As Boise citizens weigh in on a once-in-a-generation rewrite of the city’s zoning code, there are a select few issues that make the shortlist of concerns: density, movability, and parking. This is why the New York Times bestseller, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, is such a must-read.
“When people talk about letting new neighbors into their neighborhood, when people talked about the city changing and growing, the thing they feared most wasn’t overcrowded classrooms. It wasn't neighbors who spoke a different language at home,” said Henry Grabar, staff writer at Slate and the book's author. “It was losing their parking spaces.”
Grabar visited with Morning Edition host George Prentice to talk about his research, which concludes that the U.S. is under-housed and overparked, and how there’s a tangible shift in how more cities are looking at parking for their future plans.
“There is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.”Henry Grabar
Read the transcript below:
GEORGE PRENTICE: It's Morning Edition. Good morning. I'm George Prentice. Well, aside from the weather, one of our most talked about and argued about and debated about topics is more often than not parking. This bizarre obsession that some of us have with where we leave our cars. Too many parking lots, not enough parking spaces and everything in between. So we are all-in on a new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Henry Grabar is here. He is a staff writer at Slate. He covers housing, transportation, and urban policy. And he is the author of this fascinating new book. Henry Grabar, good morning to you.
HENRY GRABAR: Good morning.
PRENTICE: I'd like to start things off by asking, with your permission. If you could read a passage from your book; and if you have it nearby, I'm going to ask you to turn to page 71. Could you start with the words…”Most Americans…” and share some of that with our listeners?
GRABAR: “Most Americans, of course, do not have to fight for parking. On the contrary, the combination of urban renewal, public lots and parking requirements for private development were astonishingly successful in creating ample space to park by square footage. There is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person. All this asphalt constitutes a kind of ecology unto itself, changing the way air and water and animals interact with human civilization. It changes the way we behave, too.”
PRENTICE: The city of Boise, by the way, is in a fascinating space right now. This week we are beginning public hearings on a massive rewrite of our zoning code. Parking is right in the sweet spot of much of that debate. So, do you have a sense of where American cities are on parking right now, where we are heading and how it's trending?
GRABAR: We are at an inflection point in this countryfor two reasons. For about 70 years, parking has been a requirement as part of the zoning code in almost every American jurisdiction. And that means that if you want to build a restaurant or an apartment building or a bookstore, any anything, you need to include a certain number of parking spaces. And over the last couple of years, we've seen that as people become more aware of the affordable housing affordability crisis and also some of the problems associated with our car-based transportation system, not least of which are the greenhouse gas emissions, but also including traffic congestion and injuries and fatalities. People have decided that maybe all this parking isn't the best idea.
PRENTICE: And yet we are in this space where we have created, if you will, this perceived right that any of us have to parking, whether it be in a public space or a private space. It becomes incredibly personal.
GRABAR: Certainly, there's a great deal of attachment people feel over their own parking spaces, but also over public parking, curbside parking in streets and city neighborhoods. And as I was working on this book, one thing that I thought was pretty interesting was that it seemed like when people talked about letting new neighbors into their neighborhood, when people talked about the city changing and growing, the thing they feared most wasn’t overcrowded classrooms. It wasn't neighbors who spoke a different language at home. It was losing their parking spaces. And the anxiety about parking was the central feature of community meetings city council, civic, city policy, all these aspects where it was discussed, it seemed like parking was often the number one thing.
PRENTICE: And yet this book is filled with surprises. So, talk to me about the process of putting this together.
GRABAR: I think there's two big surprises about parking that might come as a shock to people whose primary thought about parking is Man, it was hard to find parking last night when I went downtown or something like that. The first is that parking takes up an enormous amount of space in this country. Most cities have areas that might be 25, 30% parking by area, and that's just in terms of the parcels that are dedicated exclusively to parking. That doesn't even count all the spaces on the curb, garages that are nestled inside houses and so on. And some studies suggest that we have at least three parking spots for every single car in the United States, which means that the parking supply is never more than 30% full. And because, of course, some of those cars are in motion, it is actually less occupied even than that. So that's the first thing that shocked me about this. There really is enough parking in this country. It's just very poorly managed. And then the second one is how much parking costs. I think there's a perception that because most of the time we park, it's free and our willingness to pay for parking is very low, then parking must cost just about nothing to build. And it's a, you know, sort of a worthless piece of asphalt. Well, it turns out that actually parking is really expensive to build. And especially structured parking inside garages can cost on average in this country $28,000 a space. So, when you require that an apartment building come with a certain number of parking spaces, you are putting an enormous spatial and financial constraint on the builder of that building in the imposition of all that parking.
PRENTICE: And I was fascinated to read how most cities make more money from illegal parking fines than they do from the meters or the garage taxes combined.
GRABAR: Yeah, and that gets to what I was saying about mismanagement, right? Like your parking supply is only as good as your approach to managing it. And one of the ways that we've gone wrong in the last 70 years is that we have forgotten the original function of the parking meter. The parking meter was invented in the 1930s in Oklahoma City as a way of managing this crucial. Point of access. This interface between the street and the buildings, which is the curb. And over the last few decades, I think people have rightly begun to see meters as simply a device for making money and often for making money, not even through the meters themselves, but by the fact that because the meters are underpriced. People [ark illegally can't find a parking spot. They double park. They park near hydrants or something. And then they get these tickets. And so the fact that cities make more money from fines than from meter fees shows me that they're not using the meters the way they're supposed to be used.
PRENTICE: And then there's the technology. The new technology with meters right where we can, without going anywhere near our car, extend our meters. And it almost defeats the purpose of circulating the traffic.
GRABAR: Well, I think this.is great because I think that having the ability to make the meter experience more seamless frees up the original purpose. And let me say a little bit more about what that was. Okay. In Oklahoma City in the 1930, a newspaper editor named Carlton McGee found that the best parking spots in front of the busiest commercial locations would fill up first thing in the morning with people who worked in those stores or in those offices. And they would park there all day long. And when people showed up for their meetings or to have lunch or to go shopping, there was nowhere for them to park. And so what he realized was if we charge just a little bit for those prime parking spaces, people would fall into place according to how long they planned to park for. And the people parking all day would park 4 or 5 blocks away. And for them, a 4 or 5 block walk would not be so meaningful, amortized over the course of their 12-hour workday, whereas the people who were just coming for lunch would be entitled to a space right in front of their destination, even if it meant paying an extra couple of bucks.
PRENTICE: Can we talk about,,, We just think that we are entitled, I guess, to a space and sometimes, like in a blizzard or in a time when there is an event in our community and there's only so much space in front of or near our home and we'll put cones and chairs out in the street to say, “Sorry, don't go here. That's my space”. In spite of the fact it's public space.
GRABAR: It is public space. But I think there is a sense that if you've lived in a neighborhood for long enough that begins to feel like it belongs to you. And I think this is a pretty toxic development. I mean, you know, I, I know it seems goofy, right? It's just a cone in a parking spot that you shoveled out. Right. I understand that. Right. But to me, it hints at a larger idea, which is that people believe that this stretch of curb belongs to them and not just after a snow storm, but also as the neighborhood changes and grows and develops in new ways. This attachment to your right of curbside parking, as somebody who arrived in the neighborhood earlier serves as a reason to oppose change of any kind. And I think that in a lot of cities we're seeing that that attitude has really, really severe consequences. And the most obvious one, of course, is homelessness. And all the time you see new housing projects, even affordable housing projects that are opposed on the grounds that the people who move into them will come and take the neighborhood parking spaces. And and one of the results of that is that we don't really build enough housing in this country. And I think the consequences of that are everywhere to be seen.
PRENTICE: And do you think another big X factor has to be public transportation or the lack thereof? In other words, a robust, efficient public transportation system or something that's hit and miss? For instance, we're talking here in a state that does not send one penny to public transportation, to the Treasure Valley, Boise in particular. Not not a penny.
GRABAR: Yeah, mass transit is certainly a part of it, but I think it it's a bit of a chicken and an egg question because you cannot have you cannot be into create the conditions under which mass transit will succeed unless you first are willing to take parking down a peg on our hierarchy of needs. If you continue to build strip malls where the parcel is 55% parking by land area and you continue to require two parking spaces with every apartment and you continue to place sort of provide a place for free curbside parking, you are never going to create the conditions under which people are going to want to use mass transit. I mean, that can only happen as parking becomes scarce as neighborhoods become denser. Et cetera. So, you do have to sort of take the plunge into parking, light development and cheaper, cheaper types of housing that are built without parking. In order to create a situation where people are going to say, well, you know what? For me, taking the bus is actually more convenient.
PRENTICE: To be clear for our listeners, you do make a point of mentioning the pandemic and how it indeed changed the dynamics of parking. Is it your sense that that leveled the issue somehow or do you think we have rebounded to where we were before?
GRABAR: I think there's two things happening post-pandemic and the first that the first is that in cities with robust mass transit systems, they are facing funding crises brought on by the fact that office workers aren't going downtown. And that in turn threatens the whole system on which car free or car light lifestyles depend. And that's a serious challenge that those cities are going to have to deal with. The other part of it, though, is that if you think about what's available downtown now, downtown has always been a city's greatest concentration of parking, and it has always been a waste because most downtowns are mostly commercial development. There's not anybody living there. And so all that parking is empty after 5 p.m., right? So, if you want to allow people to build lower cost housing with fewer expensive parking spaces built into the buildings, this is a tremendous opportunity because downtown is full now of underused or unused parking spaces that can be taken up by residents who are coming into the neighborhood. So I think you have an opportunity there to take the crisis of downtown and turn it into a tool that allows us to permit a lot more housing right when we need it most.
PRENTICE: Do you think some cities are getting smarter about that and using that unused asset?
GRABAR: Oh, absolutely. One of the examples that I talk about in my book is Los Angeles, which in the early 2000 decided that they were going to stop requiring developers to provide parking when they were renovating historic buildings because they had all these historic buildings that couldn't really be renovated because the parking requirements were so high. And what they found was that the developers built 7000 apartments in eight years. So it was a huge building boom. And where did those people park? Well, it's not like they stopped owning cars. I mean, this is Los Angeles, after all, but they often parked them in an empty commercial garage a couple blocks away. And it turns out that if you give people the option to figure out their own parking solution, instead of just mandating that that parking space come with their apartment, people are pretty savvy and they'll make a decision that works for them. And nobody wants to end up in a place where they have nowhere to park their car. And in this case, downtown Los Angeles was teeming with unused parking, especially after 5 p.m. And I think a lot of these now find themselves in that place.
PRENTICE: And do you think other cities are certainly smaller cities are paying attention to that as far as an opportunity?
GRABAR: Gosh, I hope so. I read an article about Boise a couple of years ago that was focused on a told the story of a woman trying to build a four unit apartment building until she realized that it was going to require eight parking spots. And she suddenly realized that both geometrically and financially, that wasn't going to pencil out. She couldn't fit them on the lot. And so she wound up she wound up building two units instead. And those types of decisions happen every single day in every single American city. And that's how our housing stock has gotten whittled down to the point we find ourselves in now. Parking really has functioned as a drag and a bottleneck on our ability to create new housing, especially affordable housing. Wow.
PRENTICE: And boy, that takes us home because all this week, citizens, here's a rare opportunity to weigh in on a once in a generation zoning code rewrite. And again, parking is right at the center of that. He is Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate. He covers housing, transportation and urban policy. He is the author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Congratulations for that. And Henry Grabar, thanks for giving us some time this morning.
GRABAR: Thanks for having me.
Find reporter George Prentice on Twitter @georgepren
Copyright 2023 Boise State Public Radio
