Q&A with Henry Grabar

Henry Grabar is a journalist who writes about cities. He is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a staff writer at Slate. His work has also appeared in 99 Percent Visible, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He has discussed these subjects on television and radio and before audiences at New America, the National Press Foundation, and various conferences and classrooms. His most recent book is Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, which was published in May 2023 by Penguin Press.

Anthony J. Mohr: Let’s start with parking psychology. In Paved Paradise, you make references to gold miners who stake out their claims and compare that to residents who feel they have a right to their parking spaces. Can you elaborate?

Henry Grabar: That's based on a quote that I heard from a Boston City Council person who was talking about Bostonians who claim to have a right to street parking after a snowstorm, and that is a practice that is not native to Boston. It also exists in Chicago and Pittsburgh and other cities where it snows, the feeling that while street parking is public, after it snows, you've earned the right to hold that parking space for an undetermined amount of time. It illustrates the extent to which we all feel a sense of ownership over street parking, and that while technically it’s public, you are permitted to store your private property in the public right of way for an undetermined amount of time. In reality, many people feel that that space belongs to them in some way, and snowstorms bring that out. But I think it's a tendency that exists more broadly and the repercussions that are evident in all kinds of local political conversations.

Mohr: Does that feed into the fact that parking enforcement officers are so disliked?

Grabar: Yes. I think one of the reasons people feel such hatred towards parking enforcement is because we have this innate sense that street parking belongs to us. There's something else at work. We often assume that parking is worthless because it's the cheapest possible use of land and that parking lots and garages are such unpleasant places to be. The idea that we should pay for them seems counterintuitive, because they feel so cheap and disposable. In fact, parking does cost a lot of money, whether it's the land that you need to dedicate to the lot, or the amount of money that goes into the concrete and the engineering of a big parking garage. The assumption that parking ought to be free because it costs little to build doesn't turn out to be true. Finally, in lots of places, parking enforcement is somewhat predatory. Some cities operate not with an eye towards managing this precious interface between transportation and land use between the street and the building, but rather with an idea of making as much money as possible. Often that money is made, not through meter rates, but through fines. Some cities are dependent on fine revenue, and people, I think, rightly perceive that the amount of money they get in parking fines is not commensurate with the offense that has been committed.

Mohr: Maybe that’s why, in New Orleans you can buy voodoo dolls of parking enforcement officers.

Grabar: I would never defend such a practice. I think parking enforcement officers are doing good work, and it's terrible that they face so much violence in their job. I'm certainly not defending anybody who makes a voodoo doll out of a parking enforcement officer. But the point is true that parking enforcement systems in cities are poorly organized and operated, and people do have good reason, I think, to be upset with the system.

Mohr: You gave some interesting examples in your book, like the priest who assaulted a parking enforcement officer.

Grabar: Crazy, right? And Mother Teresa got an audience at City Hall and used that moment to ask for two reserved parking spots for her West Village AIDS hospice. Again, this shows the extent to which people are attached to street parking, even if you're a saint. I didn't have to look that hard for those. They were stories I came across in The New York Times during a cursory search. And that's just one city over one time period. And those are just the instances to make the news. How many of these cases have never earned a spot in the local news and therefore are lost to history?

Mohr: So, what problems do you see?

Grabar: Three problems. The first is that it’s public land. And in a lot of cities, streets make up 30% of the total land in the city. And so, you are committed to a lot of that land being dedicated to the free storage of private property, in this case automobiles. No other private property can be stored there. You can’t put your mini storage unit there, or your office out there, and certainly you can’t put an additional bedroom out there.

There is a lot of demand to use that real estate for other purposes, whether that's picking up trash or bike share stations, bike lanes, bus lanes, planting trees. A lot of people would like to see that public land used for higher value use than storing private automobiles.

There's a second problem. If you become extremely attached to your possession over a piece of the public right of way, you begin to think differently about more people moving into your neighborhood. I think this is a political problem where once you see the public right of way as belonging to you and being storage for your personal private car, then when an apartment building gets built in the neighborhood and new neighbors move in, you see those new neighbors not as potential friends, potential tennis partners, people you might barbecue with on Saturday afternoon. Instead, they’re competition for your parking space.

A third problem occurs when the law requires people to have a garage. They say, “This isn't the most valuable use of my land. I would rather do something else with this.” And so, one of the things I saw, for example in Austin, Texas, is people converting garages into Airbnb units, and then they park on the street in front of their house. There are so many more valuable things that people can do with that real estate, and first among them is housing. You see this in Los Angeles all the time. People may be required to have garages, but tens of thousands have been turned into housing units, informal often, and unregulated. The need for housing is so far superior to the need for parking that you see that arbitrage at work. All this gets to the problem with spillover parking, which is if you have so many people wanting to park on the street, you create negative externalities: lots of traffic, people circling the block, wasted time, fights, etc. This gets back to the ultimate answer to this question of parking. Far from being free, people should pay for parking, because there is so much demand. The way to make sure we have enough parking is to put a price on it and create a market.

Mohr: What would you recommend in terms of social policy with respect to parking?

Grabar: I have to give a shout out to Donald Shoup, who has done an enormous amount of research on this and established that we need as policy goal number one to get rid of minimum parking requirements. They have a host of negative effects on cities, on architecture, on the environment, on housing costs, and on the urban landscape. We also need to start charging and regulating street parking. Once you remove the burden to provide parking as a part of a piece of property, people begin to park their cars on the street. Obviously, you reach a point at which that becomes untenable, and a lot of cities have responded to this with parking permit programs where only certain people who live in the neighborhood are allowed to park their car on the street. And that's one way to deal with this issue.

Mohr: So, you feel permit parking is okay?

Grabar: It's not my favorite policy in the world. I do think it's sort of exclusionary. But we have to be conscious about how local politics operate. I've learned that people have this fierce attachment to parking spaces. To tell them not only are we letting a bunch of new people move into your neighborhood, they're going to park in the street, and soon you will have to pay for street parking – that’s a challenging conversation to have. And so, I think in an ideal world we would get to a place where street space was priced, and people could use it for whatever use either commands the highest price or the highest income for the city. Those might include, for example, planting trees. Transitioning to that is difficult because people have been accustomed to parking for free for a century.

As an intermediate solution, you could issue a certain number of permits. If you live in the neighborhood, you get one. However, the number of permits would be limited by the number of available parking spaces. And we're only going to issue these permits once, but they can be traded. If you move to the neighborhood and want to park on the street, you need to buy a parking permit from somebody who has one. In that way, we establish a system where we could be sure there will never be more cars parked on the street than there are parking spaces. And because the permits appreciate as more people move to the neighborhood, we wind up with a system in which neighbors are encouraged to say yes to new neighbors.

Mohr: But if I live in a neighborhood that has no parking problems, should the city force me to pay to park?

Grabar: I don't think people should pay as a matter of course. This policy should be undertaken in places where there is a shortage of available street parking.

Mohr: Let's assume I'm moving away, but don't want to give up my permit. May I keep it?

Grabar: That's the first time anybody's asked me that question. I suppose you are entitled to keep your permit and leave the neighborhood. But a new neighbor may want that permit. The permit has value. It might go for $1,000 a year, or even $6,000 or $7,000. Maybe that's a good enough deal for you to sell.

Mohr: When we talk about getting rid of minimum parking requirements, aren't we making it harder to park in neighborhoods, because you can put up a building without a minimum parking requirement? The buildings will be closer together. How do you handle that?

Grabar: That's one of the reasons it's a good idea. For sixty years we've been requiring all this parking, and it's had a host of negative effects. It makes sense to deprioritize the ease of finding parking in favor of a system where we have more affordable housing, better architecture, buildings that are closer together, more walkable neighborhoods. So yes, in the short term, we are looking at a situation in which you create neighborhoods where it’s slightly more difficult to park. I don't believe people dislike those places. Some of our most desirable areas in the country are places where it's difficult to park. One of the magical things that happens in those places is that you achieve a density of activity that makes it possible to walk around. You have all those commercial amenities in one place. You unlock a virtuous cycle of land use with that increasing density.

Mohr: I'm coming at this with a Los Angeles perspective – You go to the market. You buy groceries. You walk out with arms full of bags. Assume your car is half a mile away. What do you do with your three bags of groceries?

Grabar: I know if you're in Paris, people carry them. But I don't think it's likely that Americans will be parking ten blocks away and schlepping their groceries ten blocks back. In a system in which there’s a scarcity of parking, a fee should be set at a rate that prioritizes access for people who need those great parking spaces and are willing to pay for them. And if you're driving to the grocery store and you're about to drop $400 on groceries and load up the trunk of your big car, then I submit that the price of forty minutes of parking is going to be worth it to you to get a space in front of the grocery store. You're going to pay for it, and you'll feel like you got a great deal, because you're next to the grocery store door.

Who was parking there before? Well, it might be somebody who works at the store. That person arrives first thing in the morning, when all the spots are available. They park there, and they leave their car there all day while they work their shift. Now, that's the person who should be parking ten blocks away. That's the person for whom that ten-block walk is a better deal than paying for ten hours of parking. In this way, paying for parking sorts people by how long they need to park and how valuable the parking is for them.

Mohr: Changing the subject. With the technology we have today, there must be a way to reserve a parking space.

Grabar: There's a bunch of apps that allow you to do this, and this is a big step, because one of the problems with parking is that it's so disorganized. I think one of the reasons people get so upset about it is that we’re forced to make decisions on the fly about something that's actually pretty important: where we're going to leave our car. It's a lot to leave up to chance, so that's why we have this cultural expectation that parking has to be super easy. Nobody wants to get stuck without a space. But one way to avoid this situation, in addition to charging for parking, is also to normalize the practice of reserving a spot in advance. One example of this is a service called Spot Hero. If you're driving into downtown, you can reserve a spot online. And then your mapping software knows exactly where to take you. You know where you will park, and you know exactly how much you're going to pay. It's not better than taking a bus or riding a bike, but it's certainly better than driving in and going around in circles and looking for a parking spot. The security of a reservation is better than taking your chances, and that leaves fewer people who have decided to take their chances, and therefore less competition for spaces.

Mohr: Now let me ask you this. What happens when I use the software and reserve my spot at 85 Main Street at 10 o'clock, and when I arrive, another car is there and somebody’s getting out and I say I've reserved that space, and they tell me to go pound sand?

Grabar: This gets back to my earlier point about parking enforcement. One of the reasons why parking tickets are expensive is because parking offences are rarely enforced. I know people will disagree with that; they'll say, “But I got two parking tickets just last week.” But what percentage of the time are you illegally parked? Do you actually get a parking ticket every time? I would say it's ten percent of the time. Honestly, it's an offense that mostly goes unpunished. And that's a reason that the parking enforcement fines need to be high in order to have any deterrent effect at all. And so, I think in a city that takes a more sophisticated approach to managing parking enforcement, people really do play by the rules, because there's a near certainty that when you illegally park, you will be ticketed for it. Then the ticket doesn't need to be a huge amount, because it's consistent enough that people do change their behavior. I think one of the reasons we can't get to that level is because we still do parking enforcement by hand. We still have people going around with little books writing down license plate numbers. Now that is the twentieth century way of doing this. If you go to Paris or Amsterdam, they have a car driving down the street with eight cameras on the roof that take pictures of every license plate, cross check them against who's paid for a meter at what time and send tickets in the mail. In that way you can actually establish a reliability of parking enforcement, which means that the fines don't need to be as high. It also means that scofflaws begin to realize that on a consistent basis, they will be ticketed. Hopefully, that leaves room for more orderly parking processes like reserving that spot at 85 Main Street.

Mohr: Los Angeles has a lot of parking meters, and the fines are about $65. Is that enough? Or would you advocate something even more thorough or more strict?

Grabar: I think the fine should be lower, closer to $25 or $30. But there should be a near certainty that if you park illegally for, say, an hour, you're going to get a fine.

Mohr: As they say in economics, a fine is a price, nothing more than a fee. So, if the fine is $20 or $25, don’t I have more incentive to say to heck with it; I’ll just pay the $25 to park there. If it’s $80, I’ll think twice.

Grabar: You're ignoring an important part of the real politics on the ground. When the fines are high, they're issued rarely. Again, I know people will say it's not that rare, but what I'm asking for is lower fines and more consistent enforcement in a way that, as you make that cost-benefit decision, ultimately weighs in favor of parking legally and paying the meter.

Mohr: You know, when I was thinking of questions for us today, I thought, make parking meters smart enough to read your license plate, so it knows it has a reservation. If somebody else pulls in, a siren goes off, a really loud siren that you can hear all the way down the block, and it won't go off until that car backs out and leaves.

Grabar: It's certainly a possibility. The other option is reserving with a private operator. That private operator enforces the rules in a way that ensures the expectation that when you reserve parking, you get it. We use license plate readings to collect tolls. You can have a camera that reads the license plate, and that could be possible for parking, too. You just park, and you're charged.

Mohr: By the way, Woodland Hills, California, has set up a system where you back into a diagonal space. What’s your thought about that?

Grabar: It's not a bad system. I think one of the big problems in transportation policy is traffic. Engineers are preoccupied with the speed of the vehicles. Their ultimate goal is to move as many cars through a fixed amount of space in a certain amount of time as possible. Back-in parking has several big advantages. It's arguably safer. It creates more parking spaces. And it narrows the width of the street, which forces people to drive more slowly and more safely. And it makes it easier to cross the street as well. But traffic engineers don't like that because it reduces the total number of vehicles they can move through this area. So, I think back-end parking is probably a good thing for Woodland Hills. But in a lot of places, traffic engineers won't allow that to happen. They won't even allow curbside parking on busy streets.

Mohr: One thing that I was looking for in your book, but didn't see, is a discussion of parking valets. In Los Angeles, they’re ubiquitous. You pull up to the restaurant. The valet takes your car. God knows where they park it, some Never-Never-Land somewhere. But after the meal, you come out and there's your car.

Grabar: A valet is a way to avoid destroying your urban environment to accommodate that peak parking demand. Rather than constructing a bunch of excess parking for the busiest times of day, you take the money you would have put into concrete, asphalt, and garage space, and you employ people to park the cars more efficiently. That's a great trade-off. It's much more sustainable. It allows you to have a denser and more vibrant urban environment. And again, the time of day when you need valets is very small. Yet often the response to that shortage is to say, let's build a ton of parking for those peak hours. This applies to areas beyond parking as well. You have this troublesome little peak of usage, and you need to deal with that peak, and it's very expensive to scale up your entire system to accommodate that peak. You can unlock enormous amounts of synergy by sharing parking between different uses.

I'll give you an L.A. example of this. In 2000, when Los Angeles passed an adaptive use ordinance, all these old commercial buildings got rehabilitated as residences. Often those people had cars, and instead of being forced to build their own garages, what those developers realized was they could just tell new tenants, hey; there's six commercial garages within 1,000 feet of this apartment. Go to them and buy a monthly parking pass. It's great business, because they're always empty after 5 PM, when all the workers have gone home. And so there actually is this great synergy where workers use that space during the day and residents use them at night. Garages make more money; developers charge lower prices; everybody wins.

Mohr: What should we do with curb parking?

Grabar: It's difficult to approach the question abstractly. Metered parking is better than free parking, but in a lot of places communities will decide that even metered parking is not the best use of that land. Every community has different requirements. Some places are dealing with storm water flooding every time it rains, and those places may decide that that public infrastructure would be best served by trying to hold water where it falls and prevented from overwhelming the sewer system, flooding people's basements, etc. Other places might decide that that space should be used for commercial activity to enliven public space and give people a chance to be outside. Other places might decide curbs should be space that’s used for carbon-free forms of mobility, people on bikes and walking and rollerblading, people in wheelchairs. It is a local decision.

Mohr: One more thing – Your book has an illustration of what’s called the valley of high parking requirements. Would you elaborate?

Grabar: That refers to the condition where, if you're obligated to provide a certain amount of parking, you will respond to that requirement based on the value of the land. If the land is low value, you'll build surface parking because it's cheap. If the land is high value, you might decide that it pencils out to build a structured garage. But in between, there is this space where land is too expensive to devote half of it to surface parking, but the value of the property is not high enough to support a structured garage or underground parking. In those places, it becomes really challenging to build things, and that is the zone between surface parking and huge structured parking, where we would otherwise be building what they call missing middle housing – townhouses, brownstones, triple-deckers, three flats, bungalow courts. But the parking just doesn't pencil out, so those types of housing don't get built.

Mohr: Henry, thank you very much for your time.

About the Author:

Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s Ethics Review and Response Committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the National Commission of the Anti-Defamation League and on the ADL’s Los Angeles Regional Board.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.