In his new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, Henry Grabar, a staff writer for Slate, argues that this fundamental, insatiable need to find space for cars “is the primary determinant of the way the place you live looks, feels, and functions.”
As Grabar chronicles, the choices that many cities and towns have made in service of parking have come with serious downsides: Homes are less affordable; pleasant, walkable communities are illegal to build (and thus in painfully high demand where they do exist); streets are more dangerous; and the emissions from our cars are destabilizing our climate.
These aren’t new complaints. In 1961, the historian Lewis Mumford wrote that “the assumed right of the private motor car to go any place in the city and park anywhere is nothing less than a license to destroy the city.” And in more recent years, the American urbanist movement—a loose constellation of civic-minded individuals, advocacy organizations, and elected officials interested in street safety, housing and land-use policy, bicycling, and transit—has bemoaned them all.
As someone who spent almost a decade in New York City government with a front-row seat on many such tragicomic urbanist fights over bus lanes, bike lanes, new housing, electric vehicle charging, curbside dining, and safer streets, Grabar’s basic thesis rings true to me: Parking is at the core of many critical questions about how we live and how we get around.
When Mumford was writing in the 1960s, American communities were nearing the end of a half-century transformation to accommodate and embrace mass car ownership. Many people experienced this transformation as a dizzying freedom. Suddenly, after generations where mobility was limited to the distance that could be traveled on foot, by horse or carriage, or on the fixed routes offered by streetcars and trains, cars offered a new level of freedom and comfort.
The federal government, cheered on by the titans in the automotive, steel, oil, and concrete industries, poured money into the interstate highway system, as well as subsidies for detached single-family homes on the outskirts of established cities and their streetcar suburbs.
To accommodate the cars, cities tore down apartment buildings, old commercial buildings, and even whole neighborhoods in order to build surface parking lots and parking garages. Meanwhile, people on foot became “pedestrians” and got shunted to narrowed sidewalks. New municipal laws required that all new buildings—from homes to stores to office buildings—be built with ample attached parking, making it harder and less pleasant (or impossible) to get from place to place without a car.