The United States is experiencing a housing crisis. That crisis is due, in part, to poor land use. Instead of building dense, sustainable, and efficient cities, many major cities devote 25–45% of...
The United States is experiencing a housing crisis. That crisis is due, in part, to poor land use. Instead of building dense, sustainable, and efficient cities, many major cities devote 25–45% of land in their central cores to parking lots. Yes: instead of storing people, we're storing cars. This much parking comes with a cost: unmitigated urban sprawl.
No, it's not "just an environmental issue" (though parking lots and other impermeable surfaces do contribute to flooding and the urban heat effect, leading to death and destruction). The wider we build our cities, the less efficient they are. The more sprawl we have, the more expensive it is to maintain roadways and the more difficult it is to create effective and equitable transportation systems, both public and private. This cost is ultimately passed onto constituents directly in the form of higher taxes and indirectly in the form of horrible commute times (lost productivity, and general misery) and often a 'need' to own a car to get to work (which ultimately means you have to work more hours to... pay for the object that gets you to work so that you can pay for anything.) Additionally, more car use means more traffic and more noise and more pollution and more deaths caused by drivers. Car-oriented development, which includes excessive parking lots, results in less walkability and less accessibility for children, seniors, and disabled people. Parking lots are also extremely ugly, but that is neither here nor there.
The worst part? Most parking spaces go unused at any given moment. This is completely wasted space. And minimum parking requirements in most municipalities are a major source of the issue. These requirements are unscientific and in many (most) areas a categorical hindrance to effective land uses; that is, instead of throwing parking lots everywhere, communities often benefit more from having, say, a public plaza or park, a recreation or community center, new housing, a mixed-use district with restaurants, a sporting arena... or basically anything other than a gigantic amount of flat asphalt. In a dense area, you simply cannot devote this amount of space to automobiles, especially when it's not being used. A genuinely multi-modal transportation network cannot allow this amount of space for car parking: it's unsustainable, especially given that much of this parking is free: a subsidy to drivers at the expense of communities.
A new tool from the Parking Reform Network (PRN) illustrates that downtown Cleveland is 26% parking lot. The centers of nearby Columbus and Detroit are 27% and 30% parking lot, respectively. Although they each hover around one-third, these Midwestern cities lag behind San Bernardino, California, and Arlington, Texas, which currently lead the country when it comes to ceding city land to surface lots: 45% and 42% respectively.
What’s especially handy about the Parking Lot Map tool is that it visually reinforces how much land is available in a given “central city” (a term PRN invented for this map “to encompass the densest, most centrally located, and most valuable real estate in a metropolitan area”) for more productive development, like housing, retail, plazas, and more. Seeing your city painted red can be demoralizing, but for PRN, these lots are places of opportunity.
“We have parking instead of people space,” Karen Kress, senior director of transportation and planning at the Tampa Downtown Partnership, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “We’re wasting a lot of space, especially with the housing crisis.”
It seems like a neat idea on the surface, but based on my look, I doubt this tool has any real value as implemented. I sampled Houston, where I used to live, and Pittsburgh, where I live now....
It seems like a neat idea on the surface, but based on my look, I doubt this tool has any real value as implemented. I sampled Houston, where I used to live, and Pittsburgh, where I live now. Houston is a strip mall the size of Rhode Island. Literally, Harris County is bigger than Rhode Island, and when you visit, you will find its a mixture of tract development housing and strip malls all the way from Katy to Baytown. But the tool only shows the city center, which is approximately the size of my little fingernail. City center is the one area with high rise development. Nobody is going to take parking lots build houses there.
The map for Pittsburgh is just as flawed but for different reasons. They've carved out downtown, and it scores pretty well, but they've ignored the fact that the north shore just across the river is basically all surface lots for the football and baseball stadiums.
I am not pro-sprawl. But if they want to talk about sprawl, I don't think this is the way to do it. They should talk about how big the Houston sprawl is, or how the I-35 corridor sprawl has basically already connected San Antonio, Austin, and Waco. Eventually it will join up with the Dallas Ft Worth metroplex and then all of central Texas will be on big traffic jam. Pittsburgh is a little different because it's much older and much more bound by geography, but (on a much smaller scale), the northward suburban sprawl has pretty much reached Cranberry Township.
Checked out Vegas and am wondering if i'm using this wrong. It literally samples downtown on the strip (East of the 15, North of Charleston up to the 95) which uh....yeah not somewhere anyone...
Checked out Vegas and am wondering if i'm using this wrong. It literally samples downtown on the strip (East of the 15, North of Charleston up to the 95) which uh....yeah not somewhere anyone wants to build housing, even if it wasn't rundown. It's also literally one of the only areas of town where you can have trouble finding parking depending on the night and the area you want to get to.
Sitting and thinking about it, that's probably top 5 spots that's completely unrepresentative of the entire city.
From the methodology: The tool isn't specifically about housing. It's about parking lots. The goal is to identify how much surface parking there really is, not exclusively as a tool for real...
From the methodology:
“Central City” is a term invented for this map to encompass the densest, most centrally located, and most valuable real estate in a metropolitan area. “Central City” is a blanket term for a city’s Central Business District, Downtown, Financial District, or adjacent connecting neighborhoods of interest. For example, New Orleans’s Central Business District seamlessly connects with the world-renowned French Quarter Neighborhood. These areas were combined into the Central City of New Orleans.
Zoning districts, Zillow, and Google Map neighborhood boundaries were used to construct most of the Central City boundaries. The methodology list below details all combined Zoning districts, Zillow, or Google Maps neighborhoods used to create the Central City boundary. Some cities did not qualify for using Zoning district, Zillow, or Google Maps boundaries due to the lack of, abnormally large, or irregularly drawn Downtown, Central Business District, or Financial District boundaries. In that case, a boundary was drawn by Parking Reform Network to include a centrally located commercial center.
The tool isn't specifically about housing. It's about parking lots. The goal is to identify how much surface parking there really is, not exclusively as a tool for real estate developers. You can use automobile parking lots in any number of ways, including housing (probably the most important use), but also businesses, offices, parks, government facilities, and so on. If nothing else, the tool demonstrates the amount of unproductive asphalt cover in our cities, which should probably be replaced with soil or plant matter to variously reduce flood risk and/or reduce localized temperatures.
I don't know enough about Las Vegas' geography to comment on that. I recommend you email the creators with your feedback: thomascarpenito@parkingreform.org.
I'm not from the US, but I do hear and read an awful lot about some of the non-eastern coast cities parking lot nightmares. This type of research is really helpful for laymans to understand the...
I'm not from the US, but I do hear and read an awful lot about some of the non-eastern coast cities parking lot nightmares.
This type of research is really helpful for laymans to understand the scope of the problem in terms they'll probably wrap their heads around. The next step would be to look into city planning and public transport (I know, US hates it) about those gigantic megacities and how the hell you untangle that problem.
I get that, but at the very least the Vegas one is such a bad example as to be absurdly unrealistic, and it makes me seriously question the rest of the data. It's sort of like using Buckingham...
I get that, but at the very least the Vegas one is such a bad example as to be absurdly unrealistic, and it makes me seriously question the rest of the data.
It's sort of like using Buckingham Palace for a study on London. It is obviously an extreme outlier and is going to skew/misrepresent anything you do. Not quite that extreme, but far enough in that direction to be absolutely ridiculous. The area they're focusing on is one of the oldest in the city and mostly still occupied by commercial operations (bars and hotels).
It's extra weird because you could go 2 miles down the road and hit the major section of The Strip, which is of course dominated by hotels with 10+ story parking garages, or you could go 2 miles in any other direction and get a much more real example of how the city is laid out. Vegas should be a perfect example for this because it's a grid system and we pretty much just copy paste whatever style/method was popular for the decade, but they've picked about as much of an outlier as they could, without choosing the edge of town.
Looking closer at some of the things it's identifying as parking, i'm not even sure it's right? Several of these things might be depots/warehouses/Construction/Vacant lots, and I'm pretty sure there's a mall/museum right there, which again being in an older part of town doesn't have a huge parking structure and instead does have a ton of space dedicated to parking.
I'm guessing this is easier in most other cities, but again it just blows my mind they chose/submitted this section of Vegas? I suspect it's a programmatic assessment given it's looking for the "central city" area, but if that's the case I wonder how often it's just useless, and if the whole "Paradise" thing is throwing it off as well.
Vegas just doesn't have the normal city flow, given that the average citizen isn't going anywhere near the strip if they can possibly avoid it.
The data is limited right now because it's compiled manually based on satellite imagery ("parking shapefiles from Open Street Maps"). I imagine there is a decent amount of human review. There is...
The data is limited right now because it's compiled manually based on satellite imagery ("parking shapefiles from Open Street Maps"). I imagine there is a decent amount of human review. There is maybe not a great way to do this review programmatically as there are no reliable nationwide or even statewide datasets on public and private parking lots. You would have to train an AI to identify parking lots without identifying street parking (in their methodology); this is possible, but out of scope of this non-profit's tool.
The tool studies urban centers because these are the places that need to have as much density (and subsequently as little parking) as possible. Any amount of wasted space in a downtown corresponds to 10x the land area of sprawl elsewhere, so it's really important to focus on this. From the methodology:
“Central City” is a term invented for this map to encompass the densest, most centrally located, and most valuable real estate in a metropolitan area. “Central City” is a blanket term for a city’s Central Business District, Downtown, Financial District, or adjacent connecting neighborhoods of interest.
I'm a little skeptical of the precise boundaries and have emailed them for more information. I think it is relatively qualitative at present, though they seem to want to expand some of the districts.
City center is the one area with high rise development. Nobody is going to take parking lots build houses there.
Housing is not the only way a parking lot can be reused at greater societal benefit than an empty lot. And yes, you can certainly build housing in high-rise areas. What do you think apartments are meant for? :) It is valuable to combine uses near each other, not to create massive swaths of residential-only areas that are long distances from commercial and business areas. While it's fine for certain neighborhoods to specialize, it's not efficient to increase transportation distances for the sake of maintaining the United States' ridiculously stringent "houses HERE and businesses THERE" design... especially downtown.
I agree that it would be useful to have additional "layers" on these maps that cover more than just central cities. I imagine that the Parking Reform Network wants to do this too, but they have to assemble the data first. I'm sure they would welcome community contributions.
I think the intended value is simply raising consciousness. And while it could be better, at least it's something in the right direction. I had the same initial complaint when I looked at Raleigh....
I think the intended value is simply raising consciousness. And while it could be better, at least it's something in the right direction.
I had the same initial complaint when I looked at Raleigh. But then I reframed to understand the article was limited only to city centers, not whole cities. As such, it does allow one to ponder. Sooner later, possibly, ideas will migrate and seep into those cursing their commute about how things might be different.
As an aside, another frustration I have about Raleigh is the size of yards. There are a few areas with reasonable size yards, but the vast majority of neighborhoods there's like minimum 1/2 acre lot size.
And this is personal, every house looks the same, and like it's from a lame catalog available at the Mall. Very rarely does a house appear to have been intentionally designed (as opposed to selected from a catalog), and rarer still is the house that adds something aestehtically. Very safe, and very bland.
Thanks for this link. I will have to read Grabar's new book. The assumption that everyone can and should drive to do literally anything is one of the most harmful narratives in modern discourse....
Thanks for this link. I will have to read Grabar's new book. The assumption that everyone can and should drive to do literally anything is one of the most harmful narratives in modern discourse. Parking and land use is just so boring of a topic that hardly anyone thinks about it, hah. :P
I'd love to see a similar tool for golf courses. That's a huge space eater on my side of the country, and I live within 3 miles of 3 different golf courses. I live less than a mile from our...
I'd love to see a similar tool for golf courses. That's a huge space eater on my side of the country, and I live within 3 miles of 3 different golf courses. I live less than a mile from our downtown, which has lots of mixed use, but also has two different high rise parking lots and two 4 different outdoor, single-story parking lots, along with two underground private lots for different companies. It feels accurate for my downtown.
The United States is experiencing a housing crisis. That crisis is due, in part, to poor land use. Instead of building dense, sustainable, and efficient cities, many major cities devote 25–45% of land in their central cores to parking lots. Yes: instead of storing people, we're storing cars. This much parking comes with a cost: unmitigated urban sprawl.
No, it's not "just an environmental issue" (though parking lots and other impermeable surfaces do contribute to flooding and the urban heat effect, leading to death and destruction). The wider we build our cities, the less efficient they are. The more sprawl we have, the more expensive it is to maintain roadways and the more difficult it is to create effective and equitable transportation systems, both public and private. This cost is ultimately passed onto constituents directly in the form of higher taxes and indirectly in the form of horrible commute times (lost productivity, and general misery) and often a 'need' to own a car to get to work (which ultimately means you have to work more hours to... pay for the object that gets you to work so that you can pay for anything.) Additionally, more car use means more traffic and more noise and more pollution and more deaths caused by drivers. Car-oriented development, which includes excessive parking lots, results in less walkability and less accessibility for children, seniors, and disabled people. Parking lots are also extremely ugly, but that is neither here nor there.
The worst part? Most parking spaces go unused at any given moment. This is completely wasted space. And minimum parking requirements in most municipalities are a major source of the issue. These requirements are unscientific and in many (most) areas a categorical hindrance to effective land uses; that is, instead of throwing parking lots everywhere, communities often benefit more from having, say, a public plaza or park, a recreation or community center, new housing, a mixed-use district with restaurants, a sporting arena... or basically anything other than a gigantic amount of flat asphalt. In a dense area, you simply cannot devote this amount of space to automobiles, especially when it's not being used. A genuinely multi-modal transportation network cannot allow this amount of space for car parking: it's unsustainable, especially given that much of this parking is free: a subsidy to drivers at the expense of communities.
You can use this tool to see how your city fares.
For further resources, please consult the Parking Reform Network.
It seems like a neat idea on the surface, but based on my look, I doubt this tool has any real value as implemented. I sampled Houston, where I used to live, and Pittsburgh, where I live now. Houston is a strip mall the size of Rhode Island. Literally, Harris County is bigger than Rhode Island, and when you visit, you will find its a mixture of tract development housing and strip malls all the way from Katy to Baytown. But the tool only shows the city center, which is approximately the size of my little fingernail. City center is the one area with high rise development. Nobody is going to take parking lots build houses there.
The map for Pittsburgh is just as flawed but for different reasons. They've carved out downtown, and it scores pretty well, but they've ignored the fact that the north shore just across the river is basically all surface lots for the football and baseball stadiums.
I am not pro-sprawl. But if they want to talk about sprawl, I don't think this is the way to do it. They should talk about how big the Houston sprawl is, or how the I-35 corridor sprawl has basically already connected San Antonio, Austin, and Waco. Eventually it will join up with the Dallas Ft Worth metroplex and then all of central Texas will be on big traffic jam. Pittsburgh is a little different because it's much older and much more bound by geography, but (on a much smaller scale), the northward suburban sprawl has pretty much reached Cranberry Township.
Checked out Vegas and am wondering if i'm using this wrong. It literally samples downtown on the strip (East of the 15, North of Charleston up to the 95) which uh....yeah not somewhere anyone wants to build housing, even if it wasn't rundown. It's also literally one of the only areas of town where you can have trouble finding parking depending on the night and the area you want to get to.
Sitting and thinking about it, that's probably top 5 spots that's completely unrepresentative of the entire city.
From the methodology:
The tool isn't specifically about housing. It's about parking lots. The goal is to identify how much surface parking there really is, not exclusively as a tool for real estate developers. You can use automobile parking lots in any number of ways, including housing (probably the most important use), but also businesses, offices, parks, government facilities, and so on. If nothing else, the tool demonstrates the amount of unproductive asphalt cover in our cities, which should probably be replaced with soil or plant matter to variously reduce flood risk and/or reduce localized temperatures.
I don't know enough about Las Vegas' geography to comment on that. I recommend you email the creators with your feedback: thomascarpenito@parkingreform.org.
I'm not from the US, but I do hear and read an awful lot about some of the non-eastern coast cities parking lot nightmares.
This type of research is really helpful for laymans to understand the scope of the problem in terms they'll probably wrap their heads around. The next step would be to look into city planning and public transport (I know, US hates it) about those gigantic megacities and how the hell you untangle that problem.
It's a toughie.
I get that, but at the very least the Vegas one is such a bad example as to be absurdly unrealistic, and it makes me seriously question the rest of the data.
It's sort of like using Buckingham Palace for a study on London. It is obviously an extreme outlier and is going to skew/misrepresent anything you do. Not quite that extreme, but far enough in that direction to be absolutely ridiculous. The area they're focusing on is one of the oldest in the city and mostly still occupied by commercial operations (bars and hotels).
It's extra weird because you could go 2 miles down the road and hit the major section of The Strip, which is of course dominated by hotels with 10+ story parking garages, or you could go 2 miles in any other direction and get a much more real example of how the city is laid out. Vegas should be a perfect example for this because it's a grid system and we pretty much just copy paste whatever style/method was popular for the decade, but they've picked about as much of an outlier as they could, without choosing the edge of town.
Looking closer at some of the things it's identifying as parking, i'm not even sure it's right? Several of these things might be depots/warehouses/Construction/Vacant lots, and I'm pretty sure there's a mall/museum right there, which again being in an older part of town doesn't have a huge parking structure and instead does have a ton of space dedicated to parking.
I'm guessing this is easier in most other cities, but again it just blows my mind they chose/submitted this section of Vegas? I suspect it's a programmatic assessment given it's looking for the "central city" area, but if that's the case I wonder how often it's just useless, and if the whole "Paradise" thing is throwing it off as well.
Vegas just doesn't have the normal city flow, given that the average citizen isn't going anywhere near the strip if they can possibly avoid it.
The data is limited right now because it's compiled manually based on satellite imagery ("parking shapefiles from Open Street Maps"). I imagine there is a decent amount of human review. There is maybe not a great way to do this review programmatically as there are no reliable nationwide or even statewide datasets on public and private parking lots. You would have to train an AI to identify parking lots without identifying street parking (in their methodology); this is possible, but out of scope of this non-profit's tool.
The tool studies urban centers because these are the places that need to have as much density (and subsequently as little parking) as possible. Any amount of wasted space in a downtown corresponds to 10x the land area of sprawl elsewhere, so it's really important to focus on this. From the methodology:
I'm a little skeptical of the precise boundaries and have emailed them for more information. I think it is relatively qualitative at present, though they seem to want to expand some of the districts.
Housing is not the only way a parking lot can be reused at greater societal benefit than an empty lot. And yes, you can certainly build housing in high-rise areas. What do you think apartments are meant for? :) It is valuable to combine uses near each other, not to create massive swaths of residential-only areas that are long distances from commercial and business areas. While it's fine for certain neighborhoods to specialize, it's not efficient to increase transportation distances for the sake of maintaining the United States' ridiculously stringent "houses HERE and businesses THERE" design... especially downtown.
I agree that it would be useful to have additional "layers" on these maps that cover more than just central cities. I imagine that the Parking Reform Network wants to do this too, but they have to assemble the data first. I'm sure they would welcome community contributions.
I think the intended value is simply raising consciousness. And while it could be better, at least it's something in the right direction.
I had the same initial complaint when I looked at Raleigh. But then I reframed to understand the article was limited only to city centers, not whole cities. As such, it does allow one to ponder. Sooner later, possibly, ideas will migrate and seep into those cursing their commute about how things might be different.
As an aside, another frustration I have about Raleigh is the size of yards. There are a few areas with reasonable size yards, but the vast majority of neighborhoods there's like minimum 1/2 acre lot size.
And this is personal, every house looks the same, and like it's from a lame catalog available at the Mall. Very rarely does a house appear to have been intentionally designed (as opposed to selected from a catalog), and rarer still is the house that adds something aestehtically. Very safe, and very bland.
https://youtu.be/VUoXtddNPAM?si=ZU0GLJCoCy_8-8gJ
Related, and possibly worthy of its own thread:
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/paved-paradise-parking-grabar/
Thanks for this link. I will have to read Grabar's new book. The assumption that everyone can and should drive to do literally anything is one of the most harmful narratives in modern discourse. Parking and land use is just so boring of a topic that hardly anyone thinks about it, hah. :P
I'd love to see a similar tool for golf courses. That's a huge space eater on my side of the country, and I live within 3 miles of 3 different golf courses. I live less than a mile from our downtown, which has lots of mixed use, but also has two different high rise parking lots and two 4 different outdoor, single-story parking lots, along with two underground private lots for different companies. It feels accurate for my downtown.