Why is housing so expensive? Parking is part of the answer.
In this episode of DemograFix, Cara Stern talks to Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, about how parking minimums, parking costs and car dependency have shaped our cities and made housing more expensive. We discuss why developers build so much parking, how parking requirements can delay or block new housing, what happens when cities eliminate parking minimums, and whether making parking harder is actually a good way to get people out of their cars.
Plus: why are there at least three parking spaces for every car in America?
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: Here’s a weird bit of human psychology. Most people refuse to walk more than two blocks from their parking spot to their destination, but put those same people in a massive Walmart or Costco parking lot, and they’ll happily walk the equivalent of five city blocks without a second thought. When I learned that, it was a total wake-up call for me.
Once you notice that double standard, you just can’t unsee it. That contradiction is just the entry point into how parking has shaped our built environment—from driving up the cost of housing to crippling local transit. These stories are at the heart of Henry Grabar’s book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. It’s a book our viewers have been asking us to cover since we launched the podcast, and we’re so thrilled to have Henry joining us today. Welcome to the show!
Henry Grabar: Thanks for having me.
Cara Stern: I’m going to start with a really big question. You write in the book that parking, by default, is expected to be convenient, available, and free. How has that principle shaped what our cities and suburbs look like?
Henry Grabar: I think of those three attributes as being part of a trifecta of characteristics that constitute the “perfect” parking space.
When people talk about parking, they have a specific space in mind, and they want three things from it:
Available: They want it available the moment they arrive. If you have to circle around the block, it doesn’t count.
Convenient: As you mentioned in your intro, that usually means directly in front of the door of the restaurant or directly in front of their house.
Free: They don’t want to pay for it.
These three attributes constitute a “trilemma”—it’s pretty easy to find parking that fulfills two of the three characteristics, but if you try to get all three, you wind up destroying the very place people came to visit in the interest of just providing more and more parking.
The pursuit of the perfect parking space—and the way it dominates community discussions, local politics, and urban design guidelines—has led us to a place where we simultaneously have too much parking, yet it seems there is never enough.
Cara Stern: I want to read a few stats from your book that I found pretty mind-blowing:
The National Parking Association—a trade group representing the parking industry in America—says parking is a $131 billion USD industry.
There are at least three parking spaces for every car in America, which means there is more housing for cars than there is for people.
Drivers take 21% longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting, and 33% longer if the arriving driver honks at them.
According to a 2017 study, Americans spend a total of 17 hours a year looking for a parking spot.
I wanted to go back to that “three spots per car” stat. That originally came from Donald Shoup, right?
Henry Grabar: There have been a few estimates of how many parking spaces there are, but we don’t have an exact count. It’s actually indicative of the way parking has been an ignored field of study.
We know how many cars are on the road and how many lane-miles of roadway we have, yet the space to store all those cars—which takes up an enormous amount of extremely valuable urban land—has never been officially counted.
There’s no official tally; even at the city level, planners often don’t know how many parking spaces exist in a neighbourhood or how full those spaces are.
Cara Stern: It’s strange that cities don’t know how many spots exist, yet they still mandate strict guidelines—like requiring a specific number of spots for every different type of structure. How did planners come up with those figures in the first place?
Henry Grabar: In every zoning code—which governs what we build, how a space must be designed, and what you’re permitted to do with your land—there are long tables dictating how many parking spaces you must include with each conceivable use. It’s not just “two parking spaces per house.” It’s parking spaces per square foot of office space, parking spaces per kennel in a pet shop, parking spaces per casket in a funeral parlour, or parking spaces per lane in a bowling alley.
The answer to your question is that those requirements are based on very little actual study. They are relatively unscientific in spite of their precision. They illustrate a guiding philosophy: there is nothing worse than not having enough parking, so we would much rather err on the side of way too much parking than not enough. That has been the guiding philosophy of urban planning in most of the world for the last 80 years to accommodate the automobile.
Only in the last 15 or 20 years have we begun to reckon with the consequences—that, in fact, there can be too much parking, and the consequences of oversupply might be far worse than going somewhere where parking is slightly scarce.
Cara Stern: Only recently have we started seeing cities in Canada eliminate their parking minimums. Our audience is very housing-focused, so many viewers have an idea of how minimum parking requirements hurt the housing market. Could you walk us through how that mechanism works?
Henry Grabar: I think about it in three distinct ways:
Direct Financial Cost: Parking costs a lot of money to build. This remains opaque to most people because we pay so little for parking when we use it—it’s just a plot of asphalt or concrete, so how much could it cost? But building structured garage parking in a Canadian city costs $50,000 to $100,000 per space. Underground parking costs even more. Even surface parking is expensive when you factor in grading, asphalt, striping, landscaping, lighting, and the opportunity cost of the land.
Physical Space and Geometry: In addition to inflating development costs—which raises rents and sale prices for homes and condos—parking takes up physical space. On small urban lots where parking requirements are high, you are basically blocked from building anything denser than a single-family home because the site geometry doesn’t work.
In theory, all parking could go underground—that’s how they did it in SimCity, pretending parking just exists subterraneanly. In reality, underground parking is so expensive that small infill projects must build surface parking, and you quickly run out of physical space to house the cars required to build the housing.
Neighbourhood and Transit Density: At a neighbourhood scale, mandatory parking caps conceivable density, which has knock-on effects. There is a threshold density required to support viable public transit that people will actually ride. The more parking we require, the lower the density gets, creating a built environment where it becomes practically impossible not to drive. We see this in housing, but it’s especially apparent in commercial districts where buildings sit like isolated islands in seas of asphalt, making walking between locations difficult or dangerous.
Cara Stern: I love that SimCity example! If parking spots were realistic in size in video games, the game would just be a boring simulator of parking lots.
Henry Grabar: When the designers of SimCity originally built the game, they surveyed real cities and measured land uses. They concluded that parking took up so much space that if they modelled the game after a real city, it would be ugly, boring, and nobody would want to play it.
If you fly over a city in an airplane, you can see this clearly: in most downtowns, 20% to 40% of the land area is consumed by surface parking lots and structured garages—and that doesn’t even count curb parking.
Vast amounts of land are consigned to this low-value use. Worse still, that land is rarely at 100% occupancy; it is overbuilt to the detriment of developers, tenants paying rent, and visitors alike. Nobody enjoys walking past a lineup of parking garages and empty lots.
Cara Stern: My entry point into learning about parking minimums was a project here in Toronto near Union Station, the city’s main transit hub. Developers had to remove 34 social housing units from the proposal primarily to satisfy municipal parking restrictions. While market-rate housing was lost too, losing social housing near a central transit hub felt absurd. These are low-income residents living right downtown next to primary transit—what are the odds they own a car or even want a parking space over a home?
Henry Grabar: When people debate whether housing for cars is prioritized over housing for people, that isn’t an abstract trade-off. It’s a real trade-off happening on individual building sites where—due to site geometry and construction budgets—apartments are literally deleted to make room for parking spaces.
Sometimes affordable housing advocates argue that if we provide housing for low-income residents, we should provide the “full package,” including a parking space, because a car offers economic mobility. On an individual level, having a car can improve access to the regional labour market and education. However, if you frame the choice as, “Are we going to provide one more parking space for this unit, or are we going to delete the housing unit entirely?” the policy choice becomes clear.
When reporting my book, I visited a development for formerly homeless individuals in Austin, Texas. They had erased a number of housing units to construct an underground garage, and that garage sat completely empty in a city where people were sleeping in their cars. Examples like that have motivated advocates over the last decade to revisit these laws and ask: does it make sense to have one-size-fits-all prescriptions? Even if including parking is a priority, does the government really know through a table of arbitrary figures how much parking should be mandated? Or should we leave that decision to the builder, who understands their tenants, the market, and the local transportation context?
Cara Stern: It’s not unusual now to see 40-storey residential towers proposed in Toronto with zero car parking spaces and hundreds of bike parking spots. Developers building near transit recognize they can sell units without parking. Yet, parking remains the primary rallying cry for NIMBY neighbours opposing new builds. Near me, the city proposed building social housing on a surface parking lot, and local neighbours organized against it. One quote went viral where a resident claimed, “This parking lot is the heart of the community!” Whether it’s a high-rise or a fourplex, opposition almost always centres on parking. How do we create a policy environment that insulates against that?
Henry Grabar: That is the million-dollar question.
The availability and price of housing has reached a crisis point across the Western world, placing immense pressure on land-use reform. There’s also environmental pressure: in the United States, transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. There is a growing consensus that we need fewer people driving in core urban areas.
When land-use restrictions are relaxed and buildings are constructed with fewer parking spaces, study after study shows that residents in those buildings own fewer cars. If you supply parking, people bring and buy more cars. If neighbours are genuinely concerned about traffic congestion, it is against their interest to demand developments with massive parking garages, because those garages guarantee more driving.
Neighbours often worry that new residents without assigned spaces will park on the street. In the Boston area, where I live, researchers analyzed public comments on housing developments in the city and suburbs to see what motivated NIMBY opposition. They categorized whether comments focused on architectural quality, school overcrowding, or design. Comments about parking and traffic were by far the number one issue raised by residents opposing new housing.
At the same time, people have an inaccurate grasp of parking availability in their own communities and hold unrealistically high standards. In Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., a study looked at when local residents perceived street parking on their block to be “full.” The answer was when the street was only 50% occupied!
If your standard is that once a street is half-full, the city must enact a development moratorium, that isn’t a sound basis for urban planning decisions. But that represents the underlying human psychology.
Cara Stern: In your book, you mentioned that people feel parking is “full” the moment the spaces directly in front of their destination are occupied.
Henry Grabar: People are deeply attached to parking directly in front of their home, and changing those habits is difficult. I grew up in New York City when the population was 7 million; today it’s 8.5 million. People who have lived there for decades remember driving and parking when the city was 20% smaller, and those old expectations cannot endure as the city grows.
Old habits die hard, so residents oppose density based on memories of how easy parking used to be. But the advantage we have when planning for evolving cities is that new residents arrive every day with fresh expectations. Planners can shape those expectations around parking availability, pricing, and street storage. We can revise those expectations today so that 30 years from now, citizens accept as normal that storing private property on public streets carries a cost.
Cara Stern: You explain in the book that making parking harder and more expensive is the most politically viable way to shift people out of cars and onto public transit. In my reporting, I often hear people argue for the “carrot” rather than the “stick”—demanding better transit before driving is made more difficult. How do you respond to that argument?
Henry Grabar: People say they want the carrot first, but in practice, it’s rarely true.
Drivers will say, “The transit service isn’t frequent enough,” “The bike lane isn’t safe enough,” or “The weather is bad.” While we must continue improving transit and bike infrastructure, the reality is that people only give up their cars when driving becomes inconvenient and expensive. Driving is almost always the fastest way to get from point A to point B in North American cities.
If you want to induce people to choose alternative transportation, the stick is necessary. Streets must be safe for families to cross, but the single most decisive factor in determining whether a trip is made by car or transit is the cost and availability of parking at the destination.
While parking pricing can be politically explosive, it is a straightforward policy lever for local governments to pull. Cities can adjust meter rates overnight, redevelop publicly owned surface lots into housing, or encourage employers to charge for parking while offering cash bonuses to employees who commute without a car.
Cara Stern: People assume driving is always faster, but that math changes when you factor in the time spent searching for parking. When I check Google Maps, it might say a drive is 15 minutes versus 30 minutes on transit. But after spending 15 minutes circling for a spot and walking from a distant garage, the total trip time is identical.
Henry Grabar: That misalignment between expectation and reality is perpetuated by mapping software.
Navigation apps tell you that you’ll arrive at your doctor’s appointment in 12 minutes, but they don’t account for the 10 minutes required to find a spot and walk to the entrance. When you end up late, you get furious at “the parking problem.” In reality, the issue is that you failed to budget time for parking, reinforcing the unrealistic expectation that parking should take zero seconds.
Cara Stern: Another point you raise in the book is that many municipalities generate more revenue from parking fines and tickets than from actual parking meters, which creates a corrosive relationship between the public and local government. Could you elaborate on that?
Henry Grabar: For decades, cities have derived substantial revenue from parking enforcement. When a driver gets a ticket for an expired meter, they often view it as a predatory cash grab by local government—and they aren’t entirely wrong.
Many cities avoid raising meter rates because charging market prices for parking is politically sensitive. Because meter rates are kept artificially low, street curbs remain overcrowded, making it impossible to find a legal spot. Drivers end up parking illegally out of desperation and paying heavy fines.
This dynamic is actually more lucrative for municipal budgets than pricing parking correctly.
When cities adopt Donald Shoup’s model—setting market-rate prices to ensure one or two open spots per block—parking fine revenue drops significantly because drivers can easily park legally. Relying on fines creates widespread public distrust in municipal parking systems, transforming parking management from an allocation tool for public space into an enforcement-driven revenue generator.
The curb is the vital interface between land use and the street, and meters remain the fairest mechanism we have to manage it.
Cara Stern: What about small towns and rural communities that lack extensive transit systems? What does parking reform look like there?
Henry Grabar: The stakes are actually higher in small towns than in major cities. The urban fabric of a historic small town is fragile and compact. You only need to demolish a few historic blocks for surface parking lots before you destroy the town’s character and economic appeal.
Local business owners in small towns often argue, “The suburban shopping mall offers free parking right out front, so downtown must match that standard with free, instant parking.” But a historic main street can never out-park a suburban shopping mall.
If a town demolishes its historic buildings to compete on parking, it destroys its primary competitive advantage: the walkable charm, serendipity, and economic vibrancy of a concentrated town centre.
Furthermore, small towns rarely suffer from true parking shortages. Drivers might complain that they can’t park directly outside a specific restaurant, but open spaces almost always exist two blocks away. Demolishing downtown buildings or spending $30 million in public funds to construct an underutilized parking garage is a disastrous misuse of capital that could otherwise fund schools or public infrastructure.
Cara Stern: You ask readers to reframe their thinking from “Why is it so hard to park?” to “Why is it so hard not to drive?” How do we successfully shift the public mindset toward that perspective?
Henry Grabar: Mindset shifts happen during major life transitions:
Moving to a new city or neighbourhood.
Deciding whether to purchase a vehicle.
Entering university or starting a career in your 20s.
When someone buys a car, they join the constituency of drivers who constantly worry about parking. Targeting those key life transitions is critical. If we design environments where university students and young professionals in their 20s can thrive without personal vehicles, those habits carry forward. When they eventually start families, they are far more likely to remain a one-car household or utilize cargo bikes.
We are seeing more people embrace alternative mobility during parenthood—like using electric cargo bikes for school drop-offs to bypass chaotic drop-off lines. Beyond parking policy, cities must accelerate the physical redesign of streets to make alternative transportation safe and convenient.
Cara Stern: What was your personal gateway into researching parking?
Henry Grabar: I grew up in New York City, so my baseline expectation was that driving was always going to be a hassle. My parents kept a car in a commercial garage ten blocks from our apartment, so using it was an intentional expedition.
When I travelled to other North American cities and explored their downtowns, I was shocked by the urban landscape. In the post-WWII era, many American downtowns looked as though they had been bombed because vast swathes of historic buildings had been cleared for surface parking lots.
I was struck by the lack of street life and wanted to understand how that transformation happened. In high school, I read Jane Jacobs—the legendary urbanist who lived in New York and later Toronto. She described parking lots as “border vacuums”—built environment features that suck the economic and social vitality out of surrounding blocks. That insight opened my eyes to how parking dictates the structure of our world.
Cara Stern: Paved Paradise is a fantastic and engaging read. You cover everything from urban planning to the fascinating underbelly of the parking industry. Thank you so much for joining us today!
Henry Grabar: Thank you for having me! It was my absolute pleasure.
Cara Stern: Thanks, everyone, for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and this episode was edited by Canadian Civil. If you have a crazy parking story, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll see you next time!