Read This, Not That

The Trouble With Parking

While many urban centers such as New York and San Francisco strictly regulate and limit parking lots and facilities, the city of Los Angeles has long embraced them with reckless abandon, overwhelmed by a compulsion to provide parking to everyone who could possibly want to park anywhere at any time.  These layer cakes of concrete and wide, flat swaths of nothing have distinctly shaped its neighborhoods and culture, but is so much parking really good for a city? Writing for Los Angeles Magazine, David Gardetta explores the lengthy romance between L.A. and the parking space, research into the epidemic, and the myriad problems of parking.

Anyone scanning Disney Hall’s debut calendar in the fall of 2003 would have noticed the size of that first season’s schedule, 128 shows in all. That’s a weighty number for a new hall—one might have assumed it was chosen by venue management wanting the gravitas of a world-class chamber’s arrival or perhaps seeking a broad spectrum of music that could reflect the diverse city. Those guesses would have been wrong. Disney Hall had been built atop Parcel K, a county-owned square of land on Bunker Hill that long had sat empty, awaiting development. For decades Parcel K served a prosaic function: It was a parking lot. Commercial landowners like parking lots; they generate cash until better economic conditions arrive, and blank space can be converted into a more profitable moneymaking device—typically a building. The practice is called “land banking.”

Yet before an auditorium could be raised on K, a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million—money raised from county bonds. Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space. The debt on Disney Hall’s garage would have to be paid off for decades to come, and as it turned out, a minimum schedule of 128 annual shows would be enough to cover the bill. The figure “128” was even written into the L.A. Philharmonic’s lease. In 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen opened Frank Gehry’s masterpiece to a packed house with Mahler’sResurrection, and in the years since, concertgoers—who lay out $9 to enter the garage—have steadily funded performances that exist to cover the true price of their parking.

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Parking is an emotionally hot issue. When the City of Ventura began playing around with Shoup’s ideas last summer, Tea Party activists responded by vowing to vote out three city council members before year’s end. Progressives also adore free parking: San Jose, the hub of enlightened capitalism, has more vacant garage space than it can handle. “Everyone believes parking should be free,” says Van Horn. “We want that in the Constitution. But it’s too expensive, and there’s too much of it. Today there are garages all over L.A. with top floors that have never seen a car.” Whereas a skyscraper of a million square feet in New York may be required to have 100 parking spaces, an equal-size structure in L.A., like the U.S. Bank Tower, is compelled by the city to provide closer to 1,300 spaces. The maxim is wrong: L.A. wasn’t built around the car. It was built around the parking lot. 

Read the full article here.