parking killed cities--8/26/26

26 Aug 2026

parking killed cities--8/26/26

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Today's selection -- from Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar. The requirements enacted in America’s downtowns for overly plentiful parking helped drive out the things that citizens love about their cities:

“In 2017, a lawyer named Mark Vallianatos conceived a tour of Los Angeles he called ‘Forbidden City.’ It sounded mysterious, perhaps even indecent, but it was something like the opposite: an architecture tour with a heavy dose of regulatory history. The premise was simple. Los Angeles banned itself.

“The Forbidden City was not a distant imperial fortress; it was all around. The familiar houses and apartment blocks of neighborhoods like Hollywood, Koreatown, and Mid-City; gated courts of stucco cottages grouped around grassy courtyards; handsome two-story houses in the style of old Spanish missions or Cape Cods, split into two (duplexes), three (triplexes), or four apartments (fourplexes). Hollywood apartment towers, with their schlocky appropriations of French chateaus or Chinese pagodas. Elegant, Bauhaus-inspired midrise apartment buildings. The Forbidden City is the everyday architecture of Los Angeles neighborhoods–the glamorous and the mundane, essential, quintessentially LA. All of it was illegal to build, because none of these buildings had enough parking spaces.

“On a warm February day in 2020, I joined Vallianatos for a Forbidden City reprise. ‘We banned the parts of Los Angeles that people love the most,’ Vallianatos said, walking up the hill into Highland Park, an early streetcar suburb near Pasadena. Dressed in a natty green suit and thick architect glasses, the square-faced Vallianatos looked a little out of place in the California sunshine, and a lot out of place as he skulked around gates and peeked over box hedges. He was looking for electrical meters and mailboxes. That's how you figure out how many apartments sit behind a facade; it's how you know when what looks like a single-family home is in fact a fourplex. He approached a two-story house with a light-blue coat of paint behind neatly trimmed bushes. Five dials. Five apartments. Evidence that this particular building would be illegal to build in 2020. Circling around back, it was clear why: three measly parking spaces. And built for the small cars Angelenos drove in 1923, when the first tenants moved in. The tripartite garage looked like a toolshed.

Parking, 5 cents a day, Hollywood, United States, 1949

“If you wanted to build a five-unit building in Highland Park in 2020, you had to build at least five parking spaces (for five studio units), eight parking spaces (for five one-bedroom apartments), or ten parking spaces (for five two-bedroom apartments). Given those stipulations, on a lot this size, you wouldn't be able to build this building at all. It was an architectural fossil; the environment that gave it life was long gone.

"The overall theme is that most of these older neighborhoods in LA have a mix of smaller apartments and houses," Vallianatos went on. A dog barked, birds chirped, a drill whined in the warm air. Another rehab under way in the Forbidden City. One consequence of prohibiting such buildings from being built today is that the old ones are constant targets for luxury renovations. We passed an austere white-walled synagogue–no parking, forbidden–and paused below the scalloped red roof of a Mission Revival bungalow court with ten apartments around a manicured garden. Forbidden. In a new home in Los Angeles in 2020, as in virtually every other city and suburb in America, a parking space was as obligatory as a toilet. In fact more so. A two-bedroom apartment did not require two toilets. But it did require two parking spaces.

"'We banned them through parking before we banned them through zoning,' he said wistfully. 'It's the city that could have been.' Vallianatos's specialty was policy, not architecture. To him, the shape of buildings was a product of law first–and taste a distant second. (Shortly after we spoke, he read The Great Gatsby–is it just me, he thought, or is this book all about housing and cars?) Around the time Mark gave the first Forbidden City tour, he cofounded a group called Abundant Housing LA, which advocated for local housing growth–a contested subject, even as prices skyrocketed and homelessness increased. By day, he worked as an executive at the county transportation agency, LA Metro. It's no wonder he got interested in parking. Parking lies at the intersection of transportation and land use, a bastard field of study shunned by both architects and traffic engineers.

“Most people in Los Angeles drive, of course. But by making parking spots as obligatory as bathrooms, the city–like virtually every jurisdiction in America–forced housing to bear the costs of driving. Most everything we have built in this country since the I960s can be seen through Vallianatos's glasses: it is the architecture of parking requirements, and it is all around us.

“In 1991, the journalist Joel Garreau wrote a book called Edge City about the suburban, highway-adjacent clusters of offices, retail, and hotels that make up the typical setting for white-collar labor in America today. He spoke to hundreds of developers about why these places looked the way they did, and what it meant. ‘The measure of time, individualism, and civilization, they repeat, is parking.’ Developers had two laws that explained ‘just about everything in the physical arrangement of Edge City’:

“Putting those two axioms together with the high cost of building parking structures, Garreau explained why all these Forbidden City buildings were missing from postwar American architecture: they had vanished into what the apartment builder Payton Chung called the Valley of High Parking Requirements. On one edge of the valley were single-family homes, fast-food restaurants, low-slung commercial box stores-all the familiar building types that could be comfortably ‘parked’ at ground level, even if parking took up 60 or 70 percent of the property. On the other edge of the valley were high-density, high-value properties like offices, hotels, malls, and condos that could afford to build structured (or even subterranean) parking garages. Anything in between was impossible to build because it was impossible to park–surface parking would take up too much room; structured parking would cost too much to build. The Valley of High Parking Requirements was barren ground where nothing would grow. Ginger Hitzke's project in Solana Beach was in the valley. So was Pastor Nathan Carter's storefront church. And the fishermen's grocery store that Daniel McKenna-Foster had to shut down in Kodiak, Alaska.

“Anybody who wanted to build a small apartment building in the United States in 2020 needed to confront a multivariate financial geometry problem that began with how many parking spaces you could fit on a lot. The size, quantity, and shape of the housing followed from there. Sometimes, with just one parcel, it was hard to make anything work at all. Buy the lot next door and you could unlock some economies of scale–like a driveway with stalls on each side. Buy four and–well, most small-time developers couldn't afford four, even if you could find four buildable, adjacent properties. In any case, parking was the immovable object at the heart of neighborhood architecture, not just socially, as in Solana Beach, but technically as well. ‘Parking is like eggs,’ one builder said. ‘You can't buy just one, you have to buy a whole floor .... If you have to build one-and-a-half floors, you'll build two floors.’

“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.

“What apartments did get built were clustered in megastructures whose design was dictated by parking placement. One popular model is the ‘Texas donut,’ in which a ring of apartments encircles a five- or six- story parking garage (this is the type of building you see in the cool neighborhoods of growing cities). Another is the ‘parking podium tower,’ like Chicago's corncob Marina City, in which the housing sits atop the parking.

“For mixed-used or commercial properties, the calculus is simpler, because so much more parking is required. There is less room to negotiate. Take the core of any small American town. Central parcels here were originally developed as commercial storefronts facing the sidewalk with offices or even housing above. Put twenty or thirty of them side by side and, voilà, Main Street.

“But if you wanted to open a shop on one of those lots in an American city in 2020, you needed to provide 1,200 square feet of parking for every 1,000 square feet of interior commercial space. More than half your lot was parking now. If you wanted to build a two-story shop, two thirds of your lot had to be parking. If you wanted to build three stories, the footprint of your building shrank to barely more than a quarter of the lot, a totem in a field of asphalt.

“For restaurants, the math was much worse. In most cities, ten parking spaces were required for every 1,000 square feet of restaurant, so your classic Main Street lot of 7,500 square feet could support a restaurant of only 1,500 square feet. Eighty percent of the lot was parking now. The developer Mott Smith, who works in Los Angeles, told me about his trips to present new projects at community meetings in the 2010s. ‘I had some architect friends, and we’d show the neighbors a picture from the community of some beautiful, zero-lot-line 1930s building with a café and a caption saying, 'What you want.' Then we'd spend the next hour explaining why the requirements make it so unless you're building a Taco Bell, you need not apply.’ Fast-food architecture–low slung, compact structures on huge lots–is really the architecture of parking requirements. Buildings that repel each other like magnets of the same pole. Parking minimums were like ‘dark energy,’ Don Shoup wrote, that hidden force that powers the expansion of the universe. Parking minimums powered the expansion of the city.

“In 1968, the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown heralded this new phase of American architecture with a contrarian, pop appraisal of Las Vegas as a city worth studying, loving, even emulating. Their comparison of a supermarket parking lot to the Château de Versailles was a Slate pitch of its day:

“The A&P parking lot is a current phase in the evolution of vast space since Versailles. The space which divides high-speed highway and low, sparse buildings produces no enclosure and little direction. To move through a piazza is to move between high enclosing forms. To move through this landscape is to move over vast expansive texture: the megatexture of the commercial landscape. The parking lot is the parterre of the asphalt landscape. The patterns of parking lines give direction much as the paving patterns, curbs, borders, and tapis verts give direction in Versailles; grids of lamp posts substitute for obelisks and rows of urns and statues, as points of identity and continuity in the vast space.

“And the Las Vegas they adored was downright urban by the standards of millennial exurban sprawl.”