Booked on Planning

Paved Paradise

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 19

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Ever wonder why a “simple” parking spot can decide what gets built on your block, how long your commute takes, or whether your favorite cafe survives? We sit down with Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, for a live episode recording that reveals how curb space, parking minimums, and meter policy quietly shape housing, transit, local business, and city budgets. Henry takes us from the horse‑and‑wagon era to modern dynamic pricing, connecting the dots between what seems like a technical detail and the urban life we all experience.

If you care about vibrant neighborhoods, small business turnover, housing options, or safer, greener travel, this is a candid, myth‑busting look at the hidden system running beneath every city. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend who swears there’s “never any parking”—then tell us how your city should use one block of curb.

Show Notes:

  • Further Reading: 
    • Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazán, Joe McReynolds
    • Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen
    • Shade: the Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam Bloch
  • To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Stephanie Rouse:

Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Henry Graber on his book, Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. This was our second live podcast recording ever. We did one a few years ago with author Alana Bruce, but for our fall APA Nebraska workshop, we had Henry Graber out to talk about his book. We did a live podcast recording and he wrapped up our whole day, which was all surrounding the world of parking with a keynote.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah. And when Stephanie says this was our second live interview, she's wrong, this was my first live interview. She did interview Alana on her own a few years ago. So it was very interesting to just like a little insight into the background of what we had to do. We had to figure out what microphones we were going to use and how we were going to set everything up. And it was an interesting experience. So you guys will have to let us know if you like these live interviews.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yes, I will say it is much less stressful and more fun having a partner in crime up there with me doing the interview together. So it was a better experience. And I think we have the audio down a bit more from that episode. If you go back and compare the two, I think they are uh light years apart in quality.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Which is fine. It's fine that our first attempt didn't go super great. So Henry's book talks about the history of parking and then really how parking has shaped the entire way we design and develop in the United States. And I thought it was really like you think parking and you think, wow, this is gonna be like a really dry book, but I thought it was really funny.

Stephanie Rouse:

I'd agree. Yeah, he had a lot of interesting stories in there. Like there's a whole section on theft in parking uh that we talk about a little bit in the episode.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah. Who would have thought that theft in parking was a real thing? You know, these days you drive up to a parking garage, you hit a button, you get a ticket, you leave, you pay with your credit card. I never thought about how previous to the technological advancement that it would be such a cash-based industry.

Stephanie Rouse:

Reading it, you could see it was a very great companion book to Choop's book and also the Choop Doctrine that we just talked about in a previous episode, but it kind of builds on that and really rounds out this whole idea of parking management.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah. And with that, let's get into our conversation with author Henry Gribar on his book, Pape Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.

Stephanie Rouse:

So a lot of you know that we run Booked on Planning, a podcast that is now in its fourth season, wrapping up here. We've done a live podcast interview one other time at a workshop with Alana Proust a couple years ago. So this is only the second time we have in-person interview. I think we've learned a lot since then. So this will hopefully be a much better audio once we publish it. But we have with us today Henry Gabar, a journalist, author, and researcher who writes about cities since 2016. He's been staff writer at Slate, where he writes Metropolis column with a focus on housing, transportation, and the environment. He was the editor of The Future of Transportation Anthology by Metropolis Books in 2019, and the author of Pave Paradise, How Parking Explains the World, which is what we're here to talk about today. It was named Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker and New Republic. His story about immigrants in the meatpacking town of Fremont, Nebraska, was a finalist for the 2018 Livingston Award for Excellence in National Reporting by a journalist under 35. And his work has also been recognized by the National Association of Real Estate Editors and the Writers Guild of America. He was a 2024 Lobe Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His next book, The Story of the Struggle to Build an Apartment Building, is provisionally titled Under Construction and is under contract with Penguin Press, which hopefully we'll be able to have you on to talk about that book when it's published.

Henry Graber:

Don't hold your breath.

Stephanie Rouse:

So, first question: how did you get into the very niche? And as Donald Schuop has been known to say, the boring field of parking.

Henry Graber:

Well, for many years I was and continue to be a journalist writing about city issues. And it seemed to me that parking was a subject that kept cropping up no matter what the story I was writing was about. So I would be writing a story about affordable housing and parking would come up as this enormous obstacle. We'll be writing about bus rapid transit, parking again, big obstacle. Municipal finance, parking would come up, policing, parking would come up. And then finally, I think the one that really drove it home for me was visiting Houston after Hurricane Harvey in 2018 and talking to people who said that their houses were flooding because of development happening upstream. And in some cases, they could point to particular parking lots that had been built that had changed the stormwater runoff conditions in their neighborhood. And I had this kind of revelation that I was in this metropolis where the houses that flooded didn't correspond to FEMA flood maps at all. It corresponded to this giant man-made infrastructure of parking lots and storm drains that we had built. And so this kind of realization that, you know, we're in this landscape where parking is such a significant feature of the urban environment that it's actually shaping just about everything we touch.

Jennifer Hiatt:

You state in the book that the parking problem is as old as the road itself. Can you give us a quick overview of the history of the parking problem?

Henry Graber:

Well, so you find some references to quote-unquote parking going back to Mesopotamia. But what they're really talking about is just people obstructing the roadway for one reason or another. And one of the punishments that gets mentioned is impalement. So parking tickets, not so bad after all. But I think you have to remember that up to you know 1900, everything in the roadway is being pulled by an animal. And so when we think about parking regulation up to the invention of the automobile, we're thinking about something that really concerns living animals. And so one of the ways in which that obviously the enforcement of that is a lot easier because people don't just leave their horses outside unattended for days at a time downtown. And one of the ways that that comes down to us today is in the etymology of the word pound. So, like a pound is where you'd go get your car if it was towed, but a pound is also where you might get a dog. Um, and that comes from this kind of shared history of unclaimed property where anything that was found in the city would be brought to the pound. And that was mostly animals, uh, although starting in obviously with the invention of the Model T, it came to include automobiles as well.

Stephanie Rouse:

I think that was one of the interesting points was we've always been dealing with parking, and there was uh a desire to have hitching posts in front of your businesses so that you could park your horse right in front of the business, and today it's just transferred over to vehicles where we need parking right in front of our businesses so people can park and and walk right in.

Henry Graber:

Yeah, one interesting change is that prior to right when horses were a thing, people considered parking a real nuisance use. They really did not want stables to be in their neighborhoods because you had all these horses, all this traffic, all this manure, obviously. And then obviously we do a 180 when it comes time to think about automobile parking, and all of a sudden it's something that we want and in fact legislate be included in in every single uh building.

Stephanie Rouse:

So by now most planners have understood or heard the concept that adding more vehicle lanes induces more driving. But you point out in the book that adding more parking induces more driving. How is this relationship?

Henry Graber:

So I think it's it's kind of counterintuitive because if you go back to the mid-century city, there's this idea that traffic is a huge problem. The city is choking on congestion, and the root of that congestion is that there isn't enough space to park. And if we could just create enough off-street parking facilities, we could vacuum the traffic off the streets and clear the way for commerce and mobility and everything else. That proves very difficult, not only because the rates at which people use automobiles continues to rise and rise and rise, but also because you begin to destroy more and more of the urban environment to create parking lots. And so you create an environment in which people actually can't get around in the ways that they used to, transit, walking, biking become dangerous or simply inefficient because the density of the urban environment has been has fallen as we sort of chip away at it with these various parking facilities. And there is research that backs this up that in fact more parking creates more traffic and not the other way around. There's a study of these, I think, seven or nine small cities done by Chris McCahill and Norman Garrick, where they tracked the creation of parking spaces between 1960 and 1980, and then the mode share in the following two decades. And what they found was that the more parking that was built in those earlier decades, the more likely mode share was to shift subsequently towards people driving. And so, in fact, it was causation that parking was pushing people into using cars rather than just correlation, parking emerging to meet the demand of people in their automobiles.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Around 580,000 people work in parking every day. I think people would really be surprised to find that out. Who are the major corporations behind parking and what role do they play in shaping the parking landscape?

Henry Graber:

It's a question I get a lot because I think we are so accustomed in so many aspects of our life to find these kind of big corporate entities who are pouring lots of money into whatever field it is that they're in, and they're responsible for shaping, you know, the way that beer gets labeled or um, you know, the way that a cell phone contract gets written or something like that. And in the case of parking, there are big companies that often manage big city airport parking facilities, stadiums, and so forth, but they're usually not owning those facilities. They're mostly managing. And so when you think about who is actually controlling the parking stock, it's often pretty local. The owner of a building will also own the garage inside it. Or you might have speculators, land bankers who are sitting on these downtown parking lots waiting for decades until they decide it's finally time to sell that for a development site. And of course, the number one sort of holder of parking is probably just the American people in the form of their single-family homes with their three-car garages and their apron driveways. So when we think about the parking stock, I think it's a case where there are these big companies, um, but they're not really driving policy. To the extent that they are involved in reform, it's kind of interesting because one thing that they do share with these parking reformers, who we'll talk about in a moment, is that they have this awareness that parking costs money to provide. Um, it's not generally profitable to build a parking garage from scratch as a kind of business startup idea. You don't see people doing that. And that's one of the reasons that, again, these companies are mostly managing garages. The garages have been built by people who think it's necessary for their business or because it's required by law, and then they turn it over to somebody to get the revenue out of it on a managerial basis. But you're never gonna pay for the capital cost of construction by charging people uh a dollar an hour.

Stephanie Rouse:

And in your book, you point out that the history of parking is in part the history of theft. It's a very interesting section. Uh, how are the two tied together?

Henry Graber:

Well, for many years, parking was the largest all cash business in the US. So you had an enormous amount of cash changing hands, and sometimes you had guys who were being paid, and they were mostly guys, because it's kind of a dangerous job, being paid, you know, 10 bucks an hour to manage a garage at which people might be paying 60 or 80 dollars after parking at a, you know, an NFL game or something like that. And so tremendous potential for cash to uh disappear from the cigar box. And this has persisted in places where cash is still the way that um garages get their transactions handled. And I was just talking to somebody about parking garages in Memphis who was saying that when COVID hit, Memphis was very concerned that they were going to lose a lot of revenue from their garages. They took advantage of this lull in traffic to convert from a cash system to a credit card system. And when they came back after COVID, they had half as many people in the garages, uh, but revenue uh was higher than it was before. So, you know, evidently uh something fishy was going on there.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I think it's interesting that you mentioned that in the garages, the majority of the enforcement is male because in the beginning, parking enforcement was female.

Henry Graber:

That's true. And uh I think that reflects again the kind of the difference between how we think about on-street and uh off-street parking, on-street being a job done primarily during the day in these kind of busy business districts where I don't know exactly why the first people to do this job were women, but I think it has to do with the fact that it was considered a kind of a service to enhance the viability of the neighborhood. And so we wanted to put a friendly face on what was designed to be really a management system. And since we're in Lincoln, I'll share that before we we talked today, you sent me these historic newspaper articles about the arrival of parking meters in Lincoln, and it's kind of a beautiful thing to see this account of people being just amazed at the way these parking meters were installed and order was suddenly established on the street practically uh overnight. Which is not to say that being a parking attendant is not sometimes a dangerous job as well, because you do have to deal with uh irate motorists.

Jennifer Hiatt:

You share about some of the parking attendants in New York City getting punched sometimes.

Henry Graber:

Yes, and there's a long and painful history of parking attendants being basically abused for trying to do their job. And um, I think it poses an interesting question now that we do have license plate recognition, we could send cars around basically just taking photos of license plates, running them against the meter system and figuring out who is parked illegally, but that might result in an uncomfortable number of parking tickets.

Jennifer Hiatt:

You dedicated a whole chapter to Chicago's decision to privatize their meters. What was the reason behind the privatizing and why was it a horrible mistake?

Henry Graber:

So, Chicago, for those of you who don't know, sold or leased, I would say it's 36,000 parking meters for a period of 75 years to a bunch of private investors. And the thinking behind this was Chicago had had some success with privatization of public assets in the 2000s. And uh with the financial crisis bearing down, they decide what if we put our parking meters out to bid and they get this offer for more than a billion dollars upfront for 75 years of parking meter revenue. Now, at that point, the city was making so little money from its meters that this seemed to some like a pretty good deal. They were going to get a billion dollars right in the sort of um at the dawn of the great financial crisis, and they would have been able to, you know, forestall raising property taxes and so on. Turned out to be very bad, however, because as the private investors, led by Morgan Stanley, as they bid for this asset, what they knew that the city of Chicago did not know was that those parking meter rates could be raised quite significantly. What Chicago saw as a good deal for them turned out to be a very good deal for the investors. They have already made their money back, and there are still 50 years left or 60 years, almost 60 years left, on this on this deal. So for the city of Chicago, not only did they lose out financially, but they also lost control of their streets. And so when they want to build a bike lane or have a parade or close a street to traffic for a farmer's market or something like that, they need to write a check to these investors who control the parking meter supply. They want to take a parking meter out of operation, they need to install one somewhere else. And this is the status quo in Chicago for the next um almost 60 years. And the tragedy is the rates finally reflect the actual demand to park in these commercial areas in Chicago, and yet the revenue is not going to pay for city services, public transportation, street trees, benches, crosswalks, anything like that. It's just going into the pockets of these investors.

Stephanie Rouse:

Have you found any other cities that have fallen into this trap? Or was Chicago like the glaring example of what not to do?

Henry Graber:

Chicago did frighten uh people for a long time. I think there's been a couple examples of privatization since. And I don't think that it couldn't work in principle. It's just that you have to think carefully about how you're designing that contract. In Chicago's case, the whole process was very rushed, and definitely the aldermen were discouraged from uh looking closely at what was actually being negotiated.

Stephanie Rouse:

So in the book, you bring up the term forbidden city a few times. What is this and why does it exist?

Henry Graber:

So the forbidden city was a term that was introduced to me by an architect in Los Angeles named Mark Valianados. And what he was describing was the way that walking around Los Angeles, he had noticed all of these beautiful buildings that dated from the early 20th century that really made up the backbone of Los Angeles' architectural character. And if you've ever driven around LA, you know that the city is full of these like kooky historical pastiche examples in its architecture. You know, you have commercial buildings come right up to the street, you've got apartment buildings, all kinds of stuff that have since been forbidden by zoning because Los Angeles downzoned itself in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and also by parking requirements. And so what Mark realized, and he would go on this tour, he would take people around to these often beloved structures in Los Angeles, and he would say, You like this? Well, it can't be built now. And it can't be built now because the zoning doesn't prohibit it, or it can't be built now because this would require 55 parking spaces, and so they'd have to buy and demolish the adjacent, you know, six properties or or whatever. And I think that is actually a pretty powerful and generalizable argument for people in all kinds of places. I was speaking a couple weeks ago to some parking reformers in Connecticut who were saying one of the most effective techniques that they've found in trying to convince people to move towards a mode of development where there's less parking is to just look around at these historic Connecticut town centers and say, if if this is what you like, then recognize that the laws we have on the book have made it impossible to build this. You know, they talk about like Gilmore girls. Like look at the town Stores Hollow, is that right? Stars Hollow. Stars Hollow. Thank you. Stars Hollow, uh, they say, you know, that that's the kind of thing that is, you know, it's it's part of this forbidden city of, you know, America's architectural and urban history that we have since declared illegal to build, even as it is, I think, acknowledged by most people to be the thing that they really like most about the places that they live.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We continually hear the development needs parking to be successful, but you make the point that some of the most expensive real estate in the country does not have the corresponding parking. Why is this myth so persistent in the development world?

Henry Graber:

Well, there are certainly some places where you do need to have places for people to park. I think the issue is there is already a lot of places for people to park. And so the question of whether a particular building needs to have its own parking lot or garage associated with it, often there's enough place to park around that building for the people who would need to drive there. But then the other thing is that when we think about how people use buildings and how people get around, there are obviously other ways of getting around than driving. And as density rises, as it becomes more difficult to park, you see more people using other modes of transportation to get from here to there. And so there's this kind of almost magical threshold at which when it actually becomes hard to park, you it almost means that you've reached a threshold of density at which transit, biking, walking become more viable. And so, right as it becomes difficult to park, you find people who are saying, you know what, I'm actually going to get around in in a different way. And so I think that's why you do reach places that can obtain this kind of super density where most people aren't getting around uh by car. And again, like enormous, if you're interested in like the tax base, obviously a better situation to have a bunch of properties that are just built out to the max rather than to have a surface parking lot owned by the city every two blocks.

Stephanie Rouse:

I think the hardest part is getting to that threshold and getting the community to make changes that will encourage more density without the parking and to eliminate certain parking minimums. We have a lot of backlash on reducing parking minimums in residential neighborhoods because residents, while they have the three-car garages to park off street, are worried about their neighborhoods getting clogged with parking. If there is a new apartment complex, it doesn't build parking. And so trying to get to that threshold, I think, is challenging for most communities.

Henry Graber:

Yeah, I was in Arlington, Virginia a few weeks ago, and the planners in Arlington have tried a performance parking pilot where they are charging dynamic rates for different blocks and so on and so forth. But right adjacent to these commercial blocks, they have residential blocks, and the residential blocks are concerned about spillover from the commercial blocks. And so they lobby to be included in these residential parking permit zones, which effectively clears the curb of anybody who doesn't live in the neighborhood. And what was interesting about this to me was they said in Arlington they did a survey and they found that these residents report that their block is full, quote unquote, when it's at 50% occupancy at the curb. So the question of like the reality versus kind of perception of a parking shortage, I think is very important to drill down on because if we want to permit attractive architecture and missing middle development and affordable housing and walkable neighborhoods and all the things that are made possible by permitting development to not include all these parking spaces, we need to have a handle on what the actual supply and availability is. And I think it's pretty rare that communities get to the point where there actually is zero parking available. And, you know, you need to find a way to, you know, to charge for it, to regulate who has access to it and so on at a neighborhood level. Sure, there might be a block here where there's not parking available at 6 p.m. on a Saturday, but if you survey the entire stock, you'll find almost always that there's a bunch of parking available.

Stephanie Rouse:

You gave one example of how COVID impacted one community with their parking revenues and their garages. And I don't think there's a sector of city life that wasn't impacted by COVID. Can you give some examples of both positive and negative impacts to the parking industry that came out of the pandemic?

Henry Graber:

Well, so when I was working on this book, I had this kind of wish that people would see that the curb lane, which up to this point really has been without any real critical thought, allocated just for the storage of cars, could be used for other things. Like imagine what it could be used for. And then it was like I had wished upon the monkey's paw, COVID arrived, and that was the thing that caused people to say, oh, you know what? We could fill up all these parking spaces with outdoor seating. And all of a sudden, like we could turn all our restaurants inside out. And people would um sit out here and they'd increase the revenue of the restaurants and the tax revenue, and they'd bring eyes on the street and sort of restore a sense of street life in these neighborhoods that had been hard hit by the shutdowns. You know, so I think that that did move the overton window for people, even if there has been a lot of retrenchment as the sort of cars come out and sort of take back their territory. Um, I do think there was a realization that, oh, like this is just this is just real estate that could be used for literally anything. Uh, and I think that's a that is a positive legacy ultimately. The challenge, I think, primarily is that COVID has really done a number on public transportation. And so if you've got cities where people are only going to the office two or three days a week, that poses some real challenges for public transportation systems that are accustomed to having those nine to five five-day-a-week commuters supply a good chunk of their revenue and then subsidize maybe the off-hour service or the um the you know the routes that go uh in other places. And so I think as public transportation reckons with maybe a new model, maybe new routes to provide more trips for people who are doing, you know, people have been traditionally been left out of transit planning, childcare trips, medical trips, daytime or off-hours trips, public transportation has really been very nine to five focused. And I think there's an there's a need to revisit that. And the reason that concerns parking, of course, is that while there is often a great excess of parking that we could be making better use of, ultimately, I think the the way to create a really vibrant place is to get people traveling by some other means. Uh, and so big cities really do need functioning, uh high-quality public transportation systems to permit the kind of density that gives them their magic. I mean, there is no Chicago, there's no New York without public transportation, even if when you look at mode share, it represents a relatively small slice of the general commuting population. It is nevertheless essential to creating an environment where like not everybody needs a car. And once everybody needs a car to get to work, there's traffic effects, and then most importantly, I think there's there's the need to park all those cars and the way that that just forces you to dedicate 50% of your land use to car shortage.

Jennifer Hiatt:

To end your book, you point out the criticism that changing parking is a penalty that falls on the backs of those who can least afford it, which at face value has some merits, but narrowly focusing on just parking is missing the broader picture. What do you envision a successful system to look like?

Henry Graber:

Well, I think this is where we can get back to the necessity of public transit, biking, and walking being part of the conversation, because ultimately, what is the goal of rethinking parking? It's number one, that our current system has created a lot of waste. So there's a lot of wasted space, wasted energy, wasted materials, wasted money that goes into all this parking that doesn't get used. But also because while it's true that giving somebody a car is probably the most effective anti-poverty intervention you could do for someone who doesn't have a car, the obligation to own a car, to participate in everything society has to offer, to access the labor market, to go to school, to go to the park, the requirement that every adult have a car to do all that is an enormous tax. I think the median American household spends something like $15,000 a year on their cars. And it's the second largest expense after housing. And so, to the extent that we can build a city or a town where families with three cars can get by with two, or two cars can get by with one, where some trips can be made without a car, we're really liberating people from that enormous financial burden of lease payments, insurance, maintenance, gas, and parking fees.

Stephanie Rouse:

We just finished here in Lincoln working on a poverty elimination action plan. And what we kept hearing over and over from people that participate in our public engagement was that our transit system isn't set up to allow them to thrive, that they can't take jobs on nights or on Sundays because our transit is doesn't run, or they have to leave two hours before a shift to be able to get there in case the bus has a breakdown and it's only one hour headways. And so typically they don't have the option to own a car because of the expense. And so they're reliant on a system that really doesn't set them up for success.

Henry Graber:

Yeah, that sounds like a familiar predicament where if transit is not fast, frequent, reliable, then it is a big ask for people to say you should travel without a car because it's better, or we want you to do that. I think there's often this chicken and egg question that when I was in Omaha, we were talking about this. This question of, you know, can you shift to a mode of development and land use where parking is less important before you have provided the transit? Or do you need to provide the transit and get people riding the transit and then you can begin to chip away at some of some of the parking and start charging for it and limiting how much you're building and all that? And I think it is complicated because on the one hand, if you charge for all the parking, but you haven't provided the transit yet in a way that serves people's needs, then I do think you're you are putting people at a at a disadvantage if if they're they're really struggling to make ends meet. On the other hand, there is no reason that anybody will use transit, except people who have no other option, unless it's difficult to drive. Driving is so much easier, cheaper, faster that unless there are obstacles in the form of parking fees or traffic or you know, limits on where you can park geographically, that until those things exist, like people are not going to use transit. So I think ultimately the parking shortage has to come first before the Transit system becomes a system that you know people are going to want to use if they have a choice.

Stephanie Rouse:

I think Minneapolis is a really good example of that. I I worked there for a time and it was challenging at best to be able to drive downtown and be able to park and go to work there. So the transit system was really set up to bring commuters in an efficient and expedient way. So that was the way most of us that work downtown got into work.

Henry Graber:

Yeah, that sounds right. And I think again, with a lot of big cities, you hit a point at which you literally cannot provide more parking for everybody who needs it. You see this at universities, medical centers, and really vibrant downtowns where at a certain point it's just not possible to provide enough parking. And that's, I think, where where transit really becomes essential to permitting growth and densification.

Stephanie Rouse:

And always the last question on our show, in addition to your book, which we always recommend that everyone listening get a copy of, what other books would you recommend our listeners check out?

Henry Graber:

Okay, I'm gonna recommend three books. The first of them is Emergent Tokyo. So this is a book by Joe McReynolds and Jorge Almazan, and it's about the particular urbanistic forms that make Tokyo such an interesting city. And they really go into great detail, both on an architectural level and a historical level, on explaining how these particular pieces of the Tokyo environment work. They talk, for example, about these multi-level commercial buildings where you'll have a restaurant or something like that on every single floor, which is something that I think for Americans we very much associate with East Asia, like that kind of thing. And they explain how those districts emerge and how they function. And it's really just a delightful book, even if you've never been to Tokyo, to thinking about how things could be different and how they work. And then I also want to recommend Saving America's Cities by the historian Elizabeth Cohen. That is a biography of the urban planner Ed Log, who was the urban renewal czar in Boston and uh also had roles in New Haven and New York. And what was so interesting about that book to me was I think after being as a New Yorker, I think Robert Moses really dominated my view of what urban renewal was about. And having read The Power Broker, came away with a pretty negative impression of him. And what Cohen does in this book is she really reminds you that urban renewal was a liberal project. And it was a project that was supported by a lot of inner city neighborhoods, by a lot of progressive people who thought they were doing the right thing. And it just makes our reckoning with that period of history and the mistakes that were made considerably more complicated than the kind of good versus evil narrative of master planner trying to demolish a bunch of neighborhoods for highways. And then third, I want to draw attention to a book that came out recently, which is Shade by Sam Block, which is about, as the title implies, shade and posits that shade is this really key thing to understanding how our cities function, especially in a time of climate change. And I think it's interesting because shade is so essential to creating the kinds of lively places that we all enjoy. And yet it's so hard to come by. And that's partly because we have zoned in such a way that often explicitly is designed to stop shading from reaching this sidewalk because there's this idea that sunlight is always better. But also the challenges of actually planting the trees that we need in our cities. Very complicated problem. And what makes it interesting is it's one of those things where sometimes everything is about money, but tree planting is not always about just not having the money for it. It's about being able to manage this complex natural system and the ways that it interacts with everything around us. One of the examples is that in Los Angeles they have like 30 rules about where trees can be planted. They can't be close to intersections because they could get in driver's sight lines, and they can't be close to power lines because they could interfere with the transmission. And so in LA, they've sort of whittled away at the urban environment. And when you think about where is the space actually left to plant a tree, turns out there's actually almost no room for them on some blocks.

Stephanie Rouse:

We have about 15 minutes to open it up to audience for questions.

Speaker 01:

So my question is about dynamic pricing for parking. I guess can you just talk about what has worked and maybe some of the challenges? Are the challenges mostly political in nature? And then on-street versus parking structures, is there a difference in how you might think about approaching that?

Henry Graber:

Yeah, that's a great question. So one of I think Donald Schuop's great achievements of which he was most proud was that he debuted the high cost of free parking in San Francisco in 2005, and everybody told him he was crazy. And then when he came back 15 years later, they had abolished parking minimums, established dynamic pricing, and uh and done a bunch of other things that he basically told them to do 15 years earlier. In San Francisco, what that looks like is different meter prices block by block. And what's interesting about it is there is a great deal of variation even from block to block in the same neighborhood, which shows that some drivers are sensitive to price and other drivers are sensitive to distance. Some people want to park close and pay for it, and some people want to park a little further away and pay less. And so dynamic pricing is a way of offering people these options. And so I actually don't think it's particularly politically controversial if you already have parking meters to say, you know what, we're going to find a better way to manage this system. And there can even be political advantages in places that have done this. One of the things that always happens is publicly owned parking garages get cheaper because there's this unfortunate habit, which often stems from the fact that a bunch of public money has gone into building them, of charging a street meter price to park in a garage. Well, everybody would rather park at the curb. And so if you charge that same amount for the garage, you're going to have people competing for the same curb spaces and the garage will be half empty and everybody will say there's a parking shortage. And what happened in San Francisco was when they'd established this dynamic pricing, meter rates on the business streets went up, but the garage rates went down. And they found that they were able to fill those garages with the all-day parkers, the employees, and so forth, and leave the meter spaces on the street available for people who are arriving. And that technique has been adopted in other places. I mentioned Darlington, Virginia. That's what they're doing. They have, again, this same system. And again, what you see is yeah, there's a block there where it might cost $2 an hour to park, but then you might move even 150 feet and it's 50 cents an hour. And so there is really like a lot of variation, even in what you would think would be one parking zone.

Speaker 00:

My question is related to after cities kind of do the hard work of getting rid of parking minimums, the next barrier is convincing the banks that would loan uh money to these developments to do the same thing. Can you talk a little bit about ways that cities or particular bank maybe lending structures can work our way towards that sector getting in line with where we need and what we require from parking?

Henry Graber:

That's a great question. Bankers are by nature conservative and not particularly interested in experimenting with the projects that they're lending money to. And so I think it's no surprise that in a lot of markets where we have spent for the last 75, 80 years, it's been illegal to build a home with no parking. So what we're dealing with is overcoming a really long-standing practice of thinking that you cannot sell a house or rent an apartment if it doesn't have its own dedicated parking spaces. And so I don't think it's surprising that it's hard for bankers to overcome that preconception. But the good news is it's been 10 years, give or take, since Hartford, Buffalo, San Francisco started doing away with their parking minimums. And we now have lots and lots of examples of projects that have been built without dedicated parking that pencil and that have proved to be profitable and work for the people that are building them. And not just in cities like San Francisco that are super dense and have very robust public transit networks, but also in places like Buffalo, where most people do drive, right? And so, you know, what bankers always want to see is comps. They want to see you're trying this. Has anybody else done it? Did it work? What's the rent roll like, right? And so to the extent that this mode of development has become more and more popular, it's getting a lot easier. And so, you know, we're in Lincoln and Lincoln might look to Champaign, Illinois, which is a place that's seen a bunch of development without parking. Also a university town, also a place where it turns out there's a pretty high elasticity in terms of whether people will bring their cars or not. There's a lot of flexibility there. Denver is another case where they're building things without parking too. So Minneapolis, right? So as the number of places that are experimenting with this increases, I think it's going to get easier and easier for bankers to find examples that they feel comfortable with.

Speaker 03:

Without going into too much detail, what's some of the most effective things to say to people who think they're entitled to free parking everywhere and have like that scarcity mindset to kind of get them thinking of like why we pay for parking and why it's not everywhere?

Henry Graber:

I think the most effective thing is often to just establish for them that there are trade-offs involved. I think if somebody is just dead set on maintaining free parking forever and there's not that much you can say to talk them out of it, if that's their preference, but what you can say is there are trade-offs. Here are the trade-offs. If we have free parking, we will have a parking shortage. If we have a parking shortage, it will become necessary for these businesses and residences to allocate half their square footage to parking lots. If that happens, we will no longer have a dense and walkable commercial neighborhood. If that happens, the tax base will drop and then your property taxes will go up. And so you can sort of run through the ways in which this parking-centric mode of development ultimately costs us all. But I think it helps to be able to perceive the trade-offs. And for different people, that might mean different things. Some people who are motivated by the idea that free parking is impeding. I think you have to tie free parking to parking minimums, right? And if you have parking minimums, you know, you might have to demolish a bunch of historic structures. And that motivates some people. You might have to chop down a bunch of trees to build a parking lot or a garage. You might have to go into debt as a city to spend $20 million on a public garage. I mean, there are countless cases of small cities that perceive a parking shortage, are reluctant to make people pay for the parking, and then finally they wind up spending all that money on a giant garage that nobody uses. And those are all effective ways of kind of raising awareness about this issue. One of the counterarguments you often hear is well, I'll just park for free out at the suburban X or Y rather than continuing to patronize these local businesses. And people will say that and they might do it. But I think the truth is if your downtown or your commercial strip is, if free parking is the only thing that's keeping it going, then you you have bigger problems. And that you're never going to do better than the suburbs on free parking. You're never going to do better than them all, right? And uh, and so I think that's that's important to reckon with. And then the last thing I'd say is there probably will still be free parking, even if some parking is paid. It's really about making sure that the free parking is a little further away so that the people who are arriving and need to run a quick errand or make a delivery or something like that, they have access to these paid parking spots. So almost everywhere that it establishes parking meters, there's a lower cost option. It's just a couple blocks further away.

Stephanie Rouse:

Thank you, Henry, for joining us on the podcast to talk about your book, Paved Paradise.

Henry Graber:

Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Henry Gravar on his book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Penguin Random House by supporting your local bookstore or online at bookshop.org. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and please rate, review, and share the show. Thank you for listening and talking to me on the front.

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Jennifer Hiatt

Co-host
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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

Co-host