Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World shines a light on an overlooked piece of most city dwellers’ day-to-day experience. Parking spaces and parking policy flavor every urban environment, and Grabar makes a compelling case illustrating the high and unintended cost of parking. 

The lack of intentional plans and study around parking tore apart urban cores, drove up the cost of housing, and created massive problems with no easy solutions for residents and city administrators alike. 

Favorite Tidbits 

•  Parking operations were/are exceptional money laundering operations for organized crime because of cash pay and loose accounting. Organized crime is likely still running parking operations in large cities on the East Coast. 
• The City of Chicago sold off its parking operation for a $1 billion on a 75-year lease…which is $2 billion under market value, and now the City has to pay a private operator for any parking exceptions. Insane city mismanagement
• Numerous surveys show Boomers want free parking more than they want affordable housing, and parking codes are an incredibly useful weapon to stifle new housing developments. 

Quotes

“Yet a big chunk of life happens in and around the parked car: a thousand interstitial moments, scenes of congregation, jubilation, learning, lust, intrigue, horror, and despair. Outside high schools or concerts or convenience stores, parking lots are places of impromptu assembly. The parking lot is where Americans learn to drive. Virtually all of us eat in a parked car from time to time; Sonic opened 3,500 restaurants around the concept. College students assemble in the parking lot to drink themselves into a stupor before football games.”

“Parking is as absent from the training of architects, planners, and engineers as it is from the culture at large. It’s overlooked even by the governments and institutions that depend on its good order, marooned between the technical domains of transportation and land use.”

“Mostly, America just stopped building small buildings. 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 1971 and 2021.”

“We care more about housing for our cars than we care about housing for ourselves. Period.”

“University of California head Clark Kerr used to say a college president’s job was “providing parking for faculty, sex for students, and athletics for the alumni.”

“We are in a business, unfortunately, where we are mostly hated,” DePinto said. “Even nuclear physicists pay for parking.” Attaining high rank at a university rarely comes with an assigned spot. Instead, the pass is known as a “hunting license.”