Vroom.
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Vroom.
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What would life in America be like if we focused on people instead of cars? One man makes the case that the pursuit of abundant parking is changing our cities and our lives, but that change is within reach.
Who is he? Henry Grabar is a journalist and the author of Jenna Witta: How Parking Explains the World. His writing and research focus on housing, transportation, and the environment.
What’s the big deal? According to Grabar’s work, the United States is facing a crisis of parking excess. And it has more impact on your life than you might think.
- Grabar lists some of the things we sacrificed in order to create parking: front porches, more affordable housing, and a lot of time spent looking for a place in the neighborhood.
- In fact, his research shows that by square footage, there are more houses per car in this country than housing per person. In 2016, Bloomberg reported that more three-car garages were being built than one-bedroom apartments.
- The issue starts with building permits, Grabar said. Almost every new project is required by law to include a minimum number of parking spaces, but the same cannot be said for housing proposals. In fact, for many new constructions, there is a limit on the number of housing units allowed.
Want more about infrastructure and the future? listen Consider This on how the EPA wants millions more electric vehicles on the road.
What is he saying? Grabar spoke with NPR’s Juana Summers to discuss housing ideas for machines rather than humans — and what a better future might look like in his eyes.
On how parking requires resources:
Parking takes up a lot of space, and is very expensive to build. I spoke to a planner who described it to me like this: Everyone comes to the planning department, and they have this project. And it looks like an ice sculpture. And by the time we’ve finished reducing it to make sure there’s enough parking, what you end up with is an ice cube. And I think that sums up the distinction between pre-parking American architecture, which is ornate and interesting and fills the whole lot, and post-parking American architecture, which basically looks like a fast food restaurant surrounded by parking spaces.
On how to improve parking in the United States:
The more parking you create, the more people drive. And the more people drive, the more parking you need to create. We have created this vicious cycle of this kind of ruined urban environment in which it is impossible to do anything but drive. But there is another cycle. There is a virtuous cycle in which you create spaces with less parking, with parking that is not in front of the shop but behind it, where the residences are a little closer between them, where the streets can move more. And in such an environment, it becomes possible not to drive as much.
On what privilege has in living in a walkable community:
I think that’s one thing we’ve seen in the last few decades – these parking-challenged neighborhoods that were slated for demolition in the 50s and 60s have become some of the most expensive places to live in the America. Now, you might say that’s a bigger reason why we want to make sure that those neighborhoods still have ample parking — to make sure that people who can’t afford to live there can still drive there. But to me, free parking in an expensive, walkable neighborhood seems like a pretty bad consolation prize.
I think the focus should be on creating more neighborhoods like that. Why are they in such limited supply? That is the question we should ask ourselves. And the answer is because anyone who is building a new neighborhood is confronted with the obligation to provide thousands and thousands of parking spaces.
Grabar says suburbs like Fort Greene in New York have become the most walkable, but also the most expensive.
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So, what now?
- Grabar says that in order to create more walkable and affordable communities, parking needs to be less of a priority.
- “We’ve effectively made it impossible to build more neighborhoods like Wicker Park, like Santa Monica, like Fort Greene. And it’s no coincidence that those are some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. It’s partly because they’re so rare.”
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