Olivia: Jackson, quick question. In America, what do you think we have more of: housing for people, or housing for cars? Jackson: That's a trick question. It has to be for people. Right? I mean, we're people. We live in houses. Cars live... outside. Olivia: Wrong. By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than for each person. And that single, absurd fact explains almost everything that’s wrong with our cities. Jackson: That is absolutely insane. How is that even possible? Are we counting toy cars? What’s going on? Olivia: It’s the central question in a book that completely rewired my brain: "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" by Henry Grabar. Jackson: I’ve heard about this one! It was named a best book of the year by places like The New Yorker. The author, Grabar, is a staff writer at Slate who specializes in urban policy. He’s not just some random guy with a parking grudge; he’s a Harvard GSD fellow who lives and breathes this stuff. Olivia: Exactly. And he argues that this invisible, boring thing we never think about—parking—is the secret master key to our biggest problems: the housing crisis, climate change, and even why we sometimes feel a primal rage when someone steals our spot. Jackson: Oh, I know that feeling. The "reptilian brain" rage. I feel seen. Olivia: You are very much seen. And that's exactly where Grabar starts—with the raw, violent, and deeply human drama of the parking spot.

Olivia: The book opens with this idea that thinking about parking engages the reptilian cortex of our brain. That’s the part that governs aggression, dominance, and territoriality. It’s why a dispute over a 150-square-foot patch of asphalt can escalate so wildly. Jackson: It feels primal. Like two lions fighting over a gazelle, but the gazelle is a 2004 Honda Civic and the lions are two dads in cargo shorts. Olivia: A perfect analogy. Grabar shares this absolutely horrifying story from Queens, New York. A guy named Jie Zou is backing his Audi into a spot near a place called Rainbow Bakery. Another driver, Zong Li, pulls up, also wanting the spot. A classic, low-stakes standoff. Jackson: I’m already tensing up just hearing this. Olivia: It gets so much worse. They get out, argue, and Zou punches Li in the face. Then Zou’s passenger gets out with a baseball bat and starts swinging. Li manages to wrestle the bat away. Zou gets back in his car, and as Li hits the hood of the Audi with the bat, Zou floors it. He hits Li, flipping him over the hood, jumps the curb, and plows the car straight through the front window of the Rainbow Bakery. Jackson: Whoa. Hold on. He drove through a building? Over a parking spot? Olivia: Six feet inside the bakery. Five people were hospitalized. The bakery owner, standing in the wreckage of his brand-new shop, just kept saying, "It’s just for a parking space." Jackson: That’s… that’s not about parking anymore. That’s a complete psychological breakdown. Olivia: Exactly. Grabar calls it 'parking-driven psychosis.' But he argues these individual meltdowns are just the most visible symptom of a much deeper, systemic insanity. The real problem isn't just our personal rage; it's how we’ve encoded that rage into law. Jackson: What do you mean, 'encoded it into law'? Olivia: I’m talking about mandatory parking minimums. These are the local zoning rules that dictate how many parking spaces a new building must have. A restaurant needs one spot for every three seats. An office needs a spot for every 300 square feet. A house needs two spots. These rules are everywhere, and they have quietly strangled our cities. Jackson: Okay, that sounds bureaucratic and boring, but how does it lead to, you know, cars crashing through bakeries? Olivia: It creates a world where the car is the non-negotiable unit of design. And this brings us to the most powerful story in the book, the story of a developer named Ginger Hitzke in Solana Beach, California. Jackson: Okay, I’m ready. This sounds like it’s going to hurt. Olivia: It does. In the early 90s, the city condemned a dilapidated motor court, evicting 13 low-income families. The city promised to build replacement affordable housing. Sixteen years later, they still hadn't. Finally, they offer up a piece of land: a city-owned parking lot near the beach. Jackson: A parking lot! The irony is already thick. Olivia: Ginger Hitzke, an affordable housing developer, takes on the project, which she calls "The Pearl." She plans to build 10 affordable homes for those families. It's a perfect location—walkable, near transit. She secures millions in funding. It seems like a slam dunk. Jackson: I have a bad feeling about this. Let me guess: the neighbors. Olivia: The neighbors. The project is in a posh, wealthy area. And the opposition is immediate and ferocious. They complain about property values, about "those people," but the one weapon they all rally around is parking. Jackson: Of course. The universal NIMBY battle cry: "But what about the parking?!" Olivia: Precisely. They argue that replacing a public parking lot, even for desperately needed housing, will create a parking nightmare. The pressure is immense. Hitzke is forced to redesign the project again and again. To appease them, she has to include a massive, 53-space underground parking garage—for just 10 apartments. Jackson: Wait. More than five parking spots per family? That’s insane. That must have cost a fortune. Olivia: A fortune. The cost of the garage alone ballooned the project's budget, making each affordable unit astronomically expensive. But the opposition didn't stop. A condo association sued to block the project, arguing a deed restriction required the land to remain a parking lot forever. Jackson: They sued to protect a parking lot over providing homes for people? Olivia: They did. And they dragged it out for years. Hitzke won the lawsuit. She won the appeal. But the opposition had achieved its real goal. The delays caused her to miss her financing deadlines, and construction costs had skyrocketed. In 2020, after a decade of fighting, Ginger Hitzke had to abandon the project. Jackson: Oh, that’s just devastating. So what happened to the land? Olivia: It’s still a parking lot. The families never got their homes. One of the original tenants, Miguel Zamora, died while waiting. Hitzke’s takeaway was blunt: "We care more about housing for our cars than we care about housing for ourselves. Period." Jackson: Wow. That story… it perfectly illustrates the whole problem. It’s not just a few angry guys with a baseball bat. It’s an entire system that values an empty patch of asphalt more than a family’s home. The personal rage and the systemic opposition are two sides of the same coin. Olivia: That’s the core of the parking paradox. The book shows this isn't an isolated incident. It happens in Boston, in Denver, in Buffalo. Affordable housing projects are killed, again and again, by the weaponization of parking. And it's all based on a myth. Jackson: The myth that there isn't enough parking? Olivia: Yes. The data is shocking. The U.S. has somewhere around a billion parking spots. That’s at least six for every car. Our national parking supply is never more than 17% occupied at any given time. We are drowning in parking. But because the system forces us to provide it for "free" everywhere, we perceive a constant, agonizing scarcity in the places we actually want to be. Jackson: So the problem isn't a shortage of parking, it's a shortage of convenient, free parking right in front of my destination. Olivia: Exactly. And the quest for that impossible ideal has a cost. It’s not just dead housing projects. It’s the very financial health of our cities, which brings us to the story of what happens when a city decides to sell its most valuable real estate for pennies on the dollar.

Jackson: Okay, so if parking is this valuable, this powerful, why on earth would a city sell it? It seems like a golden goose. Olivia: That is the billion-dollar question, and it brings us to one of the most infamous stories in modern urban history: the Chicago parking meter deal. Jackson: Oh boy. I’ve heard whispers of this. It’s legendary in a bad way, right? Olivia: Legendary in the worst way. Grabar dedicates a whole chapter to it, and it reads like a true-crime thriller. The scene is 2008. The global financial crisis is raging. Cities everywhere are broke. Chicago’s long-time mayor, Richard M. Daley, needs to plug a massive hole in the city budget without raising taxes. Jackson: A classic political dilemma. Find money, but don't ask anyone to pay for it. Olivia: So he lands on a brilliant, modern solution: privatization. He decides to lease out all 36,000 of the city’s parking meters. In exchange for a one-time cash payment, a private company would get to collect all the revenue from those meters for the next… 75 years. Jackson: Seventy-five years? That’s longer than most mortgages. That’s a whole lifetime. How do you even begin to calculate what 75 years of parking revenue is worth? Olivia: You do it very carefully, with teams of outside experts and a transparent, competitive bidding process. Jackson: Okay, I’m sensing that’s not what happened here. Olivia: Not even close. The Daley administration rushed the deal through the City Council with breathtaking speed. The aldermen were given a 150-page contract and told they had two days to read it and vote. Jackson: Two days? I take longer than that to read the terms and conditions for a software update. Olivia: Exactly. One rookie alderman, Scott Waguespack, did some frantic, back-of-the-envelope math and realized the city was getting fleeced. He estimated the meters were worth at least $4 billion, maybe more. The offer on the table from a Morgan Stanley-led consortium was just $1.15 billion. When he challenged the city’s CFO, the response was chilling: "This is the deal. Either we accept it or we don’t." Jackson: That’s not a negotiation. That’s a threat. It sounds like the city was desperate. Olivia: They were. The deal passed 40 to 5. One alderman famously admitted, "How many of us read the stuff we do get? It’s like getting your insurance policy. It’s small print." Chicago got its billion dollars, and Mayor Daley celebrated a victory for innovative governance. Jackson: And then the city woke up with a massive hangover. Olivia: The worst hangover in municipal history. The first thing the new private company, Chicago Parking Meters LLC, did was jack up the rates. An hour of parking that used to cost a quarter in some places now cost $6.50. But that was just the beginning of the nightmare. The contract was a minefield of clauses that effectively gave Wall Street control of Chicago’s streets. Jackson: What do you mean? They owned the meters, not the streets. Olivia: But the contract guaranteed their revenue. If the city wanted to close a street for a festival, or a block party, or even a construction project, it had to pay CPM for the lost meter revenue from those spots. Jackson: You’re kidding. The city had to pay a private company for permission to use its own streets? Olivia: Yes. It got even more absurd. When the new transportation commissioner wanted to install modern urban features like protected bike lanes or "parklets"—tiny parks that replace a parking spot—he found it was prohibitively expensive. Removing a single parking spot for a public parklet could cost the city thousands of dollars a year in "true-up" payments to the company. The deal literally made it too expensive for Chicago to improve its own public space. Jackson: This is unbelievable. It's like they sold the house but the new owner gets to charge them rent to use their own kitchen. Olivia: A perfect analogy. And it gets worse! The contract didn't account for a long-standing issue in Chicago: rampant abuse of disabled parking placards. Thousands of people were parking for free, legally or not. The city had always looked the other way. But CPM wasn't so forgiving. They sent the city a bill for all that lost revenue. Over the first four years, that bill came to $73 million. Jackson: So the city paid a private company for its own failure to enforce its own laws. The layers of dysfunction are staggering. Olivia: It became a symbol of everything wrong with government. Mayor Daley’s own PR advisor later said the deal was his biggest mistake, calling the meters "an insult every day that said ‘Fuck you’ every time you parked your car." The public outrage was so intense it was a major factor in Daley deciding not to run for re-election. Jackson: So in the end, the city got a one-time cash infusion, but in exchange, they lost billions in future revenue, lost control of their own streets, and torpedoed the mayor’s career. All for the love of "free" money from a parking meter. Olivia: It’s the ultimate cautionary tale. It shows what happens when we treat public space not as a shared resource to be managed for the common good, but as a commodity to be sold off to the highest bidder in a moment of panic.

Jackson: It’s just wild when you put those two stories side-by-side. In the first case, in Solana Beach, the government is forcing a developer to build a massive, unwanted, and financially ruinous amount of parking. In the second, the government is selling off its most valuable parking for a fraction of its worth. It feels like we're getting it wrong in every possible direction. Olivia: That’s the brilliant synthesis of the book. Grabar shows that we've consistently failed to understand what parking actually is. We've treated it as either a trivial nuisance to be ignored or a magic piggy bank to be smashed open, but never as what it truly is: our most valuable, and most contested, public space. Jackson: And the fight over it isn't really about the car. It's about what kind of city we want to live in. Olivia: Exactly. The fight over parking is a proxy war for everything else: housing, equity, climate, public space. Grabar's ultimate point is that the solution isn't more pavement. It's better policy. Jackson: And it’s not some impossible dream. The book talks about the "Shoupistas"—followers of the economist Donald Shoup—who have been pushing for simple, powerful reforms for years. Olivia: And they're starting to win. Cities are finally starting to abolish parking minimums. They're starting to price street parking correctly to manage demand. And when you realize that these simple changes can dramatically lower housing costs, reduce traffic, and help us build the walkable, vibrant neighborhoods so many of us crave, you see the path forward. Jackson: It makes you look at every giant, empty parking lot completely differently. You don't just see asphalt anymore. You see the ghost of a park, or a grocery store, or an apartment building that was never built. How much housing could be there instead? How many lives could be changed? Olivia: It’s a powerful shift in perspective. We'd love to hear your own parking horror stories or what you see when you look at the parking lots in your town. Find us on our social channels and share your thoughts. What would you build in that paved paradise? Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.