Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
TLDR: “Meandering polemic against mandatory parking”
This is a lot of book to make a central point: mandatory parking minimums have caused parking to have a weirdly outsized effect on the world. It has influenced city planning and even contributed to the housing shortage.
The book tells a lot of stories to make the point. They’re never boring, but they do get a little repetitive in later chapters. It’s horror story after horror story about how the need for parking minimums has prevented development from happening. Particularly in California, projects seem to anguish for decades because the developers are short one or two parking spaces.
This entire book seems like it wants to inherit the “parking polemic “ crown from Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, which is references quite a bit. That 2005 book is considered a veritable infrastructure bible by many people, so I’m curious what this book has added to the argument (I haven’t read Shoup’s book yet).
I asked AI what this booked added to Shoup’s:
Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking is a 700-page academic treatise – economics, policy analysis, dense with data. Grabar’s contribution is largely translation and narrative: he’s a journalist, and he turns Shoup’s framework into a readable story with characters – parking attendants, valets, a Chicago meter-deal fiasco, the mafia’s role in the parking industry, people shooting each other over spaces.
So, it’s just a more approachable translation of Shoup’s book, I’m gathering.
Also, I would love to hear the other side of the argument. I’ve read quite a few arguments against parking minimums, and all of them do so with a feigned astonishment that the institution has survived this far. Surely, there has to be some argument in favor of it. I’d be curious to read that.
Overall, not a bad book. But it got a little tedious towards the end, and I just don’t know what it added to the debate, or how it built on Shoup’s work, which is considered canonical.
Book Data
- Author
- Henry Grabar
- Year
- Pages
- 368
- Acquired
- Not recorded
- Open Library
- OL28890029W
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A softcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.