Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Free Parking Is Ruining Your City with Henry Grabar

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

Free and available parking is a cornerstone of American society, but is it also our undoing? The places where we stow our cars have more of an impact on the fundamental fabric of the urban landscape than the roads we drive on, affecting everything from how our cities are designed to how we socialize. Adam is joined by Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, to discuss the seen and unseen ways that parking changes our lives. Find Henry's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAboutHeadgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creatingpremium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy toachieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to ourshows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. You know, if you're like most people in this country, there is nothing you desire more. There is no psychological need as great. There is no object of fascination more entrancing than a parking spot. Oh, people will go to enormous lengths to secure one. They'll drive around for hours looking for the perfect spot. They'll block their favorite spot with cones or maybe a passive aggressive note. And if they're driving to a place where there won't be one, well, they might as well just stay home. We have all had this intense experience of searching, searching, searching for a parking spot, then finally finding one and thinking, oh, thank God, there's nothing I needed more. We love parking spots. We need parking spots. And so do many of us. It seems natural to assume that it's a good

thing to have more parking spots. But I'm here to tell you that exactly the opposite is true. There is nothing worse for your mental well-being, your neighborhood, your city, and your planet than that parking spot you treasure so much. And in fact, everything would be better if there were less parking to go around. Everything. And I know that seems hard to believe, but I have the absolute perfect guest this week to convince you of it. But before we get into that, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free. so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. We have a lot of amazing other perks as well.

And if you like standup comedy, please come see me on tour from October 5th through 7th. I'll be in St. Louis, Missouri. And from October 19th through 21st, I will be in Providence, Rhode Island. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's show. My guest today is Henry Grabar. He's a writer for Slate and he's the author of a new book called Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. Please welcome Henry Grabar. Henry, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. So look, parking is so psychologically important to so many people. You have a book about why parking is so terrible.

What is the problem with parking's primacy in our society? Well, I think it all goes back to the fact that you can barely do anything in this country without driving to it. Like for most people, it's really hard for them to get to work, get to school, go to the movie theater, see their friends, go to the gym, anything without getting in a car first. And so obviously, if you're going to be driving everywhere, then parking is the link between driving and everything else that you want to do with your life. So of course, people put a lot of importance on it. Now, the problem is that we've never really

thought about how to distribute that parking, how to it. Now, the problem is that we've never really thought about how to distribute that parking, how to price that parking, where to put that parking, anything, all that is an afterthought. Well, I just want to dwell for a second on, you said parking is the link between driving and the rest of your life. And it's true, driving is this weird activity

where when you are behind the wheel of a car or just in the car, you cannot stop driving until you find a parking space. You are like trapped. And so there's that fear you have when you're driving around looking for a parking space. If I don't find a space, I'm just going to have to leave because I cannot even, I can't literally do anything else. I have to keep burning gasoline until I find this spot. It's a weird sort of prison to be in, which is strange because cars are often thought of as like, you know, symbolizing freedom to us. Right. It's all freedom until you can't find a place to park. And I agree. It is weird.

I talked to a someone who works professionally in parking who told me, he said, imagine if you were an alien looking down on this civilization where everybody goes out with their means of transportation, but they don't know where they're going to leave it. Every day, for some of us, we go out and it's just a mystery about where we're going to put our car when we get where we're going. Like, imagine if planes took off and they weren't sure which airport they could land at, or trains left the station and they weren't sure if there was going to be a platform for them to arrive at. That's the situation in which we have put ourselves with our cars. Yeah, and because of this anxiety, because we don't know,

people sort of want this certainty that there's going to be tons of parking. I actually even think of the theme song to South Park, which is all about how wonderful the town of South Park is. One of the lines is ample parking day or night, people spouting howdy neighbor. It's considered to be a fundamental part of a good American life is having ample parking spots. And so people are like really emotionally attached to them. Like I think about, there's an incident in New York when I lived there where they tried to remove just like 20 parking spots in order to put in a bike lane near Prospect Park. And it was like two years of national news

about neighbors saying, they can't take the parking spots away. Like people get furious about it. Yeah, absolutely. There's no argument here. People are very attached to their parking spaces. I think my hope with this book is not to convince people

to relinquish their attachment to their parking spaces, not to convince them to even share the spot in front of their house with a neighbor who has an extra car or something like that, but merely to recognize the trade-offs that we've made as a society by expecting and all but guaranteeing, frankly, the presence of a free, easy parking spot at every destination for everyone who needs it. Okay, so what are those trade-offs? Like what is bad, what could be bad about a parking spot? Henry, I challenge you to tell the people who are listening to this podcast in their cars,

perhaps circling, looking for parking right this very second, tell them why they should not find a free, easily available parking spot. What is the bad trade-off? I think the most basic element of it and the one that's the easiest to understand is just that parking takes up so much space, right? Like your average parking spot is 250 square feet with Ingress and Egress. So if you add those up, the estimates are that there's at least three parking spaces for every car in the United States. So the national parking stock is only ever 30% full. And of course, some of those cars are in motion and not necessarily parked. So there's always enough

parking. And in fact, if you think about its spatial impact, in some ways, it's actually greater than the impact of the roads and the automobiles themselves. Like the actual space for parking might be the car's biggest impact on our urban landscape. And the consequences of that are that it takes up so much space that it makes it very hard to do anything else, right? It makes it hard to walk. It makes it hard to bike. It makes it hard to build the kind of walkable neighborhoods, the kind of attractive architecture that once characterized American cities. All that stuff has been made impossible by the provision of so much parking. So I got to dwell on that for a second.

There's three times as many parking spaces as there are cars. So you say there's plenty of parking. And yet, I'm sorry, my girlfriend and I were trying to go to dinner the other night, and we were circling around for half an hour and we eventually found parking nearly half a mile from the restaurant. So what the hell are you talking about? Yes. I am aware that finding parking sometimes is challenging for people who live in Los Angeles and let's say some neighborhoods of New York and Philadelphia and Chicago. But for most of us, it's pretty easy, right? Like most of the country, it's very rare for people to pay for parking or to even spend very much time looking for it

because most stores are designed with parking lots that are actually larger than the store itself. So actually we've built, we've created these laws that make it super easy to find parking everywhere. I admit that when I first understood how much parking there was in this country, my first reaction was the same as yours, which is to say, wait a second, like, why does it always seem so hard to find? And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One of them is that it's mismanaged, right? Like, we haven't really thought in a coherent way about how to actually provide the parking in a way that makes it accessible when people need it. Another one is

that it's not shared, right? Like all the parking, as far as it belongs to various businesses, condos, office buildings, et cetera, is sort of balkanized into these separate fiefdoms, right? And so if you want to park at the sub shop and there's eight spots there, you can't park at the dentist next door, even if the dentist closed at 4 p.m. Right. And so you do have actually quite abundance of parking that's divided between these different zones that are reserved for patrons of certain businesses or residents of certain blocks or whatever. And so in that way, obviously, a lot of this parking is poorly allocated. And then perhaps most importantly, a lot of the parking is in

places that nobody wants to park all the time. Like a lot of it is out at, you know, you look at Arrowhead Stadium or something like that, or Dodger Stadium, like thousands, tens of thousands of parking spaces, right? But obviously, if you go to a busy main street, right, there may be a shortage of parking in that particular place. And in fact, I would argue that is related to the fact that that's someplace people want to go. Like it's precisely that density of activity, residences, people walking around, et cetera, that creates the parking shortage that actually makes people want to go there in the first place. Right. That was the area that we were going to was the area where the restaurants are. And that's where everybody was trying to park.

was the area where the restaurants are. And that's where everybody was trying to park. And so you have a, you have sort of a glut slash famine problem, a feast or famine problem where there's a lot of parking where you don't need it and where you do need it, there's very little. And I imagine also a lot of that is like not seasonal, like it's over the course of the day, right?

Like in a certain area at the time that a lot of people want to go there, there's no parking. Like say a downtown business district, but the entire course of the day, right? Like in a certain area at the time that a lot of people want to go there, there's no parking. Like, say, a downtown business district. But the entire rest of the time, which is most of the week, it's just empty, unused space, which is bad, right? And that is the problem with parking generally, right? And the problem with the automobile-based transportation system more largely, right, is that it's very poorly designed to accommodate these moments of peak demand, right? There might be half an hour of the day where there actually isn't a space to park. And the result of that is we've completely thrown out that whole model of building places that look

like that. And so I guess the good news for you is there's not that many places like that in the United States from, you know, because we made them illegal to build 70 years ago. Now we have designed places where there will always be a place to park and the flip side of that is that it's impossible to walk there. So that's the trade-off we've made as a society. We have ensured ample parking day or

night, a little less howdy neighbor maybe. Wow, that's a really great metaphor, actually. Like using the couplet from South Park to make that point. Yeah. So let's talk about that. You said that we now require places

to be built with parking. And it's rare for buildings to be built without parking. Tell me more about that. Is that literally a large trend that we've seen in municipal codes? I wouldn't say it's rare for buildings to be built without parking. Tell me more about that. Is that like literally a large trend that we've seen in municipal codes or? I wouldn't say it's rare for buildings to be built without parking. It is illegal in most of the country to build a building without parking. And so in almost every jurisdiction, you know, you have these zoning laws, right? And the zoning laws say every, you know, they'll put

various zoning laws and building codes will put restrictions on the kinds of things you're allowed to build. And I'll say every bedroom has to have a window and every staircase has to look like this. And every building above a certain height has to have an elevator. Right. So these codes all have a provision that say every land use X, Y, Z must come with parking lot with a certain number of parking spaces. Right. And that this is crazy. There's actually a whole book of this. And it's so specific. It includes every land use you can possibly imagine. A nunnery, a tennis court, a donut shop, a dirty bookstore. Like why a dirty bookstore has different parking requirements than a regular bookstore? I cannot tell you, but this is the case. And so as a result- Well, people need to go to the dirty bookstore, park, spend a leisurely afternoon perusing the

book. I was going to say, yeah, maybe it isn't really into the time demands of that activity. But at any rate, the result of this is that it's become impossible to build a dirty bookstore with no parking spaces. And so we're really short on our walkable- Our red light districts are no longer walkable spaces. We have drowned them in, you know, empty parking lots. This is a real problem. Real problem.

But the most important part of this is for housing, right? Because housing, we have a serious shortage of housing in this country and a very serious shortage of affordable housing. And for housing,

the imposition of including, you know, two parking spots with every single unit of housing, that's a huge imposition of including, you know, two parking spots with every single unit of housing. That's a huge imposition, both in terms of space, right, which I talked about, but also in terms of cost, because if you're building parking in a structured garage, like I know people think parking is worthless because they never pay for it and they never want to pay for it. But building a garage is pretty expensive. Like median price of a garage in the US today is $28,000 a space. And that's median, right?

So if you go to a high cost city like LA or Miami or New York, that's going to go way up. And what that means is if you're tasked with building an affordable housing complex and you have to include 40 parking spots for your 25 apartments, you're adding on, you know, 40 times, you know, it could be $2 million in parking that you're just forced to build into this project. And that's $2 million that doesn't go into providing units for people who are coming off the street and living in tents, etc. So this has become a really serious obstacle to building housing, not just to building affordable housing, but also just to building the kinds of dense infill missing middle housing that used to make up the American city.

I mean, brownstones, triple deckers, bungalow courts, like every city has their vernacular that is now illegal because of these laws. Right. Oh my God. I never even thought of that. When people walk around Brooklyn and they see those brownstones that, you know, multifamily buildings used to be middle-class housing, they think, oh my God, why don't people build these anymore? It's literally illegal to, because they don't have a garage on the first floor. That is wild. And look, I live in a new construction building in a little complex of little new construction townhomes. The first floor of every single one of them is a parking space, is a garage. And all these are three floors. So like one out of three floors for every one of these buildings is just where a car sometimes sits

unused. No one is actually using the space. A car is just occasionally being stored there. And if you think about that in terms of an entire city like Los Angeles, where we need as much housing to be built as possible because we have such crazy housing prices and such a homelessness problem. If you're requiring one out of every three floors of every building to just be a place for a car to sit, that's like, obviously enormously increases the cost of building the house. I mean, it's such a waste of space. It is a huge waste. I think what's interesting about Los Angeles is that what you're you're you're what you're I think getting to there is that there is this arbitrage where parking spaces are ubiquitous, but people don't want to pay very much for them. But housing obviously is relatively scarce and people will pay a lot for it. And as a result, despite the fact that all this parking has been required, we've seen people just begin to use the space dedicated, legally reserved for parking and turn it into housing.

And that starts with garage units, right? Like in LA, you have tens of thousands of people who have converted garages into apartments. Now for a long time, this was totally illegal, but it just made sense, right? Because like no one was going to pay $800 a month to store their car there. But yeah, no one was going to pay $800 a month to store their car there. But yeah, somebody was definitely ready to pay $800 a month to turn that into a little house. And so that has happened by the tens of thousands of garages in the city

of LA. And the city, the state actually recently made that legal to convert garages into apartments. And that's actually been one of the leading sources of new housing in LA, is the creation of these small backyard garage units. So it is now contributing to the city's housing stock. But in most of the country, it does remain the case that we require all this parking, we limit the amount of housing, and as a result, we have a surplus of parking and a shortage of housing. That's really cool that that transition is happening. I'm sure people's question is, but where the fuck are people going to park? But before we get to that, I just want to talk about the downsides of parking in, you know, in addition to residences in, in business districts or, or, you know, just for enjoying the city. Uh, you know, you mentioned Dodger Stadium,

which a wonderful ballpark I've been to many times. But Dodger Stadium is, look, it's one of the oldest ballparks in America. But if you go to the ones that are just a little bit older, you go to Wrigley Field, you go to Fenway, those are in the middle of the city. And, you know, they're famous for that, right? They're like literally just sort of like tucked into the city. You the subway there or whatever and you know you can walk around there's like shops etc it's a whole neighborhood around the ballpark dodger stadium for those who don't

know uh was something a third or fourth oldest ballpark but it is built in the middle of a park called elysium park but it's surrounded by a sea of parking. If you look at it in an aerial map, there's this little ballpark in the center and then just probably a square mile of parking surrounding it, which is hell to walk through. The sun is beating down on you and most of the time it's not being used.

And before it was built, that was A, a residential neighborhood, but B, also parkland. And it's a really stark example for me of like how much we lose when this like central business attraction, they built enough parking to take care of everybody, but it sort of renders the whole area like a dead zone. It's almost like a bomb went off there. Is that, can you think of a starker example of that?

Digestating is pretty bad. Actually, you just made a great back of a starker example of that? It's pretty bad. Actually, you just made a great back of the envelope estimate. Cause I was making a presentation the other day and I literally pulled up Google maps and use the measure distance function. And it is almost a mile from the top of that parking lot to the bottom. Now in the middle of that mile is that tiny patch of grass that we call the actual baseball field. But, um, but yeah, that yeah, that was a pretty good estimate. And I think that's, it's an extreme example, but it is actually a pretty good case study for what

we have required from every single commercial property, right? And so if you begin to think about this at a city scale, where we once had a main street where you'd have building, building, building, building, building, and everyone had a restaurant or retail on the ground floor, offices or residences on top. Like if every square foot of that triggers a requirement for an additional square foot of parking, all of a sudden that kind of urban fabric becomes totally unsustainable. And instead, what you end up with is these like buildings that they kind of look like they kind of have these moats of parking around them. And I mean, we all know this type of architecture, right? Like this is the dominant commercial

architecture of the United States. And what it is, is the architecture of parking requirements. And what happens when you go to these places is not only have you enforced a sufficiently low density of attractions, right? Because of all this parking that it's like really challenging to walk density of attractions, right? Because of all this parking that it's like really challenging to walk from one restaurant to the next shop over, not to mention illegal, by the way, because you'd have to leave your car in the proprietary parking lot of the Taco Bell to go to the Models or whatever. But I digress. That's one issue. And then the other one is also that it's just a huge subsidy, right? Like you have, as far as drivers are concerned, like a big part of the cost of driving ought to be, is in reality, storing your vehicle. But we

have taken that cost out of driving. And we've asked builders of commercial space, residential space, tenants of those spaces to bear that cost on behalf of the drivers so that the drivers are ensured a place to park and that when they arrive, they can park for free. And by the way, it makes the entire shopping experience worse as well, because when you want to go to Models, because you got to go to Moe's, you park your car and then you have to like cross this baking hot expanse of a parking lot. There's very little shade and it makes it very difficult to do, you know, the most pleasant thing to do in shopping, which is, oh, let's pop into that store. Let's pop into that store. You know, you can't really do that. Maybe, okay, there's a,

there's something else in the same strip mall that you're at, but you know, you, you are generally going to be like almost a quarter mile away from any other possible attraction. It puts me in mind of, you know, here in LA, the places where people most enjoy shopping, where I most enjoy shopping is at these outdoor malls we have that were built by Rick Caruso, who ran for mayor a couple of years ago. He's a business magnate. And I'm sure you know about these, but just to explain for the audience, there are these outdoor malls that sort of replicate main streets where people can park and walk around and go to the Apple store, go to Sephora.

And like, you know, there's grass and like paving stones and it's like very pleasant. It looks like you're in a city a hundred years ago, or at least it's designed to look like that. But attached to this little sort of Disneyland main street is the most massive parking garage you've ever seen. Like eight floors, either up or down, you know, you're driving on one of those crazy corkscrews, you take a ticket. And, you know, that whole parking garage is monetized. So it's solving the problem you're talking about. It's not subsidized, but you know, the, the people who are going are paying, you know, 20 or 25 bucks. And you start to feel like the entire mall is really just a parking garage with a couple of attractions attached that the whole point

is the entire idea that Rick Caruso had is, Oh, what if I build a gigantic a parking garage with a couple of attractions attached that the whole point is the entire idea that Rick Caruso had is, Oh, what if I build a gigantic fucking parking garage? And that way I can entice people to pay me money to park. And then they'll finally be able to get out of their cars and walk around. The reason I go to, I go to a movie there is because I'm like, we'll definitely have parking,

right? That's the one thing I know about it in LA. And it sort of becomes this perverse thing where just the ability to get out of your car is the whole point. Yeah. I don't think it's any secret that Americans really like environments that are like that. I mean, like Disneyland and Disney World come to mind. Every mall, frankly, is like a pretty walkable environment. And like the stereotype is Americans don't want to walk. They don't want a parking space that isn't like 40 feet away from their destination.

But then you look at like the mall, any mall, and it's a pretty strong counterpoint to that. Turns out Americans actually will walk like a quarter mile from their parking spot, often across a huge parking lot, to get into a mall. And so why the people who plan downtowns don't feel like they can get drivers to do the same thing, I think is a major planning error on their part. And I think if you actually go to places that are really charming and have like a really nice street life, drivers actually do park quarter mile away. Right. And in part, it's because they have to because there's that many people there and it's hard to find parking. But it's also because the environment is nicer. Right. And I think this is one of the big differences between the sort of dominant, uh, strip mall commercial architecture and actual, like an actual thriving neighborhood is, um, is the fact that, uh, if it's harder to

park, it might actually be nicer to walk. And those two things might be related even because fewer parking spots means again, like more stores to go past. Maybe like there's trees, uh, you might, um, run into somebody, you know, uh, so all these things are some kind of things we experience in like everyday city neighborhoods as well as at the mall. Um, but we've, we've decided that with our, you know, regular old commercial architecture, we're going to make that stuff impossible. I mean, is there anybody who benefits from these sort of parking requirements or is this entirely just a, you know, desire to assuage the parking anxiety of the public or is it because I hear, you know, when decisions are being made this poorly,

I listen to what you're saying and I'm like, somebody must be getting rich off of this somewhere, even if it is just Rick Caruso. So like, what's going on? I don't think anybody's getting rich, but I do think that, I mean, drivers like this. I mean, we decided to make this decision as a society because we suffered from a serious parking shortage in the 1950s, basically. I mean, you can all trace it back to that moment

when American cities after World War II were just crammed with cars, didn't have enough parking. And they came up with what they probably thought was a pretty elegant solution to that problem, which was let's just require the private sector to take care of it, right? Like from now on, every builder will just provide the parking and we won't have to do anything. And in fact, it was incredibly successful, successful beyond their wildest dreams. It was incredibly successful, successful beyond their wildest dreams. They, in some cases, created downtowns like, I don't know, Newport News, Virginia or something like that, where you will literally have more parking there than buildings. And and so that was all basically by design.

Now, in terms of preference, I often think this is hard to evaluate. Right. It, obviously, everybody in this country, almost everybody, almost every household has a car. The median household has 2.2 cars. So you could certainly argue that we like this system and that if we had to vote, we would vote for a system of more parking all the time. On the other hand, it's the very neighborhoods where it's difficult to park, where it's possible to live life without a car, where it's possible to walk and to use transit that are by far the most expensive places to live in this country. So if you're looking for price signals from the market about what people actually want, even if the majority of Americans want a house in the suburbs with a yard and a two-car garage, I think there's a significant amount of people who are being underserved by what American urbanism is

offering right now because those walkable neighborhoods have become so expensive. It's almost like walking has become like a kind of an elitist thing in the discourse, right? It's like, what could be more normal than just walking? But apparently the normal thing to do is to drive. It's certainly true here in LA that the densest areas, the places with the best sidewalks are the most expensive. I know that's true in New York as well. I mean, it almost seems like it's like we trapped ourselves by, you know, we made this initial investment in the car culture as a means of transportation. That created a problem. Well, we need parking. So then we created all of these parking minimums as another new innovation and parking proliferated.

But then that sort of lent itself to, well, if there's a huge parking lot, now it's harder to get there on foot. So you pretty much need to drive. And since everyone's driving everywhere, now everyone needs even more parking spaces. And so we've ended up in this situation where everyone just demands parking all the time. It's very rational in a way, or at the very least, it's a rational anxiety that people would feel, oh my God, I have to have parking because it often feels like a scarce resource. And that

is the only way that a lot of people have to get around. Is it not? resource. And that is the only way that a lot of people have to get around. Is it not? I agree with that. Yes. It's a cycle, right? I mean, you, you car, car, car dependent land use produces car dependent transportation, which requires more car dependent land use and so on and so forth. Now that makes it sound like we are in a doom loop of more driving, more parking lots, more driving, more parking lots, et cetera. I would just add that the same thing is also true in reverse, right? If you create a nice walkable main street that is full of, you know, low cost apartments that are built over retail with a bunch of amenities nearby and a couple of schools, et cetera, you will find that people who move into that neighborhood will have on average lower rates of car ownership than the people who live outside. And so you could create,

and some cities have done this, right, a kind of reverse cycle where people move into neighborhoods where they're actually able to do things on foot, car ownership rates go down, traffic gets lighter, not heavier, et cetera. I mean, that is a possible future we could create for ourselves. Well, let's talk more about that future, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Henry Grabar. Okay, we're back with Henry Grabar. We're talking about parking and why it is bad. So let me ask you this. So often when a new building is being built, you know, one of the things that NIMBYs will latch onto is that, oh my God, what's going to happen

to parking in this area? Traffic's going to be bad. Parking's, I can't park my car now as it is. And that's because the folks, you know, again, have this maybe semi-rational anxiety about there never being enough parking because they're trapped in this system that requires them to use a car to get around. So how do we assuage that fear, right? If, as you say, it would be better if new buildings, such as the one I live in now, were not built with guaranteed parking spaces, even though here I am in Los Angeles in a car dependent city. How do we get over that hump and, you know, solve the parking problem while also making sure that it's not immediately impacting people? That is the that's the million dollar question, right?

I mean, I think we have concluded over 50 years of experimenting with this format that it does not actually work to require all this parking with every building. I mean, number one, from a neighbor's perspective, if your number one concern is traffic and your number one request for every new building in your neighborhood is parking, you have to understand that those two things are at cross purposes. Like the more parking, the more parking that gets built, the more people who move into your neighborhood are going to own cars. This is like one of the laws of parking. You can see it across study after study. And actually, I'll tell you about one of them because it's pretty interesting. San Francisco has an affordable housing lottery. And, you know, this is San Francisco. So the people in the affordable housing lottery make plenty of money. I mean, it's like up to six figures, maybe even higher, which is just to say they could definitely afford to own cars.

But what we see with the affordable housing lottery is that people who get sorted at random into buildings with no parking own cars at a significantly lower rate than people who get sorted into buildings with parking. And that is irrespective of the geography of where the buildings are in the city in relation to transit, etc. Parking is a predictor of vehicle ownership and use. And you see that across all kinds of land uses. You see it across housing, across offices, etc. So if you are a neighbor who is concerned that the people moving into your neighborhood are going to be contributing to the traffic problem, ensuring that they all have two parking

spaces with every unit is basically ensuring that you are going to add a thousand cars to the neighborhood. So I think the first thing to get out of the way is there is a kind of dissonance in that aspect of local politics. That's fascinating. That said, I do think there is something to this idea that the question of traffic and parking is actually at the root of like a great deal of local political struggle over nimbyism and new neighbors and all that. And, you know,

I think that in a perfect world, you would just say, hey, get over it. These people's houses are more important than your parking spot, which is, by the way, on a public right of way. It doesn't actually belong to you. Like that's what we're fighting over here, right? It's like existing neighbors feel a sense of ownership over the street, which is public. And it's that sense of ownership over the street that compels them to tell new neighbors, hey, get out, you're not welcome here. This is my neighborhood, et cetera.

So I think that, okay, that's not a good development, but if we want to be pragmatic about it and just take it as it is, I think, you know, one thing you can do is you can issue parking permits to existing residents of the neighborhood. And that way and you can even make them tradable. And that way, when new neighbors show up and they want to park on the street, they have to find a way to get their hands on one of these parking permits. And if they can't get their hands on a parking permit, then they can't park on the street. And that's a way of both limiting the risk of overcrowding at the curb and also creating a kind of sneaky incentive for existing neighbors to welcome new neighbors because they are in possession at this point of a parking permit that is poised to become more valuable as density in the neighborhoods increases. Wait, but hold on a second. That worries me a little bit because one of the problems,

I think, in American housing overall is that people see their home as a thing of value that they want the value to go up of. And if people also own a parking permit that is some kind of fungible investment, I'm a little bit worried that it deepens the problem of, oh man, I saw a 200% return on my parking permit last year. I'm going to flip that shit. It's a little worrying. I agree with you. I don't think this is the perfect world solution, but I also think that the home value question and the parking value question are actually working in opposite directions. People fear their home value will go down as new people move into the neighborhood. I think they're wrong about that, but that's what they think.

Now, with the parking permit, I think it would be pretty clear that the more people move into the neighborhood, the more valuable the parking becomes because the more coveted and it becomes and the more people own cars. So I don't think that's a good way to run local politics. I would much prefer to just tell all these people, hey, look, street parking doesn't belong to you. You want a guaranteed parking spot? Buy a house with a garage. But that's a tough sell. Like, I'm a realist. I see the way these political debates play out. Like, I have seen housing for the homeless dashed on the rocks of the parking shortage. Like, it's like project after project after project parking. It's like it's like Americans see new neighbors, not as future parents of their parents at the school or future people to barbecue with or people to play soccer with. They see new neighbors as

threats to their parking supply. That is like the number one way we envision our fellow Americans. And I think that's bad. Well, I mean, it sort of plays into our general scarcity mentality, right? That there's only barely enough for me. And if someone else comes in, they're going to use up what I need. And people feel that way about parking, but they also feel that way about almost every resource. I mean, certainly when people are, you know, very anti-immigration, it's that scarcity mentality. But, you know, people who have liberal attitudes about immigration have the same, you know, concern, traffic and everything else. It's a real, it's a real bugaboo of the American psyche. Sure. But I think if you took actually the traffic and parking out of the equation, I think the hostility, the sort of neighborhood is full thing that people talk about would like you could take a lot of the venom out of that argument.

Because like when people say the neighborhood is full, they're not actually talking about like the cafe. They're not talking about the park. They're not talking about the sidewalk. The sidewalk isn't full. They're talking about traffic and they not talking about the sidewalk. The sidewalk isn't full. They're talking about traffic and they're talking about parking. And so I think the larger answer to your question is we can come up with these kind of like clever solutions to convince people to be more charitable about who moves into their neighborhood. But the longer term solution is we've got to find a way

to make it possible for people to get around without using their cars. And some of that happens naturally when a neighborhood becomes denser because you get new residents and those new residents support new amenities. And suddenly you have enough people in the neighborhood to support a supermarket or another cafe or a gym or school. And so you have something that's within walking distance that wasn't previously within walking distance. And so you have that many more trips that can be made on foot or on a bike, et cetera. So I think there is that cycle that can happen. But the other part of it is that we have to find a way to design our streets in a way that people feel safe doing something other than driving. And I think in a lot of cities, including L.A., L.A. is one one of the densest. It is in fact, the densest metropolitan area in the entire country,

despite all the talk about cars and all that. Yeah. Like if you look at the metro area from, you know, the entire thing, which is LA County and probably some, some parts besides. So it's about 10 million people. It's way denser than the, than the New York metropolitan area. And that's because the so-called suburbs in LA are actually really, really dense. And what I'm getting at here is I think even in places that don't strike us as being walkable, there is a potential. There is a density of consumers to support that kind of amenity development, right? And eventually that kind of walkability, electric bikes, golf carts, whatever, there's all kinds

of new technologies that could play walkability, electric bikes, golf carts, whatever, there's all kinds of new technologies that could, you know, play into this. Right. But it's never going to happen as long as you have to cross an eight lane road where everybody's going 60 miles an hour. And I think that is a major obstacle, even for trips that are only actually a half mile or a quarter mile. Well, it seems like there's a chicken and the egg problem, right? It seems like there's a chicken and the egg problem, right? Because if people, especially, I'm thinking like a very suburban area of Los Angeles, I live in a pretty, one of the more transit accessible corridors. So I get around without a car. But, you know, I know people who live in spots where I literally cannot get anywhere without a car. So therefore, I need a place to leave a car. So therefore, I need a garage, right? How do we start to lever

ourselves out of that? I mean, if you say, well, let's remove those parking requirements, but you do it in an area where, you know, transit is not accessible, as I'm sure it isn't for many people listening to the show. How do we take that first step? I mean, sure, you can build an apartment building with no parking. How do those people get to work? How do they get to the store? Yeah. I mean, I think it is a question, right, of chicken and egg. I think one thing people need to realize, people often say about parking, they say, well, we can't permit developments without parking.

We can't get rid of any parking spaces until we have a fully functioning transit network, a subway stop here where the train runs every five minutes, et cetera. And that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the way public transit works. Public transit only functions when parking costs money and when density is sufficient to support it. And those two things are kind of requirements for functioning public transit. So I think if you are going to wait to allow an apartment building in your neighborhood until you have a bus running every five minutes, you'll be waiting until the

end of time. And I think people actually secretly like that idea because they actually, they say, oh, the transit is not good enough, et cetera. But what they really want is not to have new neighbors. And I think at a certain point, you just have to recognize that we actually are suffering from this serious crisis and that the provision of these new apartments is more important than the provision of parking spaces. Now, in terms of how this actually plays out, I think what happens is the first buildings that get built without parking get built around subway stations, around transit lines, etc. Many people who move into them own cars anyway, and they park them on the street or they park them in a garage, right? I mean, that's what happens in New York City. LA actually has an interesting example of this. Downtown LA 20 years ago had all these abandoned commercial properties from the early 20th century,

these beautiful old Art Deco skyscrapers. They had been abandoned for years because they were impossible to retrofit. And one of the reasons they were impossible to retrofit was because of the parking requirement. Like you'd have to take the bottom five floors and just turn it into a huge garage. And no developer wanted to do that. It seemed very costly and all that. So the city in 2000 said, all right, you can turn them into apartments without parking. And developers went crazy. They turned like 80, 100 of these skyscrapers in downtown LA into apartments and condos. And they added something like 6,000 new apartments to the housing stock in downtown LA. And some people credit this with the renaissance of downtown LA.

I mean, it comes around the same time as the Staples Center, but it's part of this whole wave of people moving downtown. Now, where do those people park? It's not that they didn't own cars, right? They just parked their cars in neighboring commercial garages, which happened to be empty at night since they mostly served office commuters. And so I think this is where you get into the fact that we actually have a surplus of parking in this country, especially in our less walkable neighborhoods. And so really, there is actually quite a bit of slack, I think, for the housing stock to grow and for these neighborhoods to densify before they turn into, you know, Greenwich Village or Koreatown. Okay, so you build the or retrofit the parking free apartment, but there actually is a lot of parking slack,

like at night in that neighborhood, most likely where people can keep their cars if they have them. And in the meantime, you sort of laddered the neighborhood up a little bit because now you have one parking free building and you can sort of do that step by step until like that goes hand in hand with bringing in some transit, et cetera. Is that sort of the idea? Yeah. I mean, I don't think it happens overnight. And I also don't think that probably the, you know, the parking shortage doesn't strike overnight either. I mean, you look at neighborhoods that have a bona fide parking shortage in the United States and they are all like super dense and walkable. You don't see a parking shortage in neighborhoods of single family homes where you have, you know, two people living on a,

you know, a quarter acre plot of land, right? Like it's just simple geometry. So I think there's actually quite a lot of room for us to approach this threshold before parking becomes an actual existing conflict rather than something that people bring up at community meetings just to oppose new housing. Well, and that's the interesting dynamic that you talk about or to talk about because there are a lot of people in those dense walkable neighborhoods who are still obsessive about parking. I think about when I lived in Brooklyn for 10 years,

I never owned a car. I never knew anybody who owned a car. Everybody took the subway because it was a dense walkable neighborhood. And yet there were people in that neighborhood who did own cars and were obsessed with their parking spots and would use the parking spot to shoot down someone doing anything new, such as putting, I mean, people who are living on Prospect Park in Brooklyn, like A, should be taking the subway and B, should welcome a bike lane going in to one of the most heavily visited parks in the country that makes it more pleasant for everybody. But instead, people freaked out over the loss of a couple dozen parking spaces, seemingly out of pure, I don't know what, loss aversion or just privilege, not wanting to let go. It's this weird contrast where the people who need the parking the least are the loudest about screaming when, you know, there's even a suggestion that it be taken away. Why is that? Yeah. I mean, the perverse thing in New York, which is definitely singular in this regard, is that New Yorkers don't actually use their cars to get to work. I mean, we are talking about people who their curb for them is actual long-term car storage. It's not about access. It's not about access.

It's not about, I need this every day to do my job. But I got to go to Long Island for the weekend. So that's why I have the car, to go upstate. So New York has some very, there's some very unique circumstances afoot in New York. There's some assholes. That's what you're trying to say. I would never say that about my fellow New Yorkers. But no, but the thing about New York, right, is that this is the part about New York that I think is true in a lot of places, is that the lane, a pickup and drop off zone for deliveries or for Uber or whatever.

And so the actual, the decision to dedicate all this public space to private car storage is actually impeding us from actually getting away from the car as a means of getting around. So I think there is this, it gets back to this, you know, cycle thing, right? Like, let me give you a concrete example of this. In a city like LA, it's been shown time and time again, that one of the safest things you can do for pedestrians is to take away the parking spots that surround the intersections, right? There's two on each side.

And one of the reasons for this, they call it daylighting. And the reason is so that when a car is approaching the intersection, the driver can see if someone's crossing the street or about to cross the street because you don't have that big SUV parked right in front of the crosswalk. And we very rarely do this. We very rarely take away those spots and turn those into these like, you know, plant a couple of trees there, push the sidewalk out so that the crossing is shorter. And the reason we don't take them away is because, right, neighbors would revolt. But in this case, we're talking about, you know, potentially a life and death matter for pedestrians, for kids getting to school, et cetera. And I think it's an example of how like

parking politics are toxic. I think we've discussed that in the context of housing, but also in the context of transportation. And so unless you can have the civic wherewithal to take away a lane of parking spaces to create a protected bike lane, yeah, you're not going to get people riding bikes. And I think people see a bike lane here and there and they say, oh, these damn bike lanes getting built everywhere, nobody uses them.

It's like, try riding a bike in LA and just see how far that bike lane gets you. Cause usually it's like eight blocks and then you're just thrown out into eight lanes of speeding traffic. And it's like, yeah, of course nobody's riding there with their kids to get to a soccer game. Like, yeah. So I think, yeah, it actually does stand in the way of, of making it easier to not depend on it so much. There's also, I don't know, when I picture the parking list world, you know, it's so obvious to me how, what a beautiful place it is, right? I can, I can envision the, I can envision it so clearly. And I feel like other people can too, because that's

why they love to go to the Grove or the Americana or Disneyland or any of these other places where you can finally get out of your car and walk around. And yet it's, you know, it's in contrast with the desperation that people feel to preserve the parking spaces. Inside all of us, there's two wolves, the parking lover and the parking hater, and they're at war with each other. And it seems like a very difficult war to settle. I mean, is there a way to appeal to people more to the parking hating wolf so that that wolf can attack and kill the parking loving wolf? Yes. I think about this question a lot.

And I thought about this when I was writing my book. I think it's often that we characterize this as a situation where it's like drivers versus pedestrians or drivers versus cyclists. It's like we're all people. And even people who drive sometimes ride a bike. And certainly people who bike often drive a car. When you park your car, you become a pedestrian. That's right. Nobody is a driver the whole time.

Eventually you got to get out of that motherfucker. You do have to get out. You do have to get out sooner or later. But the thing is, right, so I think the number one thing you can do to actually change people's minds about this is to get them out of their car, even just for a little bit. So I think like events like Ciclovia in L.A. or Open Streets in New York or like the, you know, the Open Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, like those kinds of events that get people out on the street and get them to think about what would it be like if I could ride a bike without fearing for my life? What would it be like if I could go out with my kids on, you know, on rollerblades or whatever? Like those kinds of events, I think, have the potential to change

people's minds. And California is instructive in this regard because the parking requirements in California recently got preempted by state law. So it's no longer the case in California that a neighbor can say no to a project and say, this doesn't have enough parking. It has to build more parking by law if that project is near a transit station. Now, granted, that's a limited slice of California, but it does include busy bus routes. And so there's a lot of the state where now you would be able to build an affordable housing project with zero parking spaces if you wanted. And developers are doing this, right?

And the reason this law got passed is because there's a state senator from California who started riding a bicycle during a pandemic. is because there's a state senator from California who started riding a bicycle during a pandemic. And that was his moment of radicalization was riding this bike during the pandemic and seeing the urban environment for what it is, which is like a gigantic piece of infrastructure designed exclusively for people in cars.

And I think once you get that perspective change, you start looking at it anew. And so I think really like, what I tell people is like, you to get your mayor on the bus. You got to get your city councilman on a bike like that is so important, I think, to helping people realize what might be possible. That's amazing. And you feel that that can actually create change? Because, I mean, we have been a lot, you know, we made our generational mistake of building our entire civilization around cars. We made it about 70, 80 years ago. I don't always feel that I see it turning around. I mean,

even when you look at, you know, the infrastructure bills, they spend so much more money incentivizing electric car production, which is like, hey, I mean, I guess slightly greener way to move a two-ton piece of metal around to transport one guy to and from Models. It's like marginally cleaner, but not that much money for buses, which would be many, many times cleaner and also help create a greener environment or a more pleasant urban environment to boot. So I'm very happy about that California law, but is it a drop in the bucket or are we really going to see a seat change here? I feel like I share to some extent your pessimism, but I guess I also feel like something's got to give because we know how dire the housing shortage in this country has become. And so when you think like according to like Freddie Mac, I think we're up to four million housing units short of what we need to support all the new households that exist and that have been forming over the last 10 years have been unable to, you know, kids unable to move

out of their parents' house, families that are doubling up, et cetera, all this stuff. Where are those houses going to go? Where are those people going to move? And if you begin to think about adding 4 million new units of housing, I mean, yeah, they could be built on the ex-urban fringe, like 50 miles from downtown. But if we can get some of those built in these urban neighborhoods, I think we can reach that point where things start to change. And I do feel optimistic about that, in part because I just feel like there's a growing consciousness in the people I talk to, which, granted, I wrote a book about parking. It's

definitely a selective group. But there seems to be a growing consciousness of how we have messed up the urban environment and how much people would like to get something back from what their grandparents grew up with. And I do feel like that is something I see in city after city. And by the way, this is not just New York or San Francisco that are making these changes. Like Atlanta has this big two-way bike path downtown. Cleveland is doing stuff like this. Cincinnati has closed streets to create restaurant seating. I mean, this seems to be something that is catching on in place after place.

And I do think it's going to happen gradually at first. And it starts at the neighborhood level, right? I think a lot of the time people are focused on the commute. Commute is really difficult to take away the use of the car because commutes are really long. And because the geography of jobs is pretty sprawling, they're actually not mostly located in the CBD, the Central Business District. They're mostly located in the suburbs. So getting people out of their car to get to work is really challenging. But the good news is the commute represents something like one in six of all trips.

And the rest of those trips happen mostly in the neighborhood. And they're mostly pretty short trips. And so I think if you can begin to rethink your life in the neighborhood as, you know, could I do this on foot? Is this an errand that we could make safe, et cetera? There, I actually feel a great deal of hope. Yeah. I mean, I also wonder if we can just draw people back to that experience at Disneyland or at the outdoor mall, which the

interesting thing about those places is they are always set up to be your grandparents' America. That's famously how Disneyland was designed. You know, it's the old timey American Main Street feeling. That's how these outdoor malls are designed. And what are those things all have in common? It was a time before cars. And why do you want to go there? Because you don't need your car. And guess what? We could make your entire city like that. The entire place could be that pleasant. Wouldn't that be nice? People get that intuitively. And if we can paint that picture to them, then maybe we can get them to support some of these projects and changes. Yeah. You know, Disney World has actually the bus system at Disney World would be something like the 10th busiest mass transit system in

the United States if it were considered on its own. It's not like Americans won't ride the bus. Like if you give people a bus that comes every six minutes and goes somewhere useful. I mean, I think this is one of the silver linings to come out of the pandemic is for years, transit, and I know most of your listeners will probably say transit doesn't work for me. It doesn't go anywhere I need to go. It doesn't come when I need it. I understand. I agree. I think one thing that's been happening with transit is for years, transit systems were designed to reinforce downtown's centrality. They were designed to prop up real estate values for downtown tycoons who owned office buildings and wanted their workers to be able to get there,

but realized the geometry of parking all those cars would never work. Now, since the pandemic and since the crisis of the rush hour commute and remote work and all that, I think some transit agencies have started to rethink their mission. And they've started to say, what if we rethink this? What if our goal instead is to permit people to make trips without cars,

generally speaking, rather than simply to get them to work? And that means rethinking the way you run the network. It means instead of running the most trips at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., we think about, you know, when are parents picking their kids up from school, right? Like that means more trips at 3 p.m. When are people going shopping? When are people who work at home making those trips, right? Like when are people who work odd jobs in food service, when are they making their trips? And if you begin to think of it this way, instead of just focusing everything towards this white collar workforce that's working nine to five, I think you can begin to rethink your whole network and make making trips without a car possible for more people. Well, Henry, my God, thank you so much

for coming on the show to talk to us about it. I love the vision of the future that you paint. If you want to see it as well, you can pick up his book, Paved Paradise at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find you online, Henry? You can find me on Twitter, Henry Grubar. And if you go on my Twitter, I've got a newsletter too, where I talk about this stuff in more detail, if you haven't already heard enough. Thank you so much. It was wonderful having you. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you once again to Henry for coming on the show. If you want to check out his book, head to factuallypod.com slash books. And remember every book you buy there supports not just this show,

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