The Importance of Parking in Housing

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Sally Kohn: It's illegal to build the kinds of village environments and city environments that people love. She says because we require so much parking, it becomes really hard to build these things. "We are actively making decision after decision as a society that parking for current residents is more important than housing for new residents," she says.

For decades, urban planners have blanketed our cities with the cheap and convenient car storage known as parking. They've swapped sidewalks for strip malls and bulldozed bright, inviting storefronts to make room for dark, urine-scented parking garages. In some downtowns, more land is now devoted to parking than buildings.

Parking profligacy has left us with cities that are polluted and hostile to pedestrians; they're also increasingly unaffordable because legally required parking can drive up the cost of residential construction by 25 percent.

In "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World," journalist Henry Grabar dares to imagine a future in which we knock parking off its pedestal by enacting new laws, adopting new attitudes, and embracing new technologies (like e-bikes and autonomous cars) that make our cities greener, friendlier, safer, and more fun.