Book Review: Paved Paradise

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

Not since Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic have I felt so engaged by a book about driving. Not just driving, but about the least-sexy part of driving: parking. If you live (as I do) in an American city in which driving is not a luxury but a necessity, you deal with parking every day but probably don’t think about it that much. Or maybe you do. Maybe you’re like me, and figuring out where you’re going to park when you get there is 90% of the stress. Maybe you’re the kind of person that circles the lot five times looking for the spot by the door, or maybe you’re more like me and will park a mile and a half away because you hate looking for parking.

But even if you don’t drive a car, parking affects your life.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that cities are either made for cars or they’re made for people. You can’t have a walkable city that also has sufficient parking wherever you want it. I loved being able to walk to wherever I wanted in Philadelphia, but parking was a nuisance. Grabar spends the book going into more detail about this phenomenon, often using New York City as an example. He talks about how and why parking garages (back when they took cash) were superb money-laundering mechanisms and why they were so rife with graft. He talks about how the guy who invented Spot Hero was motivated and inspired by how hard it was to find parking during games at Wrigley field even though all those commuters weren’t using their driveways.

One of the things Grabar gets passionate about is how detrimental mandatory parking minimums are to city planning, especially affordable housing. I had no idea how much money it cost to build a single parking space, and that it was required to provide parking even if the residents couldn’t afford cars or didn’t drive. It’s things I’ve noticed as a person who prefers to walk (it’s not safe or comfortable to walk across parking lots) but not to the depth he has (new condos are almost always luxury houses because they are required to have multiple parking spaces, which cost tens of thousands of dollars each.) He also points out how absurd it is that in places like Manhattan, with colossally high rents per square foot, street parking is essentially free. Why is the most valuable real-estate in the world given for free for long-term car storage? One of the cringiest stories in the book is how Chicago was swindled out of billions by privatizing its parking meters to Morgan Stanley. Ouch. Sorry, Chicago. That’s gotta sting.

I would say the bulk of the book is spent promoting Grabar’s manifesto: urban parking should not be free, and drivers should be the ones paying for it. By subsidizing driving with mandatory free parking, we incentivize not just driving, but we make walkable cities all but impossible. It’s only in the last little section of the book that he talks about the obverse: free parking is the consolation prize given to people who have been priced out of city life.

I recommend this book to any NIMBY who wrings their hands when a developer wants to build new housing in their neighborhood, wailing “but what about the cars, Marge, won’t someone think about the poor cars?” Or, probably, more likely something about there not being enough parking with all those new residents. The intertwined relationship between parking availability and hostility to pedestrians is eye opening.



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