Publishing Industry Insider interviews industry updates on bestseller list find all of our podcast by downloading the free cspan now app or wherever you get your podcast and on our website cspan. Org podcast. Henry grab bar is a writer journalist and urban analyst who is also a terrific writer with an ability for complex urban issues into accessible narratives which shed light on the intricate dynamics that shape their cities this is one of them we see the troubles we are running into every day. We wonder how to fix them is this what we should and other problems its veryco complex and very c convoluted and everything is connected. And his new book paradise offers a compelling explanation of forces that shape their cities from the rights of the automobile to the challenges and the urgent climate conscious urban planning please help me welcome to the men who write sentences like this i love the sentence. Wonder why market is so important youre driving around you are sweating you want a parking spot so bad. He writes a parking space is nothing less than the link between driving and life itself. [laughter] is help me welcome henry grabar. Topic. Good evening. Thanks for that introduction. Thanks for upstaging me. [laughter] i know we just went to spend the next hour watching falcon beating. This wont take long im just going to explain the entire history of the american urban environment to you. [laughter] and thank you for coming i am really proud to be in the lecture today. Everything i have heard about albert suggests he would have loved this topic and would have been so ready to jump into this conversation and argue with all of us about parking all night i have no doubt we could do that. So i want to start was something i will break with the elevated theme that characterize the intellectual life of mercantile library. Seven season reality tv bonanza parking wars. [laughter] haif you have not seen it for te most part the show follows the workers of the Philadelphia Parking Authority as a ticket andd show philadelphians carson generally provoke sometimes experience extraordinarily level of mental anguish. As you can probably imagine when he started writing a book about parking status as a psychic third rail i felt blessed until there dozens of hours of footage. T [laughter] escort the tension in this show revolved around an unresolved question at the heart of the american urban experience. To whom this parking belong . Who owns it and under what conditions can it change hands . Two decades ago donald shoop the pope of parking studies the first albert pyle urban lecture speaker observed thinking about parking takes place in the reptilian cortex. The part of the brain set to govern aggression, territoriality and visual display. I believe science has moved on from this concept but holds true for parking. Sitting here in this Beautiful Library or move from the stress of the road answer to the question of parking ownership is simplebl. We set the public, it belongs to all of us from behind the wheel of your car you might see iotherwise. You might say it belongs to me. You see this assumption on neighborhood forms like nextdoor or an unfamiliar parked car at a suburban curb can become the days subject of conversation. Oc many sittings including cincinnati issue local parkingas permits as a way of legitimizing this claim. The parking belongs only to the people who live here. Even your runofthemill single home family driveway plays a similar role it offers access to private garage but it reserves a piece of the curb for you. After a snowstorm and more finegrained system of curb ownership takes place in which the person who shovels the spot gets to keep it. There is a blog in chicago that catalogs the fantastic array of objects used in this practice folding chairs, childrens toys, heavy machinery, nativity figurines. Always imagine the implication that you or your car would be beaten with the object in question if you were to take the spot perhaps some of you have experienced this on one side or the other i dont know which. Thats hard to imagine another domain in which a City Government implicitly endorses the delay of justice but thats what dibs or saves these is. When a boston tried to limit this practice to 48 hours after a snowfall city councilman protested. The issue speaks to the basic principle what it means to be an american he said. The gold of minor and the pioneers, residents have a right to stake their claims. I will not surprise you learn dozens of americans are killed over parking disputes every year. I submit to you the most important driver of parking anger is a deep sense of confusion over ownership in following from that conflicting standards of entitlement and behavior. Is parking public . Private . Somewhere in between . Conceive there are other med things about parking stop and driving directions so it feels like a time penalty. The rules are confusing and so rarely enforced getting a parking ticket feels unlucky and unfair. Why me question rick finally parking isbu maddening because u have no choice but to drive. The cart may be freedom but not being able to park it will turn into a cage figure out the source of thes. Irritation was just not enough parking. There isnt enough for a driver to find a spotof immediately in front of their destination. Want to statement parking to be free, convenient and available think of it as a vent diagram f hit two of those three is parking when it shopped a hot restaurant it 8 00 p. M. And all the spots are taken convenient and available but not free thats parking in frontnt of a t restaurant downtown that has parking meters. Free and available but not convenient as part many of us find a parking because we dont want to pay for it. Myself included. Inar other words standards for parking are very, very high. We do not want to pay, we do not want to wait and we dont want to walk. The best of parking is doled out along the status hierarchy. At uc barkley for example to win a reserved parking place he must win a nobel prize. [laughter] i dos not know what is required here at the library. It would be unimaginable for us to hold any other good to the standard. But the problem is certainly not that we dont have enough parking. In fact thereng is an astounding amount of parking in this country. As many as eight spots for every car. And of course not p all the cars are parked at the same time. Even if summit set out to write a book about how much space for parking there is in thisbi couny i was shocked by these numbers. So i will digress momentarily for the difficulty of finding a parking space and give you a sense of just how much parking there is. In the losan angeles county thee are 19 million Parking Spaces that is five for every household it is 14 of the Incorporated Land in the county produce more land than the moving plants on the streets and freeways put together. And Silicon Valley the wealthiest region of the niceties parking is 13 of the i land. Li there are 15 million spots in the bay area enough to wrap a parking lane around the earth twice. Smallest t city the more parking there is generally speaking. Seattle has five spo per household des moines, iowa has 20 per household. Parking parcels in other words in a a louisville twin 9 in denton kansas city. Curb parking you see atlanta and philadelphia here also plenty of parking. In buffalo new york the master plan is to demolish all downtown really halfway there. Standing in the way of parking progress. And it is not just buffalo. There is more land used for use restoringeach car in this cn there is for housing each person. A team of programmers were working on the first new game and a decade they studied american municipal architecture, politics and urban design to try to produce a compelling. Lead designer use a google earth to measure hise surroundings. The Biggest Surprise he found was the size of the parking lots. S when i started measuring out our local Grocery Store which i dont think of his being that big i was a blown away by how much more space for parking lot rather than actual store he said. A problem we of were originally going to model cities, real cities but we quickly realize there were way too many parking lots in the real world and our game was boring if iteally was proportional in terms of parking lots. In the game he said try to measure parking was, undergrou. We had to do the best we could and still make the game look attractive. So if there is so much parking then why is it so hard to find a spot . The answer lies in this question of ownership. Parking problem is as old as the road itself. In the seventh century bc the king hosted signs that read royal road let no man decrease it. Under penalty of death and public impalement. You can stop complaining about your parking tickets. Julius caesar introduced offstreet chariot parking in rome to reduce traffic, 17th century new york established a towing service to clear the streets of animals you can get your piggyback from the pound or your horseac for two and a half. In fact the terms of dog pound and toe pound both come from the shared history of unclaimed property. Up until the invention of the automobile the temperamental nature of horses with his own regulation. The adventth of the car was required to be left outside in all weather for days or weeks at a time turned the parking problem into a major dilemma. Not only did merchants and country folk quickly abandon horsepower in the first few decades of the 20th century commuters could drive themselvei itching the unwashed the pick pockets in the bustle pinchers on the trolleys american enthusiasm for this new mode of transport was overwhelming and immediate. The 1920s in muncie indiana one woman spoke for the nation she said she bought a car before installing indoor plumbing because you cannot go to town in the bathtub. [laughter] what followed were four decades of interminable traffic jams as cars swarm downtown streets observers believe the root of the traffic problem was parking. A large share of the traffic was caused by people looking for parking and another shirt was caused by people who gave up and double or triple parked. And so by the time the end of world war ii cleared the way for the renewal of the cities everyone was convinced that parking was a crisis in a postwar report on decentralization the flow of Business People and money to the suburbs the urban Land Institute the National Organization of Real Estate Developers concluded parking was in the most important single problem facing the Central Business districts of large cities today. When i first came across these accounts of the mid century city like this cartoon you see here which in case you cannot see the label says a Downtown Parking problem. I could barely believe it. Between the crises of racial inequality, endemic pollution, ramshackle housing, job loss and crime that characterize the urban trajectory after the Second World War newspaper editorials and conference keynote refocus on parking . Yes for General Motors video from the 1950s give yourself the green bite represents the conventional wisdom of the postwar era. Biltmore parking. What brings up store sales today is parking space when merchant says it is important to volume as a shelf space and display windows. Best investment a town can make, lots of them. The rise of the suburbs give this problem new urgency. Fix your parking thinking what or become obsolete should. They viewed it was a fight suburbs tapping urban vitality population in tax revenue was commonplace. At this point cities had two choices. They could try to manage parking demand by charging for parking, sprucing up Transit Service encouraging carpooling and building walkable places for jobs, homes and amenities close by. They had a new tool the parking meter invented in 1935 by Oklahoma City newspaper editor. He noticed all of the best parking spots were taken by employees they would arrive early in the morning and park all day. Then there is nothing during the day. Charge even a little bit for parking the allday parkers would park a fiveminute walk away giving the premium spaces the interface between the street and the building free for shoppers, clients, and delivery. Parking meters were hailed and there time as a miracle. But of course cities chose another path to focus on chart parking supply parking lots settlement of the wreckage of urban renewal publicly funded garages were put up downtown. Parking meter fell out of favor Transit Service began to disintegrate. Mixeduse mid Rise Development was redlined out of existence. Most importantly cities began requiring the renewed or renovated building having its own parking. Supplies. They began a long transfer of parking from public use on streets or municipal garages to a private one required of home and business. Capable of managing their streets and curbs cities force the private sector to take care of car parts. This decision would have serious consequences. Cities were about to come up with a very complicated and a willing answer to the question of who owns that parking space. Chronologically speaking we are now 1970. Curbs are made free or cleared for faster traffic. Their Critical Role as urban access is limited by either decision. For builders zoning for parking is ubiquitous. Can understand what planners werees thinking when they establish these rules. They could have the private sector fix the parking problem instead of city tax dollars funding taxexempt public garages teachers would be developed to do their parking themselves. Nearly every city adopted a long complex code that dictated how many parking spots for every single use in Apartment Buildings and schools nail salons number of nunnerys and Funeral Homes yes they really are that specific. You are looking at a popular parking manual on screen, tag your self i am a copy dont shop with a drive through window. They are so specific print look at these Marijuana Dispensary carpet store, Building Material and lumber supply judicial complex. Le here in cincinnati for example one spot for every tune of 50 square feet of a poolroom. One for every one of 50 square feet of a bingo parler. Five for every lane and a bowling alley. One for every two boats in a marina for it one for every two and 50 square feet of a quote sexually oriented business. [laughter] and no, i do not understand what needs its own parking regulation either. I do not think planus could cap imagine how effective these policies would be. Going to run through some of the consequences of this misguided approach to parking. The most dramatic consequence of asking the private sector to take care of car storages and lhousing. Anyone who was to build a small Apartment Building in the United States must first confront a multi variant financial geometry problem that begins with how might Parking Spaces can fit on the lot. The size quantity and shape of the housing falls from there. Sometimes. With just one parcel its hard tot make you think wk at all by the lot next door you can unlock economies of scale like a dry but was stalls on other side. Most smalltime developers couldt afford for even if they could find for adjacent properties for sale. Parking is the immovable object at the heart of neighborhood architecture. As a result of these rules we simply stop building small buildings. Parking requirements have have helped to trigger extinction level event with a bite sized Apartment Buildings like rowhouses, brownstones, tripledeckers that made up the American City in the early 20th century. The production was between two and four units filled by more than 90 between 1971 and 2021. More parking means less housing because parking takes up space and it cost money to build. Quite a lot of money in fact too. Building a stand alone garages barely profitable required parking tens of thousands of dollars the cost of every single american apartment or home including a half a billion dollar penalty annually on tenants who do not drive because they pay for that parking in their rent regardless of. Every completed building with a bunch of party included theres a blueprint for unbuilt structure that did not pencil out. This is a valley of the high parking requirement. On one side, on the right properties in expensive areas like downtown cincinnati and justify costly structures garages or even subterranean parking which can cost 100,000 a space. On the left to see low density urbanism with ample room to parker. You do not see much in between. The belly of the high parking requirement is not a fertile place. Limit zinc required parking and as a result we have a parking surplus and the housing shortage. The second consequence of making parking spot as mandatory as the front door has been in architecture. For centuries in american architecture has in tandem with parking lots increasing quantities of her lip parking has forced developers to move from the early 20th century that i just mentioned, corner taverns, storefront groceries, rowhouses bungalow courts et cetera. Big box stores houses of the primary architectural feature is the garage door. When ayo land advisor high enouh you get the parking podium building the most famous example might be marina city in chicago which you can see on the left but there are also plenty of examples here in downtown cincinnati. When land advisor not so high you get something more like Dodger Stadium in los angeles. This system has made it impossible to maintain the american main street. Central parcels on main street were originally developed as commercial storefronts facing the sidewalk with offices or housing above. Put 20 or 30 of them sidebyside and main street. That is what you see on the upper left here. If you wanted to open a shop on one of the slots and an American City to date you wouldo need to provide 1200 square feet of parking for every 1000 square feet of interior commercial space more than half of your lot is parking now. Ifo you