only natural that its ever-growing population has resulted in an ever-increasing number of automobiles, and thus an ever-worsening lack of places to park. To alleviate that condition, older building types with little space to do so must be displaced by newer building types with more of it. What Paved Paradise and The High Cost of Free Parking clarify is that the very form of the "car city" (in the particular case of Los Angeles, a city "both denser than other car-oriented cities and more car-oriented than other dense cities," as Shoup memorably puts it) hasn't resulted from the car itself, but from the assumption, hardened into law, that parking should be free. Most American cities dictate a minimum number of parking spaces that must be included in each new building, according to the use of that building. Scientific-sounding but wholly arbitrary, that number usually exceeds the number of spaces that would be occupied at the busiest imaginable moment, assuming everyone is parking in them with no charge.
Where these assumptions took hold, developers came to find that "anything between sprawl and high-density development was impossible to build because it was impossible to park" — i.e., to meet the parking requirements. "Surface parking would take up too much room; structured parking would cost too much to build." In the case of housing, "situations like this draw builders into a vicious cycle: Parking garages cost so much money that developers must raise rents. To justify high rents, developers get into an arms race to provide amenities — roof gardens, cycling studios — which add costs. And then before you know it, everything is a 'luxury' development." It's an instructive exercise to ask suburban Americans to guess what a single space in a parking garage costs to build; few will land within the range of $20,000 to $100,000 (early two-thousands dollars) quoted in The High Cost of Free Parking. Grabar describes Shoup's calculations confirming that "the annual American subsidy to parking was in the hundreds of billions of dollars," invisible but extracted nearly everywhere. "You paid for it in the rent, in the check at the restaurant, in the collection box at church. It was hidden on your receipt from Foot Locker and buried in your local tax bill," to say nothing of electricity costs and environmental damage. "But you almost never paid for it when you parked your car."
Parking requirements were a major cause — perhaps the major cause — of the much-lamented decline of the American downtown in the decades after the Second World War. In Los Angeles, in fact, they started going into effect even before the war. "At the time, they were considered an incremental approach to an urgent problem. By the millennium, however, those laws had helped give the Los Angeles Central Business District an astounding 107,000 parking spots — the highest parking garage density in the world," though with nothing much left to do for anyone who parked there. "Downtown Los Angeles had, after Chicago, the country’s greatest concentration of early-twentieth-century architecture, but the sum of the buildings was little more than a set for movies like Armageddon." Only with the passage in 1999 of the city's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (treated extensively by both Shoup and Grabar, the latter of whom profiles one of its chief architects), which made it possible to convert those classic, hollowed-out buildings to officially "under-parked" residential uses, did it start to publicly become clear just what had been holding back the long-hoped-for downtown revival.
Los Angeles may offer a prime example of both the parking-induced death and parking-light rebirth of the American “inner city,” but I wouldn't want to give the impression that these books pick on it. Despite its reputation, it's far from the most car-dependent city in America, and in any case, even much less car-dependent cities exhibit grave parking-induced neuroses of their own. Take Grabar's hometown of New York, with its long-standing combination of free curb parking and "alternate-side" regulations that results in the city's drivers seldom getting in their cars except to briefly move them on certain mornings in compliance with the law, then park them right back again in the space they'd previously occupied. ("Free curb parking is like rent control for cars," writes Shoup, and the analogies between the strange New Yorker behaviors incentivized by both conditions draw themselves.) Despite growing up in the nineties, I never did tune in to Seinfeld, which, though shot in Los Angeles, brought an almost (but not quite) parodically heightened New York sensibility into the mainstream. Still, I've known for decades George's comparison of paying for parking to visiting a prostitute, which might as well be an articulation of foundational belief of American urban planning: "Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?"
That line is quoted in both The High Cost of Free Parking (a book with a wholly unexpected density of pop-culture references) and Paved Paradise. So, unsurprisingly, is the Joni Mitchell hit from which the latter takes its title — and of which, in truth, I've never been a big fan. Tom Lehrer described "Little Boxes" as "the most sanctimonious song ever written," and to my mind, "Big Yellow Taxi" isn't far out of that league, though both do make undeniable criticisms of U.S. cities. "One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance," writes Grabar. "We take our vacations to places where we can get out of the car — Charleston, Disneyland, Manhattan, Miami Beach, Rome. Housing prices reflect the desirability of such destinations, making anything but a brief stay off-limits to all but a moneyed few." Disneyland aside, those places are all packed with cars as well, the key difference being that they haven't been deformed in accommodation of the car. That even Americans prefer such environments is reflected in the costs of those environments, obscured though that preference is by how so much of their country has been rigged to develop: "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."
Seoul, where I now live, hasn't been subject to the same forces. While the complaints one sometimes hears about this city's aesthetics aren't always without cause, they're never due to parking infrastructure having eaten away at its urban fabric "like moths devouring a lace wedding gown" (to use a phrase, quoted by Grabar, originally from Mark C. Childs' Parking Spaces: A Design, Implementation, and Use Manual for Architects, Planners, and Engineers). The garages I've seen here tend to be located down back streets, fairly tall but also extremely narrow because they function like storage elevators: you give the attendant your license plate number, and he calls your car down to the ground level. Seoul’s surface lots, which would hardly merit the name in America, tend to max out at four or five spaces, though some can be made to hold more than twice that many cars through creative double-parking. What makes that a viable strategy is the presence, in practically every automobile's window, of a sign bearing the owner's phone number: if you've blocked in someone who needs to get out, they simply call you and you come back out to move your car, no harm, no foul. (My first sight of those phone-number signs, at least after someone told me what they were for, drove home that I really had come to a different society.)
What Seoul lacks are parking meters. This will be a conspicuous absence to any visiting American who attempts to drive here, though for many, not a bothersome one. The everyman's abomination of the parking meter stretches nearly all the way back to its invention in the Oklahoma City of 1935, a story told by both Shoup and Graber. Yet as their books argue, the American city's path to salvation runs through its coin slot — or its credit card IC chip sensor, or some even easier payment system yet to be widely implemented. In The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup proposes parking meter networks whose pricing changes in real time according to demand, calibrated so to keep their spaces about 85 percent full in total, so that anyone who needs to park can always do so without "cruising" (i.e., circling around and around for an opening). At the time of the book's first publication in 2005, this would have seemed an outlandish notion in most parts of the country, but it seems to have gradually caught on. Key to such schemes' public acceptance, Shoup thoroughly explains, is their use to fund improvements and services in the surrounding area. He illustrates this with a real-life tale of two neighborhoods, Westwood Village and Old Pasadena. The former, once the red hot center of young Los Angeles, had fallen into a desuetude out of which it just couldn't climb, no matter how much of itself it sacrificed to expensive garages; the latter turned from a quasi-ghost town into the liveliest part of Pasadena thanks to its installation of parking meters and local reinvestment of their revenue.
This story has since been retold in Jeff Speck's Walkable City, among other urbanist texts — including, come to think of it, the book on Los Angeles I myself have been working on for a while now. More than a decade ago, when I published online an early version of its essay on Old Pasadena, Shoup himself sent me an e-mail asking me to make sure to send him a copy of the final product as soon as it came out. That I didn't get it done in his lifetime (due in part to distraction by other cities, Seoul included) will remain a matter of some regret. But I do believe that the man will live on as a kind of patron saint of parking reform, his gospel preached by Grabar and many other public-facing acolytes. The Shoupian message is, after all, a hopeful one: the false beliefs about parking that have deadened American cities are correctable, the reforms that consequently follow are straightforward, and if implemented correctly, they'll unlocked an enormous urban potential currently buried under huge tracts of white-lined asphalt. Shoupistas everywhere can take satisfaction in knowing that he lived to see his ideas accepted by more than a few city governments and urban planning organizations. If he'd stuck around just a little longer, he'd also have witnessed the election to the papacy of Leo XIV, the first pope from Chicago: the rare American city to declare not a parking minimum, but a parking maximum.
See also:
Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (2008)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.