How Parking Destroys Cities
May 19, 2021 by admin
Urban Planning
Lewis mumford was suspicious of parking. “The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar,” he wrote in The City in History, “in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.” Jane Jacobs, who disagreed with Mumford on many counts, agreed here. Parking lots, she said in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, were “border vacuums”: inactive spaces that deadened everything around them.
Mumford and Jacobs published those lines in 1961, when most United States cities were 15 years into an experiment called “minimum parking requirements”: mandates in zoning codes that forced developers to supply parking on-site to prevent curb congestion. In postwar America, development was booming, and neighbors were worried that new residents would make street-parking impossible. Decades later, parking requirements still exist nationwide. In Los Angeles, where I live, new apartment buildings must have at least one parking space per unit; retail buildings need one space per 300 square feet; and restaurants need one space for every 100 square feet of dining area.
Parking minimums take the cost of that space—a cost that should be borne by drivers—and push it onto developers, hiding it in the cost of building. Sometimes this means a project can’t be built at all. At other times, it makes projects more expensive: In downtown L.A., parking usually costs developers more than $50,000 per space to build. Walt Disney Concert Hall, a cultural landmark that is home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cost $274 million to build. Of that total, the underground parkingstructure, which is not a cultural landmark (it’s an underground parking structure), accounted for $100 million.
Because parking requirements make driving less expensive and development more so, cities get more driving, less housing, and less of everything that makes urbanity worthwhile. This process is subtle. Many mayors today declare their support for walkable downtowns and affordable units. But cities are built at the parcel, not from mayors’ podiums. And parcel by parcel, the zoning code quietly undermines the mayors’ grand vision. A commercial requirement of one parking space per 300 square feet means developers will put new retail in a car-friendly, pedestrian-hostile strip mall. And a requirement of one parking space per 100 square feet for restaurants means the typical eating establishment will devote three times as much space to parking as it will to dining. America did not become a country of strip malls and office parks because we collectively lost aesthetic ambition. These developments are ubiquitous because they are the cheapest way to comply with regulations.
For each individual project, parking requirements can seem reasonable; in many cases, they mollify worried neighbors. A zoning board in Boston, for example, recentlyrejected a homeless housing project when nearby residents said it had too little parking. The project might still get built, with fewer units and more parking, and perhaps to the casual observer the difference is small. Over many parcels and many decades, however, the units lost and parking spaces gained add up, and the sum of our seemingly reasonable decisions is an unreasonable, unaffordable, and unsustainable city.
This city, the parking city, can’t have row houses and townhouses that sit flush with one another and come right up to the street. It can’t reuse handsome old buildings that come straight to their lot line, so those buildings stay empty. It can’t tuck quirky buildings onto irregularly shaped parcels, so those parcels stay vacant. (Manhattan’s famous Flatiron Building is an impossibility in a city with parking requirements.) The parking city is one where people drive into or under buildings, rather than walk up to them. It is a city with listless streets, one that encourages vehicle ownership, depresses transit use, and exudes antagonism toward people without cars.
Large portions of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, if they burned down tomorrow, couldn’t be rebuilt, because according to modern zoning, their buildings don’t have “enough” parking. Brownstone Brooklyn, after all, is largely devoid of parking; so is Boston’s famed North End. Zoning defenders might call this point moot, because those places are different—parking can be scarce because walking and using transit are easy. But walking and using transit are easy, in part, because parking is scarce. Transit thrives on density, which parking undermines, and parking and walking don’t mix. The short walk to a Manhattan subway stop will take you past attractive store windows, which come right up to a sidewalk largely uninterrupted by driveways. Walk along an L.A. boulevard, by contrast, and you’ll get a good view not of stores but their parking lots, which means in turn that your walk must be careful rather than carefree—lest a car slide out, cross the sidewalk, and run you over. That pleasant experience comes courtesy of L.A.’s zoning.
None of this is an argument against parking. It’s an argument against required parking. In an age of ostensible concern about global warming, it shouldn’t be illegal to put up a building without parking and market it to people without cars. If neighbors worry that people will move in and park on the street, cities should meter their streets. Curb space is valuable public land. Parking requirements or no, cities will have curb shortages as long as they give the curb away.
There are promising signs of reform. Buffalo, New York, recently abolished its parking requirements. Minneapolis has done the same. San Diego and San Francisco have scaled them back, and California may be on the cusp of rolling them back statewide. In most cities, however, parking requirements still reign unchallenged.
Cars do need parking. But cars need many things, and most get supplied without being mandated. Suppose that tomorrow a mayor proposed minimum gasoline requirements: a set number of fuel pumps on every parcel. Most people would consider that outrageous. They’d observe that the private market supplies gas just fine, that it’s not a big deal to travel a small distance for fuel, and that putting pumps on every parcel would just squander valuable land and encourage driving.
They’d be right. But what’s true of gas is true of parking too. Sometimes the hardest damage to see is the damage we are already doing. America’s disastrous experiment with parking requirements should end.
Associate urban-planning professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/parking-drives-housing-prices/618910/
Recent News
- Art as Daily Experience in Ogden’s Nine Rails Creative District
- Award Spotlight: Salt Lake City Reimagines Nature
- LET’S TALK! AND TALK. AND TALK SOME MORE…
- A Minnesota Judge Throws the Book at Immoral Tax Assessments
- The Great Rebalance
- To Fully Observe, We Need to Walk
- Study reveals that Utah housing prices have increased 200% in two decades
- DOUBLE WHAMMY
- The Office of the Property Rights Ombudsman
- Gov. Cox hails ‘generational’ effort in Utah’s water law history
- Clamor is King
- Utah Is Building a ’15-Minute City’ From Scratch
- Quality of Life – A Dishonest Approach to Change in Neighborhood Character
- Changing the Rules of Zoning
- Growth & Change In the West: 2022 RMLUI Conference Recap
- Vernacular Is Beautiful—If We Would Just Allow It
- APAUT Spring Conference Follow-up and Pictures
- To Airbnb or Not to Airbnb
- The Costs of Wide Streets in the U.S.
- APAUT President’s Message – March 2022
- How should we decide the fate of Utah Lake?
- How the Utah Legislature continues to usurp power from city and county government
- What to know about residential care facilities in your neighborhood
- University of Utah Professor Named the 3rd Most Cited Planning Faculty in the World
- TWO BIG BILLS OUT
- Examining the Impact of London’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing
- May We all Grow Together: Cultivating Support for Utah’s Emerging Planners
- A Commitment to Change
- Okay Boomer
- APAUT Book Discussion: Evicted by Matthew Desmond
- Economic Development After the Rise of Telework
- Follow the 2022 Legislative Session
- After the Bennett Freeze: Planning Within the Navajo Nation
- Flexible Zoning for the New Economy
- Lead and Inspire with Purpose: AICP Code of Ethics Update
- Janet Quinney Lawson – Institute for Land, Water & Air
- Emerging Planners Survey
- Plan to restore Utah Lake met with resistance from Utah County conservation groups
- New Murray projects and guidelines move forward as moratorium ends
- From the Office of Dodge, Wiggle, Hack, Shrug & DeCamp, LLC
- Land Use Training
- Paul Allred: Career Reflections & Valuable Advice – Part 3
- Cache Summit 2021
- WAVE HIKING PERMIT CHANGES ON THE WAY
- Paul Allred: Career Reflections & Valuable Advice (Part 2)
- Paul Allred: Career Reflections & Valuable Advice
- UDOT seeks public input on rural Utah transportation plans
- Electric Vehicles Are on the Rise. Is Your Community Ready?
- Call for Award Nominations
- Fifteen-Minute City
- Remember Olympia Hills?
- The Mountain Lions: these nine cities boomed in the COVID era
- AS PLANNERS, WHY DO WE DO WHAT WE DO, AND WHY ARE WE DOING IT?
- Andrea Garfinkel-Castro, doctoral candidate, “Unpacks” Latino Urbanism
- 11 Ways To Excel Ethically At Every Level
- Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD): core principles
- A Tale of Two Walks: Part 2
- Heat, Health & Equity: The Effects of High Temperatures on Health, and Ways to Mitigate Heat in Our City
- Help Shape Equity Planning Policy
- DO CITIES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO BAN FIREWORKS?
- Air Quality Is Better In Utah Today Than Ten Years Ago, But…
- Layton council adopts water-saving landscaping requirements for most new development
- CAREFUL WHOM YOU CALL A NIMBY
- Considering A National Infrastructure Bank
- HEALTHY UTAH COMMUNITY
- Breaking Down Silos: The Inception of the Utah Rural Coordinating Council
- MAG Transit Studies
- Effective Public Engagement Requires a Lot More Than a Public Hearing
- Is Remote Work Here to Stay?
- SENSITIVE LANDS PLANNING: PROTECTING PUBLIC HEALTH, SAFETY, AND WELFARE FOR GENERATIONS TO COME
- Bond Ratings are for Investors (Not Taxpayers)
- It’s Complicated (Ok, you’ve heard that before, but maybe not for this topic – billboards.)
- The Color of Law APAUT Online Book Discussion
- The American Jobs Plan Will Make Our Infrastructure Crisis Worse
- President’s Infrastructure Proposal Includes Addressing Housing Affordability
- We Cannot Plan from Our Desks
- Rep. Curtis, Sen. Romney introduce bill to advance the Bonneville Shoreline Trail
- Utah could lose out on billions in federal funding for passenger rail
- The Cure for the Wasatch Front’s Housing Crisis: More Affordable Homes Between North Salt Lake and Lehi
- Ambassador Program Update
- Local Needs Among Utah’s Multicultural Communities During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Campus Mobility Hub Study – APAUT Award Winner
- Does Building New Housing Reduce Overall Housing Costs?
- Layton Forward – Layton City’s Comprehensive General Plan Update
- Spring Conference Postponed, Book Club, President’s Message
- Presidents Message
- Lehi Connectivity Standards – A Stronger Urban Fabric
- Housing First; Cars Last
- UDOT Bike Infrastructure Data Collection Project
- The Great Horizon Year of 2020
- Density is a Loaded Term
- New Study on Housing Affordability Focuses on Local Land Use Practices
- There is no such thing as ‘smart sprawl’
- Legislative Interim Committee – What You Need To Know
- A bipartisan opportunity to rebuild American infrastructure
- Zoning laws aren’t the only things hindering Utah’s housing market
- Congratulations to the APAUT 2020 Award Winners
- State and Local Governments Must Further Address Housing Affordability
- The Status of Women Leaders in Government – Utah Cities and Towns
- We have to do something about Utah’s housing crisis
- What the Wasatch Front needs is more basement apartments
- Cities Don’t Need High-Rises to Become Affordable
- Away from the bustle: Covid-19 and the end of commuterland
- The Color of Law: A Book Review
- (Contract) Zoning by Agreement in Utah
- Zoning Reform Is Not Leftism
- “The Great Localization” COVID-19 and Opportunities for Communities
- Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis
- Zoning Reform – English Style
- 3 Stories Show the Flip Side Of Zoning Reform
- APAUT Call to Action
- The Politics of Housing Affordability
- Zoning, Affordability, and COVID-19
- Where do we go NOW!? – President’s Message
- An Interview With Ashley Cleveland, MCMP
- The Importance of Sense of Place in our Communities
- An Answer to the Suburban Growth Dilemma
- Homeless to Housed Fall 2019
- A New Initiative: Children’s Walks
- Awards Spotlight: Water Quality Planning Toolkit for Utah Communities
- All About Storm Drain Utility Fees – Video