Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)

Jan 1, 2026

In this engaging discussion, Henry Grabar, a Slate staff writer and author of Paved Paradise, explores the pervasive and often absurd impact of parking on American cities. He examines the environmental disasters linked to parking and how historical decisions have led to urban chaos. Addressing the paradox of parking scarcity in the midst of abundance, Grabar sheds light on the politics behind parking reform and shares inspiring examples from cities like Los Angeles. He advocates for smarter parking pricing and reimagines urban spaces post-pandemic.

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ANECDOTE

Houston Homeowner Connects Parking To Flooding

In Houston Henry Grabar heard a homeowner link new mall parking to upstream neighborhood flooding.
That conversation spurred Grabar to see parking as part of larger stormwater and flood issues.

INSIGHT

Parking Is An Environmental Problem

Parking creates large environmental harms through impervious surfaces, heat islands, and disrupted groundwater recharge.
Henry Grabar links excess parking to higher driving, emissions, crashes, and broader environmental damage.

INSIGHT

Parking Dropped Off The Policy Map

Mid-century policy made parking seem solved and removed it from serious study or public responsibility.
That retreat left parking marooned between land-use and transportation disciplines with little data or oversight.

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Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?

These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin, 2023), Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems--from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster--ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.

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