the downside of parking lots --5/20/2026

20 May 2026

the downside of parking lots --5/20/2026

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Today's selection -- from Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar. There is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person:

“Most Americans, of course, do not have to fight for parking. On the contrary, the combination of urban renewal, public lots, and parking requirements for private development were astonishingly successful at creating ample space to park. By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person. All this asphalt constitutes a kind of ecology unto itself, changing the way air and water and animals interact with human civilization. It changes the way we behave, too. ‘The effect of the cars reaches far beyond the cars themselves,’ wrote Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language, his landmark study of human landscapes. ‘They create a maze of driveways, garage doors, asphalt, and concrete surfaces, and building elements which people cannot use. When the density goes beyond the limit, we suspect that people feel the social potential of the environment has disappeared.’ Perhaps most importantly, making it easier to park did not get rid of the life-draining experience of traffic. On the contrary, it created traffic.

“[Victor] Gruen's [often considered the 'father of the shopping mall'] distress reflected the dawning regrets of city fathers at large, the start of a half-century planning hangover upon awaking to find yourself surrounded by parking lots. Dude, where's my town? By the end of the 1960s, the emerging consensus was that we would never be able to build enough parking to restore the vigor of the prewar metropolis. In retrospect, the focus on parking as the key to ensuring downtown's survival seems perverse. Downtown business interests and the politicians they supported were delusional. The conventional wisdom in Chicago, for example, had been that the 1954 opening of the record-breaking Grant Park Garage would help ensure that the population of the Windy City was not eclipsed by that of Los Angeles. (It did not.)

“In 1957, at a conference in Hartford, the urban historian Lewis Mumford postulated that cities would never be able to build their way out of car traffic. It would progress, he said, ‘until that terminal point when all the business and industry that originally gave rise to the congestion move out of the city, to escape strangulation, leaving a waste of expressways and garages behind them.’ One planner said the cars coming downtown were like coffee–you had to provide the cups (parking garages). Mumford's metaphor was not so neat. Traffic, he said, was like ‘dumping a whole orphanage on an overcrowded and bankrupt home.’

“Even car-friendly engineers never believed that Americans would abandon mass transit the way they did. Frank Turner, the father of the interstate, took the bus to work most days and, as head of the Federal Highway Administration in the late 1960s, would open his meetings at bureau headquarters by asking: ‘How many of you came by bus today?’ In 1953, fewer than half of the fifty-seven thousand people arriving in downtown Atlanta every day came by car, and in their parking assessment that year, city leaders believed that transit ridership would stabilize. But the more parking lots cities built, the more people drove. Transit executives, whose long-held (and widely despised) monopoly was coming to an end, were some of the first to sound the alarm. The general manager of the Cleveland transit system, D. C. Hyde, argued in 1952 that parking was doing the opposite of what its builders believed: ‘Destroying buildings and using valuable land for more and more parking lots and garages hastens decentralization.... It is just as sensible to stop doing things that bring more automobiles into already congested areas as it is to stop buying drinks for a person who is already drunk.’ Like transit officials in Detroit and elsewhere, Hyde reminded his audience that streetcars and buses were by far the most efficient use of precious street space–and were being rendered useless by automobile traffic. The chairman of the board of transportation in New York went one step further, arguing that better transit, not better parking, was the key to halting the suburban ascendance.

“In 1965, the chairman of the Boston finance commission slammed the municipal garage program. Boston had built garages for ‘the bolstering effect they would produce on the city's economy’ by pulling in suburban shoppers, George Berkley wrote, even when ‘no interest was evinced from the private sector.’ Even assuming a generous boost to retail activity, the city was still spending millions subsidizing its garage operating expenses. By invoking eminent domain to seize properties for parking, Boston had forfeited tax revenue; by subsidizing parking spaces, it had forgone transit revenue. Garages, Berkley added, also caused congestion, detracted from the street's ‘scenic appeal,’ and reduced the taxable value of transit-adjacent properties.

“Over the course of the 1960s, this view would enter the mainstream. Transit ridership cratered. Residents, stores, factories, and offices abandoned cities. Urban renewal did damage; highways did more. Intellectuals led by Jacobs and Mumford assailed car-centric planning, and local activists in cities like Baltimore and San Francisco organized ‘freeway revolts’ to stop inner-city expressways. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed to regret what he had wrought with the Interstate Highway Act; ramming the big roads through American neighborhoods had never been his intention. But more than the highways or the slum-clearance projects, it was the need for car storage that ate through American downtowns.

“By 1972, the Detroit City Planning Commission made a downbeat assessment of how the Motor City's downtown had wound up dedicating 74 percent of its land to vehicle movement and storage: ‘The automobile has an insatiable appetite for space. It needs about 300 square feet when stored in its home quarters; 300 square feet when stored at its place of destination; and 600 square feet on its way. It further needs about 200 square feet for those places where it is sold, repaired, and serviced. Thus an automobile needs 1400 square feet of living space. That is equal to the living space of a family unit.’ A surface parking lot was the lowest-cost use of downtown land, but Detroit had so much parking relative to commercial activity by the millennium that even parking lots were being abandoned.

“Parking was just as much of a mess whether you considered it at the scale of your street, your city, or the entire country. Washington paid for the highways, but it did not address the parking. Washington kept track of how many cars were on the road and of how many miles of road we built. But no one kept track of the parking supply, where a car spent almost all its life. Most studies put America's parking supply at a little under a billion spaces. Under the assumption that each space (including egress) takes up 330 square feet, if we were to lay it all flat, the asphalt would cover the entire state of Connecticut–twice. The desert agglomeration of Phoenix has 12.2 million parking spaces, about 3 per person, 4.3 per vehicle, and 6.6 per job, divided more or less evenly between the street, commercial facilities, and home garages. Parking accounts for 10 percent of the manmade landscape in the Valley of the Sun. In Silicon Valley, America's wealthiest and most productive region, parking is 13 percent of the land–not including the curb. According to one estimate, this wasted space cost the region a billion dollars in forgone wages. There are 15 million parking spots in the Bay Area, 2.4 for each car and enough to wrap a parking lane around the planet twice and still have some left over.

“The most valuable land in the United States is in New York City, so you might think it would pay for New Yorkers to count the parking spaces. No one has. Estimates range from 1.3 million to 3 million, a staggering degree of uncertainty–and that's just the number of spaces on the street. In any case, New York is exceptional among U.S. cities for its low number of parking spaces. San Francisco, America's second-densest large city, has 441,541 curb spaces, more than one for every household. When estimates include garage space, the numbers go way up. Philadelphia has 2.2 million parking spots, according to a conservative estimate, or 3.7 for every household. Seattle has 1.6 million spaces, or more than 5 per household. And those three cities are among America's most compact; each has robust public transit and schools and shops within walking distance of most homes. Des Moines has the same number of parking spaces as Seattle, though it is less than one third the size. The Iowa capital has almost 20 parking spaces per household. Many American downtowns, such as Little Rock, Newport News, Buffalo, and Topeka, have more land devoted to parking than to buildings.

“In the mid-aughts, when the team of programmers at Maxis were working on the first new SimCity in a decade, they studied American municipal architecture, politics, and urban design to try to produce a compelling simulacrum. Lead designer Stone Librande used Google Earth to measure his surroundings. The biggest surprise he found was the size of the parking lots. ‘When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store,’ he said. ‘That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.’ In the game, he said, they tried to imagine that the parking was underground: ‘We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.’

A San Jose, California parking lot in 2006

“All this pavement has direct environmental consequences. One is simply the cost of producing it all: the production of cement is responsible for almost 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and lots and garages are part of that total, as is all the infrastructure required to serve the sprawl.

“A second is the loss of natural land to suburban development. America lost 460,000 acres of wetlands, for example, every year in the 1950s and '60s, and 290,000 acres a year in the '70s and '80s. This transition is associated with steep declines in animal density, especially of birds and bugs. This is happening even in the oldest and slowest-growing parts of the country: Massachusetts, for example, developed more land in the last five decades of the twentieth century than in the three hundred years prior to 1950.

“A third is the urban heat island effect. Pavements and roofs absorb energy from the heat-generating elements of urban life, such as buildings and vehicles, which means that cities both warm up faster and cool down slower than natural areas.

“A fourth is flooding. A city is, among other things, a complex new hydrological zone, where water collects and flows in unpredictable ways. In sprawling Houston, fifty years of growing faster than any city in America have sealed a Belgium-sized section of Texas grassland beneath asphalt, concrete, and lawn. Flat as a tile and nearly as resistant to water, Houston is the epicenter of the urban flooding epidemic in the United States. When the stronger and more frequent rainstorms caused by climate change pass over this heavily populated region just inland from the Gulf of Mexico, the water has nowhere to go. Various studies have estimated that ‘impervious’ cover such as parking lots may increase runoff and flooding by up to a factor of ten. In the two decades preceding Hurricane Harvey, greater Houston grew by 2,7 million people–the equivalent of adding an entire city of Chicago to the metro area in just twenty years, mostly on former prairie, farmland, and forest. Approximately 770 square miles were developed in this time, with about half of the land becoming impervious. From 1996 to 2011, impervious surface in Harris County increased by a quarter, and from 1992 to 2010, the area lost almost a third of its wetlands--about sixteen thousand acres. In Brays Bayou, one of the city's major creeks, rainfall has increased by 26 percent over the past forty years--but runoff is up 204 percent. Runoff has tripled because the region has paved its way into an unmapped, manmade floodplain. Subdivisions built upstream are causing hundred-year-old houses downstream to flood for the first time.

“It's a problem that goes far beyond Houston. Cities like Chicago and Saint Louis have dug huge underground tunnels to hold all the rain. In Philadelphia and Seattle, homeowners have adopted rain barrels and cultivated native plants. Everywhere, architects have installed green roofs and city planners have replaced the desiccated pits of street trees with reedy green swales. Even the engineers of parking lots are doing their best, adapting to stormy weather with porous materials like gravel or crushed clay. If you drive to commune with the spirit of American environmentalism at Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau's retreat near Boston, you will leave your car on one of America’s pioneering permeable parking lots.

“A fifth consequence of all this pavement is water pollution. Outside of cities, runoff from roads and parking lots often goes straight into lakes and streams. In the northern part of the country, in the winter and spring, this runoff is contaminated with road salt. In the summer, heated by the smoldering blacktop, it can drain ten to twenty degrees hotter than it fell. In all seasons, it can be contaminated by pollutants such as motor oil, rubber dust from tires, animal droppings, pesticides, air pollution residue, and heavy metals. Jurisdictions are frantically trying to slow this phenomenon; by 2020 they had created more than 1,800 stormwater utilities in the United States that try to treat or divert runoff away from sensitive habitats.

“A sixth is groundwater absorption, the flip side of the flooding. The largest stormwater utility of all is funded by a “driveway tax” in sunny Los Angeles, of all places, which in 2021 put a 2.5-cent annual levy on every square foot of pavement. It is not enough money to encourage greener building practices at scale–but will raise enough across the country to build infrastructure to keep the city’s precious rainstorms from being flushed down its concrete river directly into the Pacific Ocean. That will keep the beaches clean. But it will also, crucially, preserve millions of gallons of stormwater that could be used for nonpotable uses like watering lawns and keeping saltwater out of underground aquifers. During difficult times, it could be filtered and put back into pipes.”