Home Building: Parking over People: Interview with Paved Paradise author Henry Grabar

Nov. 5—Earlier this fall, Homewise, as part of its Livability Speaker Series, brought in journalist Henry Grabar to talk about his new book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. And boy, did he explain a lot. Not only about parking but how parking has affected, shaped and largely determined and otherwise reoriented (i.e., nearly ruined) once-vibrant downtowns throughout the country, as well as how it has nefariously affected affordable housing, rents, walkable communities and otherwise everything needed to make a city aesthetically attractive, functional and environmentally conscientious. Even better, he had the data to back it up. Por ejemplo: "...every vehicle spends an estimated 95 percent of its life span parked."

Had you ever been to Santa Fe before?

No, that was my first time.

What was your impression?

The historic center is as beautiful and as charming as everyone says. I really loved it. And I spent a lot of time walking around there and going into local shops and just people watching and admiring the architecture and all that. But as you head down toward the airport, the urban environment degrades pretty rapidly. And you get into a kind of sprawl that, really, could be anywhere in the United States.

Getting to your talk, and to your book, you did such a thorough job that people seem to want policy advice from you?

Well, there are professional parking consultants whose job it is to count the parking and tell you how you could better manage it, but a lot of this—when I read that report on Santa Fe, contrary to popular perception, there actually is quite a bit of parking even in downtown Santa Fe. It's just not being well used. Street spaces fill up. The garage spaces are only ever half full. And it's not necessarily the case where management can solve some of your problems. But beyond that, and maybe where I come in, a lot of the decisions that need to be made are not technical. It's not, How do we find the best price for the parking or the best place to put the parking in? It's, What kind of city do we want to have? Do we want a place where people can walk to the grocery store? And that is not a question that can be answered by a consultant. That's a question for the populace to figure out and decide what they want. So it's true that people ask me for policy recommendations, but what I'm offering is not really a technical solution. What I'm offering is the prospect that change is possible.

And you've probably learned even more being out there on the ground—literally—on this tour, about parking issues around the country?

Oh, definitely. Going to all these places has been a kind of parking tour. I've seen several dozen examples now of different ways to approach this problem.

Parking seems to be more a question of American values more than anything. As you pointed out, parking has taken precedence over commercial and residential space. But as you also point out, parking is more malleable than people realize, and citizens can reorient their priorities and so the design of their cities. Like you say, it comes down to deciding what kind of city people want. Is that right?

Yeah, right. The important thing to remember is that the demand for parking is not fixed.

One thing you really homed in on was how parking affects not just the culture and aesthetics of a city but housing, and specifically, affordable housing. When a city like Santa Fe expands, is that when parking becomes even more a battle between parking space and housing space?

One thing that inner cities have going for them is that they have this diversity of users and the way one parking space can play many different roles. And that's harder in a small town where the hours of operation are really 9 to 5. There's really one center where everybody goes, at the same time. But part of the issue the city faces is that as it has expanded to the south, the historic core remains where a lot of the activity is. One thing that does have to happen, as the city gets larger, is to plot different neighborhood centers where people can go and get things done. It's thinking about how people are going to get what they need, within their own neighborhood or at a distance, and where driving becomes optional.

Is that more of an issue in bigger cities? Or everywhere?

Well, it turns out that most people's trips are one to two miles. The median trip is 1.1 miles. And there have been lots of places in the West and elsewhere, where they've been retrofitting big suburban boulevards. To make them more like urban streets. They have a bunch of trees and they have traffic calming measures, or service alleys with access to buildings.

Is it unrealistic for Santa Fe to try to go back to being a walkable city that's less centered around cars and parking?

I don't think so. But it doesn't happen without changes in design and land use. It's not gonna happen with the existing parking regulations.

There are a few different parts to it, but one is building pockets of higher-density housing that will support amenities in the neighborhood, where maybe parking in an apartment complex is an option or there's one space per unit or you pay more for the parking or it's not included in your rent. You get a little more flexibility with respect to people's transportation. People need choices.

Part of that is the promise of getting rid of parking minimums, like letting developers feel the market and decide, OK, are there enough people out here to rent an apartment and do they need one car or would they be happy getting to work on an e-bike? But that's something you cannot expect to happen as long as developers are required to provide all these parking spaces; because once you've provided the parking spaces, everyone who lives there has already paid for it.

And compared to other cities, you already have an example of what a walkable, mixed-use development looks like. There shouldn't be any reason for people to be culturally opposed. But it does require leadership. We know the status quo isn't good. But until you try something new, you'll never know what might happen.

Have you seen other cities that Santa Fe could model themselves after that might work here?

The first step, definitely, is getting rid of parking minimums. Or maybe the pessimists are right, maybe Santa Fe is just an auto-oriented place and no one's ever going to want that apartment that doesn't come with parking spaces. But you'll never know until you try it.

But we've seen other car-oriented places, like Buffalo, New York, experiment with these policies, and Austin.

The other big place to experiment beyond maybe like mixing the downtown parking situation would be with the streets. To create a higher-density transit corridor. Invest in the service and invest in the shelters and see if people go out and use that. I believe there is a program that provides downtown Santa Fe employees with bus passes. Transit services and changes in land use probably should go together.

One other project that might be interesting is Denver, Colorado started a few years ago. Their e-bike rebate program; the city helped subsidize the cost of purchasing an e-bike for residents and it's been a huge success. It's been constantly oversubscribed, every time they reopen it, people sign up. That has huge potential. It opens up transportation to a group of people for whom there were certain distances, certain temperatures, that previously it wasn't possible for them to afford. That might change the way people think about some of these car trips that are longer than a couple of blocks but need to be done in the car.

What are people's attitudes toward parking?

Well, one thing that I've been pleased to see—and this is thanks to the work of people like [UCLA professor] Don Shoup and other researchers who have gone into this—is how keenly aware how much parking shapes the future of a building, a district, a corridor, etc. So there's a lot of attention being paid to that. If we're trying to create, for example, a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood, we've got to find a way to keep the parking down. It'll ruin the walkability of a city, and its affordability. It leads to the types of projects that ultimately end up in the neighborhood where everybody's driving and traffic is getting worse, rather than a neighborhood where people are walking and you have more vibrancy.

Do you think parking requires federal action, to get everybody on board in a way where it's mandated on a national level?

No, I don't think federal action is required. And I don't think we're going to abandon our automobile-based transportation system anytime soon. But a shift in parking doesn't actually require that much of a lifestyle change. It's not about telling everybody to give up their cars. It's about a more intelligent management of the resources that we already have, which are used extremely inefficiently. That's a big part of it. And then beyond that it's also about realizing that there's this sort of hidden nudge that affects people's behavior in subtle ways that we can use to our advantage. But neither of those things requires big federal action. Obviously, there could be way more federal support for affordable housing and all that, but the appealing thing about the parking is that it can be gotten right at a city-by-city level.

Home Building: Parking over People: Interview with Paved Paradise author Henry Grabar