Henry Grabar's "Paved Paradise" is a Masterpiece

It's the spiritual successor to "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and important companion to "The High Cost of Free Parking."

If Don Shoup is the Parking God—the Ganesh of Gravelled Ground—then surely Henry Grabar is its Patron Saint, and he’ll gladly pay for the time he’s spent idling here. In about a week, we’ll all be able to read “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.” How’s this for praise: it’s the most exciting and potentially important planning book I’ve read since “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” There’s a nonzero chance that, if enough people read even some of this book, that we might be able to knock this sticky policy and land use issue loose from the throes of what is.

Henry’s book is hopeful, but he also told me this:

Believe it or not, there is a story of a parking space attack that I thought was actually too gruesome to go in the book. And I won't say anything more about that. It just didn’t need to be included.

Too gruesome? This is a book about car storage.¹ That’s just it, though. Is it?

In a happy happenstance, “Paved Paradise” landed in my inbox because a publisher had reached out to my friend, Zach, with an offer of a galley and an interview. Zach, a music and culture journalist, thought to pass the contact on to me and I gladly hopped on it. I’ll say this: this book is as important to the narrative and discourse around …everything as any I’ve ever read. Remember: I own about 1000 books. It’s not the spiritual successor to Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking,” though it does dedicate at least a third of the book to Professor Shoup, his storied career, and its millepedian effects on policy and discourse. I’ll never speak ill of Shoup, but it’s hard to argue with pulling the best parts of 700 pages and weaving a story like Grabar’s done with this book.

His argument is simple and strong: attached to the atoms of the soil that tenuously holds the root of our urban (and suburban and rural) problems is parking. More specifically, the acres and square miles of parking that we assign to our streets and condos has not only clogged space that might be used for literally anything else, but it’s also fueled years of fights that waste everyone’s money and time; people have killed each other over a parking spot; American cities have mortgaged their future selling access to parking to …the UAE.

This garage collapsed a few weeks ago in New York City and the affair killed a person. Talk about gruesome. Tom Kaminski/AP.

Henry’s real trick here that balances the scold buried underneath the story is its cast of characters. They’re memorable humans, even the slick and despicable ones—they’re never archetyped, memefied, or caricatured. These people, too often, are buried under theory and research, but all 300-plus-pages read like biography rather than treatise. Henry reminds us that a decision is a person making a decision just like a car doesn’t park itself (at least not yet). In “Paved Paradise” we meet:

• Ginger Hitzke, an affordable housing developer who spent years—years—trying to build homes, but was ultimately stymied by parking.

• Ana Russi, a traffic agent aka “the most hated person in the city” for enforcing parking rules.

• Victor Gruen, the father of the shopping mall, filled cities and suburbs with oceans of parking.

• John Hammerschlag, parking garage mogul—an “old school parking guy.”

• Paul Volpe, the budget guy, and Richard M. Daley, the mayor, helped to sell the rights to Chicago’s parking meters for a quick influx of cash and mortgaged the city’s future for decades.

• Nathan Carter, a pastor and community man, who wanted to build a community church, but couldn’t—not because he couldn’t find a congregation, but because he couldn’t find a place for them to park, whether they needed to or not.

• Don Shoup and the Shoupistas, his global following of parking evangelists.

• Tony Jordan, Lindsay Bayley, and Jane Wiberding from the Parking Reform Network—a group of aptly named evangelists and reformers who’ve connected to share story, policy, and optimism for a future of cities for people not cars.

• Carol Schatz, a narrow-footed reformer from Los Angeles who worked to change the land use code to dump parking minimums from building conversion projects.

• Clay Grubb, by all means not a reformer, but a developer who wanted to build cheaper housing by cutting out parking, got his projects labeled “monstrosities,” for lack of parking, and who we think is not in jail.

• Jose Trinidad Castaneda, who just wanted to live where others parked and help others do so, too.

• Janette Sadik-Khan, whose projects did not put much of a dent in NYC’s supply of 3 million curb parking spaces, but did give us Times Square back from a few thousand of them, for better or worse.

• And dozens more bit players and major interlopers, developers, and politicians that make up the vast landscape of folks trying to do something about this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

  

  This is Don Shoup. Photo by Kimberly Paynter. Source.

Oh, and there’s Henry himself who wrote this book because he “got hit on my bike in the bike lane, by a police officer of all people, who was pulling out from the curb lane and right into the bike lane.” He was fine, he said, but the bike was not. “And it was mostly just a little scary, and it really made me ask the fundamental question of, why is this bike lane where it is? Why is there not a safe way for the hundreds, if not thousands of people who ride their bikes down the street every day, to not worry about getting hit by a car?

“And the answer to that question in New York, whether it's for people riding bikes, or people riding buses, is the sanctity of free street parking. And when you think of it that way —I understand it. Lots of people rely on free parking and certainly, they're accustomed to it. But it really is the thing that's standing in the way of creating safe ways for people to get around in alternative ways. To me, riding a bike shouldn't require taking your life into your own hands.”

On its face the only thing that connects “Paved Paradise’s” diverse cast is parking. There’s something more nefarious that connects the people to their places to this idea—that parking is an inalienable right—that without unlimited, unfettered access to 320 sqft. for free: hegemonic public power and pressure. Who wins when everyone loses and what will it take to reverse a century of diffuse and incoherent policy? What price have we paid for a policy that affects intimate (for now) objects that sit empty more than 90% of the time?

“Paved Paradise” doesn’t answer this question directly, but it puts the evidence against the glass and begs you to connect the dots. There’s joy in this book where there isn’t in its subject matter: it’s a mystery novel and a policy brief wrapped into one and the writing is alive. It weaves together primary source quotes and aphorisms with verifiable facts and deep research. It piles on the clues and begs you to come to a conclusion. This is the other trick of “Paved Paradise,” though perhaps “trick” should be “carefully structured decision:” In what order does this book introduce the information? It’s instead two-dimensional: timewise and geographic. How do you connect parking meter “asset recycling” (Chicago, sixty more years) with California enviroNIMBYs (The California Coastal Commission, forever)?

Downtown Houston, 1970s. Can’t imagine why that’s not Peak™️ Urbanism.

What’s the future look like? Safety first, second, and third. Henry’s encouraged by the striking of parking minimums across many states and municipalities, but is less so by the other side of the coin: too much road death. Henry told me this when I asked him about what a successful future looks like:

There hasn't been similar progress in making the streets safe for people who aren't driving. That's just a huge barrier. And a lot of places, even when the distances are feasible on foot or on a bicycle, especially on an electric bicycle, if cars are still going 55 miles an hour, with some bike lane painted on the shoulder, that's not good enough. Nobody's going to give up their car to ride with their kid down the road. So, cities that are repealing parking minimums, on the one hand, should be equally enthusiastic about making safe streets on the other. And on that front, I feel a lot less optimistic.

We owe it to Don, Jane, Henry, Nathan, Ana, Jose, and to the next generation of pedestrians, who are dying at an alarming twenty people per day², and who are killed by drivers maneuvering vehicles from one spot to the next. We have to do better.

---

Buy “Paved Paradise” here. I’m going to get a whole handful to give to friends.

1. Not written by Ari Aster.

2. https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians22