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A new article! https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/parking-drives-housing-prices/618910/
"The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city." -- Lewis Mumford, _The City in History_
'A train drops a passenger off and keeps going. A driver drops a car off and keeps going. Thus most trains are mostly moving, while most cars are parked most of the time. The price of the car’s convenience, then, is the space it consumes when it isn’t in motion, and indeed even when it isn’t there. Cities designed for cars must set aside space: space to wait for cars, and space to hold them while they wait for their drivers to come back.'
'In downtown L.A., parking usually costs developers more than $50,000 per space to build. Walt Disney Concert Hall, a cultural landmark that is home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cost $274 million to build. Of that total, the underground parking structure, which is not a cultural landmark (it’s an underground parking structure), accounted for $100 million.'
'Large portions of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, if they burned down tomorrow, couldn’t be rebuilt, because according to modern zoning, their buildings don’t have “enough” parking. Brownstone Brooklyn, after all, is largely devoid of parking; so is Boston’s famed North End.'
'There are promising signs of reform. Buffalo, New York, recently abolished its parking requirements. Minneapolis has done the same. San Diego and San Francisco have scaled them back, and California may be on the cusp of rolling them back statewide.'
"The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city." -- Lewis Mumford, _The City in History_
'A train drops a passenger off and keeps going. A driver drops a car off and keeps going. Thus most trains are mostly moving, while most cars are parked most of the time. The price of the car’s convenience, then, is the space it consumes when it isn’t in motion, and indeed even when it isn’t there. Cities designed for cars must set aside space: space to wait for cars, and space to hold them while they wait for their drivers to come back.'
'In downtown L.A., parking usually costs developers more than $50,000 per space to build. Walt Disney Concert Hall, a cultural landmark that is home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cost $274 million to build. Of that total, the underground parking structure, which is not a cultural landmark (it’s an underground parking structure), accounted for $100 million.'
'Large portions of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, if they burned down tomorrow, couldn’t be rebuilt, because according to modern zoning, their buildings don’t have “enough” parking. Brownstone Brooklyn, after all, is largely devoid of parking; so is Boston’s famed North End.'
'There are promising signs of reform. Buffalo, New York, recently abolished its parking requirements. Minneapolis has done the same. San Diego and San Francisco have scaled them back, and California may be on the cusp of rolling them back statewide.'