Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

PENGUIN PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © 2023 by Henry Grabar

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

Illustrations by Alfred Twu

library of congress control number 2022038827

ISBN 9781984881137 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781984881144 (ebook)

Cover design: Ben Wiseman

Designed by Sabrina Bowers, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

pid_prh_6.0_148814534_c0_r3

For Mom and Dad

Contents

Introduction

Part 1 What a Mess We Made

Chapter 1 Housing for Cars and Housing for People

Chapter 2 Fighting Over Parking Spaces

Chapter 3 The Travails of New York’s Top Parking Attendant

Chapter 4 Destroying the City in Order to Save It

Chapter 5 Paved Paradise

Part 2 Charging for Something Everyone Expects to Be Free

Chapter 6 How to Use Parking for Money Laundering, Tax Evasion, and Theft

Chapter 7 A Trip to the Heart of the Commercial Parking Industry

Chapter 8 When Wall Street Bought Chicago’s Parking Meters

Part 3 How to Fix the Parking Problem

Chapter 9 The Professor of Parking Starts a Cult

Chapter 10 Parkitecture

Chapter 11 The Shoupistas Take City Hall

Chapter 12 The Market: Parking after Minimums

Chapter 13 How Americans Wound Up Living in the Garage

Chapter 14 Planting Gardens in the Gutter

Chapter 15 The New World

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

_148814534_

Introduction

It was a November afternoon in Queens and Jie Zou was looking for a parking spot. He pulled his white Audi in front of a space on Kissena Boulevard, by Rainbow Bakery, and prepared to back in. But Zong Li drove up behind him, angling for the same opening. It was a typical New York moment, a low-stakes impasse that has its own Seinfeld episode, until the men got out of their cars.

The argument escalated quickly. Zou punched Li in the face, and Zou’s passenger, Jonathan Zhang, produced a baseball bat, which he swung at Li and his companion. After Li wrested the bat away, Zou and Zhang got back into the Audi and pulled across the street. Li followed, smacking the bat on the hood of the Audi. Then Zou hit the accelerator. When the Audi hit Li, he flipped across the hood of the car. Zou kept driving, jumped the curb, and sent the sedan careening into Rainbow Bakery’s plate-glass window. The car ended up six feet into the shop, leaving shoppers lying in the shattered glass. Five people were taken to the hospital; Zou, who left the scene on foot, was later arrested and charged with assault.

John Lo, the owner of Rainbow Bakery, stood forlorn among the smashed display cases, bent wall studs, and Sheetrock dust of his store. It’s just for a parking space, he said in disbelief. It was his opening day.

You may feel similarly shocked to learn that disputes over parking spaces can and do lead to violence. In a few dozen incidents each year, they even lead to death. Typically, these killings get little discussion beyond a perfunctory spot on the local news, in which a bewildered, siren-lit reporter standing outside a store or an apartment complex asks what is obviously intended as a rhetorical question: How could someone end a life over something so trivial? Over a parking spot?

But since these fights keep happening, it’s clear that it’s not a rhetorical question—nor a very difficult one to answer. Parking-driven psychosis is a regular feature of American life, and these outbursts are more ordinary than we might like to think. Indeed, I have come to see these fits of rage as highly visible eruptions of a common parking urge shared by most nonhomicidal drivers, whether we’re behind the wheel or not. They are expressions of the same fear that rises into view anytime our parking comes under threat, whether it’s the neighborhood lot or the curb in front of your house. Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain, said to govern instinctive behavior involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual display, writes Donald Shoup, the country’s foremost parking scholar.

It’s not hard to grasp what makes parking a fixation: without a place to park, you can never get out of the car. A parking space is nothing less than the link between driving and life itself, the nine-by-eighteen-foot portal through which lies whatever you got in the car to do in the first place. Whoever said life was about the journey and not the destination never had to look for a place to park. Every trip must begin and end with a parking space, and in no uncertain terms. We expect parking to be immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most important, free. This is unique. It would be unimaginable to hold any other good or service to the same standard. We expect parking to be perfect. Once, I missed an entire summer afternoon at the beach because I refused to pay for parking and, while I hunted, my passengers (wisely) left on the island ferry without me.

Combine our need for unconditional parking satisfaction with the opaque, contested ownership customs that govern curbs, lots, and shared garages, and you have a recipe for bad behavior. Driving into a new city, I often find street-parking instructions so unintelligible I might as well be trying to read a restaurant menu from twenty feet away, through a window, while steering the car. No aspect of American law is as scorned as parking regulations; no civil servant as despised as the parking agent, which must be the only job whose workers say they cover up their uniforms to eat lunch, out of concern that someone will spit in their food. And those are just the rules on paper. Many communities govern parking by unwritten codes you learn the hard way, or by intricate hierarchies, such as the one at the University of California at Berkeley, where the only way to secure a free, reserved parking space on campus is by winning a Nobel Prize.

Our parking urge doesn’t just fuel the occasional dustup. The need for a perfect parking space has also shaped the country’s physical landscape. It has become the organizing principle of American architecture, from the parking-first design of the strip mall to office towers that sit like sculptures atop their garage pedestals to the house itself, where the garage is often the largest room and the dominant feature of the facade. In most of the country, it is illegal to build a home without parking. The need for parking determines local politics and the behavioral compact that governs the street in front of your house. At the center of our biggest cities, some of the most valuable public land on Earth has been exclusively reserved for the free storage of private cars. By paving so much ground, the metropolitan parking supply directs the course of floodwaters. Parking determines the size, shape, and cost of new buildings, the fate of old ones, the patterns of traffic, the viability of mass transit, the life of public space, the character of neighborhoods, the state of the city budget, our whole spread-out life in which it is virtually impossible to live without an automobile.

The grayness of a city where it’s easy to park is embedded in the word parking itself, which once referred to curbside patches of greenery, tiny parks. Now it describes something like the opposite, the lifeless blacktop. Our cities are full of moonscapes for the purpose of storing cars. From the perception of scarcity was born an abundance so great it became the single largest use of land in some cities. Between 1950 and 1980, when Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in the United States, LA County was adding parking spaces at an almost unimaginable pace—850 new spots every day for thirty years. Parking now occupies two hundred square miles of land in the county. As a single parking lot it would form a square of asphalt stretching from LAX to Sherman Oaks to Pasadena to Downey. Or, for nonlocals, a three-story garage the size of the District of Columbia. And this in a place where people routinely complain about how hard it is to find parking.

Why did we do this to the places we love? Was parking really more important than anything else? In Boston, a woman spoke at a community meeting about a new fourteen-unit apartment building to be built down the street. She objected because of parking. She said she had lost eleven pounds because she was afraid to go to the supermarket, lest she return to find she had forfeited her space on the street. She was starving herself to park. It’s a good allegory for the whole American parking picture.

Hail Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking space.

It’s not pretty. The parking shortage functions as a political cudgel to shut down new business and keep out new neighbors. Laws that require every building to include parking prevent us from creating housing, especially affordable housing, because parking costs so much to construct and takes up so much space. In Seattle, for example, required parking makes up 10 to 20 percent of the cost of construction of multifamily buildings and drives up apartment rents by 15 percent. In California and Arizona, garages increase the cost of affordable housing by 27 percent. The obligation to provide parking makes it impossible to reuse older buildings, compelling needless demolitions, or work with smaller properties, leaving infill parcels fallow. Parking is a mutant strain of yeast in the dough of architecture, making our designs bigger, uglier, and farther apart. If the Empire State Building had been built to the minimum parking requirements of a contemporary American city, for example, its surface parking lot would cover twelve whole blocks. Parking is power, the architect Andres Duany explained to me. And what I mean by that is that in most of the United States, you can build as much as you can park. It’s not the building envelope or the floor-area ratio that determine what you can build, he said, citing two common zoning provisions. In the end, what cuts you off is the amount of parking you can provide. When Duany’s firm plots out a new town, their base unit of measurement is seventy feet: a whole society planned to the width of a driveway aisle with parking stalls on each side.

Parking is also a key element in the way a city interacts with wildlife, heat, and rain. It’s an environmental disaster twice over—first in its direct impact on nature, which it squashes underfoot; second because of all the tailpipe emissions subsidized by billions of dollars’ worth of mandatory free parking at virtually every destination. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that parking is the primary determinant of the way the place you live looks, feels, and functions. While there are still some corners of this country where parking is worth fighting for, in most of the nation the fight was over decades ago. Parking is plentiful. The country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments. More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person. It is this sea of parking, in which destinations bob like distant buoys, that renders mass transit, biking, and walking difficult or dangerous. We devote so much land to parking, you really do run out of places to put buildings, Steve Jensen, the former planning director of Omaha, Nebraska, said of his city. By some estimates there are as many as six parking spaces for every car, meaning that our national parking stock is never more than 17 percent occupied. And in spite of all that, somehow, it often seems damn hard to find a space when you need one.

There’s a maxim among people who deal with parking professionally that helps explain this situation: Everyone wants parking to be convenient, available, and free. But the forces of time, space, and money conspire in such a way that no thriving place can meet more than two of the three parking needs. Free and convenient but not easily available? That’s street parking in Flushing, Queens, or any other big-city neighborhood. Convenient and available but not free? That’s the ferryboat parking lot that I left in a huff. Free and available but not convenient? That’s where I parked when I missed the boat.

It is the expectation and pursuit of all three parking qualities—convenient, available, and free—for every destination that has led us to require many properties, such as offices, restaurants, and shops, to be more than 50 percent parking by area. Like that woman in Boston, we are wasting away, clinging to the rotten system we know instead of taking a chance on something new and better. In our quest to make it as easy as possible to park, we’ve made it awfully hard to do anything else.

—

The parking problem is as old as the road itself. In the seventh century BC, the Assyrian king Sennacherib posted signs that read royal road—let no man decrease it, under penalty of death and public impalement. (And you complain about parking tickets.) Pompeii and Herculaneum have sections of pavement demarcated by raised stones, which may have been early parking regulations. Julius Caesar introduced off-street chariot parking in Rome to reduce traffic. Seventeenth-century New York established a towing service—to clear the streets of animals. You could get your pig back from the pound for a florin, or your horse for two and a half. The terms dog pound and tow pound both come from this shared history of unclaimed property; a pound was originally an enclosure for animals.

Up until the invention of the automobile, however, the volatile nature of horses was its own form of regulation: you couldn’t leave your horse on the street for a week. The advent of the car, especially cars that could be left outside, in all weather, for days or weeks at a time, turned the parking problem into a major dilemma. By the middle of the twentieth century, many experts feared parking—specifically, the lack thereof—was the most important issue facing American cities.

Today that seems ridiculous. Amid the crises of racial inequality, widespread pollution, ramshackle housing, job loss, and crime that characterized the urban trajectory after the Second World War, newspaper editorials and conference keynotes were focused on . . . not enough parking? In the Los Angeles Times, the parking problem was portrayed as a King Kong–sized gorilla hulking over downtown. Yet we are now living in a world built by the fear of a parking shortage, not just in this country but in many others that have followed America’s lead in planning and design.

If driving is freedom, the open road, and limitless space to inhale, parking is its cramped, contested partner, driving’s ill-tempered brother, the thing you never see on television because it is simultaneously too boring and too irritating. In the final minutes of The Sopranos, Meadow’s struggle to park makes a fitting tribute to the series themes of banality and decline. This never would have happened in Goodfellas. Driving is the plot of hundreds of movies; parking gets less screen time than using the toilet. Good driving is courteous, but good parking is cutthroat. Driving is the central motif of hundreds of pop songs; if there’s a song about finding a parking spot, I haven’t heard it. (Big Yellow Taxi is the best I could do.)

Yet a big chunk of life happens in and around the parked car: a thousand interstitial moments, scenes of congregation, jubilation, learning, lust, intrigue, horror, and despair. Outside high schools or concerts or convenience stores, parking lots are places of impromptu assembly. The parking lot is where Americans learn to drive. Virtually all of us eat in a parked car from time to time; Sonic opened 3,500 restaurants around the concept. Teenagers in parked cars fondle their way toward paradise by the dashboard light: Did he try to park? girls used to be asked. College students assemble in the parking lot to drink themselves into a stupor before football games.

Despite or perhaps because of its growing ubiquity, parking declined from a major field of research and interest to an unloved backwater. Parking is as absent from the training of architects, planners, and engineers as it is from the culture at large. It’s overlooked even by the governments and institutions that depend on its good order, marooned between the technical domains of transportation and land use. Like a bastard child that no one wants, according to one longtime parking executive. The weight we place on good parking in our personal lives is surpassed only by our ignorance of its systemic consequence. I have been reporting on cities for more than a decade, and I have never seen another subject that is simultaneously so integral to the way things work and so overlooked. Car culture, the highways, and the suburbs have been studied to death, but I can count the books about parking on two hands. And yet it comes up in story after story, and it isn’t hard to see why: for all the talk about roads and cars, every vehicle spends an estimated 95 percent of its life span parked.

—

This is in part the story of how we destroyed our cities in search of parking, and the people who helped make it so: the mall builders and the mobsters, the police and the politicians, the garage magnates and the community groups. But it is also a chronicle of those who have begun to repair the damage, waging an unpopular war to take parking down a notch on America’s hierarchy of needs, and restore what it took from us.

Not all the way down, mind you. I’ve read more books about car culture than I care to count, and many have not aged well. Their disdain for the suburbs and the people who live there is condescending at best and, in light of today’s urban real estate prices, newly classist. I come to bury that rhetoric, not to praise it. This book proposes an honest reckoning with the subsidies and externalities of cars, but it is not anticar. Parking has made an awful mess of the American city, but drivers are not the architects of this system. In a way they are its victims. In its best moments, driving feels like freedom, but our inability to get around any other way is a kind of prison.

I do, however, take it as a first principle that most people would like to be able to leave the car behind once in a while—to travel on foot, on a bike, with a kid on Rollerblades or a baby in a stroller, on a bus that comes when you need it and goes somewhere you want to be. We are what we build, first because our buildings are an expression of our values, and second because, in time, those buildings come to set the patterns of our lives. This cycle is on full display in this country’s long pursuit of free and easy parking.

One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance. We take our vacations to places where we can get out of the car—Charleston, Disneyland, Manhattan, Miami Beach, Rome. Housing prices reflect the desirability of such destinations, making anything but a brief stay off-limits to all but a moneyed few. The promise of this book—the promise of fixing the parking problem—is not to force the reader out of her car but to let her forget it now and then for a moment. In a world with better parking it would be easier, not harder, to find a spot, and much easier to live in a place where you would not need to drive quite so often. In a world with better parking kids could walk to school and grown-ups to the grocery store. In a world with better parking, there might be fewer places to park, but in place of those old parking spots would emerge a city so much richer and fuller and fairer that you would not think twice about what had been lost.

In the last two decades, some people have begun to seek those changes. Architects, activists, planners, builders, researchers, and environmentalists have started to interrogate the country’s relationship to parking. How could something so fundamental to our every movement have gone unstudied for so long, missing from textbooks and schools and research journals, even as it became the defining feature of the American urban environment? "The only thing drivers know about parking is the letter P on the gearshift lever, a commercial parking expert told me once. And sometimes they mix that up with the letter R." Parking was ready for a revolution. These people have caught on to the central role that parking plays in determining whether we get more places that look like Greenwich Village or another strip mall. Their stories will, I hope, suffuse you with the dawning awareness that parking rules everything around you.

And yet, for most of us, to the extent we think about parking at all, the thought is very simple: Where’s my spot?

Part 1

What a Mess We Made

Chapter 1

Housing for Cars and Housing for People

The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape.

—Pope Francis

In 1991, a generational tale of parking’s role in American life began in Solana Beach, California. This story isn’t just, or even primarily, about where we should put our cars when we’re not driving them. It’s about how the need for parking holds an insurmountable power over the decisions we make about the places we live, a claim of such self-evident weight it takes precedence over much else that we say we hold dear. Because it’s hard to find a consensus view about whether the parking shortage is real, imagined, or addressable, the need for parking is an evergreen retort, straddling the line between a real right of access and a contrived and disingenuous excuse. One Southern California developer told me that this dual nature was one of the things that made parking such a tricky and emotional trip wire. "It’s like a plain pasta that takes on the flavor of whatever sauce you put on it. It’s a proxy for so many other things, and a real thing in and of itself, and that dance of parking as proxy and parking as parking adds up to a lot of badness and dysfunction." In other words, sometimes people are talking about parking, and sometimes they’re talking about something else.

When it came to building affordable housing in Solana Beach, they were definitely talking about something else.

Solana Beach is a posh suburb of San Diego. Time-share condos around pools, houses around cul-de-sac driveways, shops by the highway. Marine layer in the morning, blue skies in the afternoon, and the sound of the Pacific crashing on the beach below the cliffs. Solana Beach, stated The San Diego Union Tribune, was six square miles of sunny coastal ambiance, a place that epitomized the bewildering patterns of postwar suburban development in Southern California.

But there was nothing sunny about the 1928 motor court at 204 South Sierra Avenue, at the heart of the city’s down-on-its-heels main drag. The walls were damp; rats and cockroaches roamed the rotten floors at night. Toilets broke and showers lacked hot water. The absentee landlord, Leon Perl, lived in Beverly Hills.

Miguel Zamora, a thirty-nine-year-old tenant from Guadalajara, rented a one-room studio there with his wife and four kids. He fixed things himself and paid for it himself. He repaired the plumbing. Installed a water pump. Put in a new lock.

In January 1991, Solana Beach began inspecting the property, issuing violations to which, the city said, Perl was only minimally responsive. By the fall of 1992, the city had filed an eighty-three-count criminal complaint against the landlord for the illegal conditions. Perl decided it was more trouble than it was worth, so he moved to bulldoze the place. Eviction notices went up on the cracked wooden doors in November.

The tenants were evicted and the building demolished, and the city settled out of court with Perl. The Legal Aid Society, representing the tenants, secured a commitment from Solana Beach to develop replacement housing for the thirteen evicted households by 1999.

By 2005, just three homes had been built. Not until sixteen years after the evictions did Solana Beach, where the median home now costs more than $2 million, put forth a site for developers to house the remaining ten families. The spot the city picked was not quite as good as the site of the original motor court—by then a dirt lot in the middle of a resurgent downtown strip—but it was close to the beach and less than a mile from the commuter rail. It was a city-owned parking lot. A perfect place to build affordable housing.

At least, that’s what Ginger Hitzke thought. In 2008, the thirty-three-year-old Hitzke was trying to establish herself as an affordable housing developer. She had started working as a receptionist in a developer’s office a decade earlier and, at the start of the recession, was ready to try to build things herself. Hitzke was an improbable figure in the world of Southern California real estate. She grew up poor. Didn’t go to college. She was a woman in a male-dominated field. She had just $14,000 in the bank when she went out on her own.

But when a friend scanned and sent her a newspaper clipping about the Solana Beach project, she thought: This is my model. A small project in a small city for a good cause. Unlike most affordable housing projects, whose tenants might be granted apartments by lottery, the Solana Beach housing was associated with specific people, kicked out of town almost two decades earlier. People like Miguel Zamora.

Hitzke scraped together $10 million in financing and Solana Beach gave her a shot. She called the project the Pearl, a reference to the slumlord whose evictions had set the process in motion.

There was a reason she had no trouble getting the job: the fixed costs of building things in California are so high that ten affordable units is not an attractive proposition to most developers. In Solana Beach, as it would turn out, the risks were not smaller because the project was small.

I visited Hitzke in October 2020, in a suburb on the other side of San Diego called Lemon Grove, where she worked. She talked fast, swore frequently, and broke up her sentences with a high, staccato laugh. Only when we talked about Solana Beach did her voice sink. I think people take a bit of joy that I failed so spectacularly, she reflected. "I was in the LA Times and now I’ve got fucking Slate on the phone. People call and say, ‘Are you okay?’ And I say, ‘Fuck you. You know I’m not.’ "

Her office was on the ground floor of one of her apartment buildings, Citronica Two, and it reflected her boisterous demeanor. Her door was etched with the words boss lady/patrona, and her desk sat beneath a bright mural by a local artist named Maxx Moses—a kind of impulse buy. In 2019, stoned at the Warhol exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hitzke had experienced a deep longing for art in her life. When she got back to Lemon Grove, Moses was outside her office looking for walls to paint. So she had a mural behind her chair. Nearby, a painting in a gilded frame depicted her as a recumbent, dark-haired Glinda the Good Witch, showering rainbows over an Emerald City modeled after the building. The wand had an H, which looked a little like the Hitzke Development logo and also a little like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign logo. Ginger loved Hillary. She drove a caravan of teenagers to Iowa to campaign for her. Her Twitter bio read Fabulous Real Estate Developer + Fat Lady. Proudly race-mixing since 1994. Suburb abolitionist. Hitzke is white; her husband is black; the couple has two sons.

Abolishing the suburbs, well, that was a work in progress. Ginger Hitzke’s affordable housing project in Solana Beach was dead. Cause of death: parking.

Parking has been the number-one topic that surpasses all other things that go along with what you hear when you’re trying to develop apartments, Hitzke said. Crime, property values, community character, parking is an everyday—God, I hate the topic so much. She burst out laughing. I laugh because I hate this topic so much.

Originally, Hitzke had planned to build eighteen apartments on the site of the Solana Beach municipal parking lot. She would provide thirty-one parking spots to make up for the loss of the public parking, plus add twenty-two spots for residents, inside a fifty-three-space underground garage. Parking fees would help offset construction costs. There would also be a small retail space. She imagined filling it with a little grocery store.

It’s worth taking a moment to understand just what compelled the fifty-three-spot underground garage that would drag Ginger down. First, there were twenty-two places for residents—a parking requirement of local zoning here in Solana Beach, like almost everywhere else in the country, to make sure residents wouldn’t park in the street. Second, there were the thirty-one spaces in the municipal parking lot, which Hitzke was under pressure to rebuild, underground and at great expense. Because this site sits just one thousand feet from the Pacific Ocean, it falls under the jurisdiction of a group called the California Coastal Commission (CCC). The CCC was born of a virtuous impulse to prevent developers from cordoning off the seaside for the exclusive use of nearby residents. It was created by ballot referendum in the 1970s and later given permanent authority over construction along the state’s 1,100-mile coast, including for inland sites.

The CCC was part of a burgeoning, powerful California slow-growth movement, which successfully restricted development in some pristine natural areas, such as Big Sur. But it had a malevolent counterpart: a group of metropolitan homeowners who brought that righteous sense of preservation to urban and suburban neighborhoods. Using tools like parking requirements, single-family zoning, historic preservation, minimum lot sizes, and lawsuits under California environmental law, the state’s homeowners wrote the playbook for how to exclude new neighbors—and look righteous while doing it. They were astonishingly effective at keeping new residents out of coastal cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Of course, people didn’t stop coming to California. Newer, younger, and poorer residents just spilled out away from the coast, into fire-prone forests in the north of the state and scorching deserts in the south. Drive till you qualify for a mortgage, and then spend the rest of your life driving to work.

That was Ginger Hitzke. Though her office was just outside San Diego in Lemon Grove, Ginger lived with her family in Temecula, seventy miles north. There’s an inverse correlation between real estate prices and summer temperatures. On a blistering July day, the temperature rises ten degrees from Solana Beach to Lemon Grove, and another ten degrees in Temecula. Before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, more than half of workers in Temecula spent more than thirty minutes a day getting to work. Some days, Ginger was part of a burgeoning class of California supercommuters, who spend more than three hours a day commuting. (More than 7 percent of the workforce in her county was in this category, more than three times the rate in San Diego County.)

Which is why, ironically enough, Ginger had to rebuild that parking lot in Solana Beach. Because without parking, there’s no beach access for the millions of Californians pushed inland by coastal housing restrictions. The fewer people permitted to move to places like Solana Beach, the greater the egalitarian cachet of its free parking. So the California Coastal Commission, charged with preserving the coastline, is also the state’s greatest defender of beachfront parking lots. It’s an irony that plays out at every national park, at every mountain trailhead, at every beach and boat launch: for most Americans, there is no access to nature without parking. This is why Yellowstone’s Old Faithful sits inside a giant horseshoe of parking lots. In Texas, beaches are presumed to be parking lots, and local authorities can keep cars off the sand only if they provide a parking space for every fifteen feet of beach closed to traffic.

Restrict or charge for nonresident parking—as towns in the Hamptons or on Cape Cod do—and wealthy residents can keep the beach to themselves without having to say so. In white neighborhoods along Rockaway Beach in New York City, street curbs that abut the beach are categorized as fire zones—a blanket parking prohibition, all down the block, under the spurious logic that fire trucks need the