Quote:
GROSS: Let me stop you there. You're saying that creating more parking creates more traffic because if there's more parking, you're more likely to drive.
GRABAR: Yeah. It's counterintuitive. But at the beginning - right? - in the 1950s and '60s, when cities were sort of swamped by traffic, they figured, OK, we have to build parking because if we don't build parking, people will continue to circle the block looking for parking, and we'll be stuck with this terrible traffic problem. So they built a ton of parking. But what we have learned since is that, in fact, if you require every single land use to be - to come with a certain number of parking spots and, in some cases, to be half parking by surface area, you are creating a lot of incentives for people to drive.
Not only are you requiring renters and homeowners to pay for that parking in the lease or in the sales price when they purchase or rent a new unit. Sometimes that can amount to 15 or 20% of the total cost of the unit - just the parking, right? So if you don't drive, that's a pretty big down payment you're making on a car right there. But the other part of it is that the more parking you provide, the harder it becomes to walk, bike or use transit because you create a low-density environment that's just not particularly pleasant to walk in. And it can be that simple that, you know, when you find yourself in an environment where you're surrounded by parking lots, it becomes difficult to get around any other way than in a car.
GROSS: Is there another point you wanted to make before I interrupted you?
GRABAR: The other thing I think is behind this big reform movement is housing, right? So the United States has a serious housing affordability problem right now, and some studies estimate that we are millions of units short in providing adequate housing. And the cities that have begun to reform these laws requiring parking have realized that parking - required parking - is a major impediment to achieving housing affordability. And that's not just because it costs so much to build and impedes the development of affordable housing projects, but it's also because it changes the types of projects that get built.
I mean, if you are under obligation to provide two parking spaces per unit, which is the requirement in many places, you are going to find it difficult to work with small infill lots. You're going to find it impossible to build some of these older forms we were talking about, like brownstones, triple-deckers, three-flats, etc. And this is a huge impediment to building the kind of housing that many communities have decided that they need.
And so if you zoom out a little bit, one of the consequences of free parking, one of the externalities we've been talking about, is that if you don't regulate street parking and you create these shortages, people circling around the block and so forth, you create an environment in which there's more and more opposition to new housing and in which new housing is required to come with increasing quantities of parking to satiate parking-hungry neighbors who are angry about the public parking supply.
And that dynamic is really powerful. If you go to a community meeting in any American town where a new residential project is being discussed, the shortage of parking is always invoked as a reason to oppose. And so our inability to manage parking has produced a situation in which parking functions as a cudgel that can be wielded to keep new neighbors out of old neighborhoods.
