For most of the 20th century, American cities required every new building to provide a minimum number of parking spaces. A restaurant needed X spots per seat. An apartment building needed Y spots per unit. A church needed Z spots per pew. These requirements weren't based on research. They were copied from city to city, growing more generous with each iteration, until the average American city dedicated more land to parking than to housing.
The origin
Parking minimums emerged in the 1950s as car ownership exploded. Cities were overwhelmed by on-street parking demand, and the solution seemed logical: require every building to handle its own parking. The problem is that "handling your own parking" means paving a lot of land. And paved land doesn't generate tax revenue, doesn't create density, doesn't support transit, and doesn't make neighborhoods walkable.
The math
A single above-ground parking spot costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to build. A structured spot in a parking garage costs $25,000 to $50,000. An underground spot can exceed $60,000. These costs are baked into the price of everything: your apartment rent, your restaurant meal, your groceries. Free parking is never free. The cost is just hidden.
Donald Shoup, the UCLA economist who has spent his career studying this, estimates that there are roughly three parking spaces for every car in America. That's approximately 800 million parking spots, covering an area larger than the state of Connecticut.
What's changing
Starting around 2017, cities began repealing their parking minimums. Buffalo was first. Then Hartford, San Francisco, Austin, and dozens more. By 2025, over 70 major cities have reduced or eliminated minimum parking requirements for new development.
The early results are promising. Developers in these cities are building fewer parking spots (about 30% fewer on average) and using the saved space and money for more housing units, ground-floor retail, and public space. The buildings don't look different from the outside. They just use land more efficiently.
The deeper lesson
Parking minimums are a case study in how small policy decisions compound into enormous spatial consequences. No single parking requirement seemed unreasonable when it was adopted. But collectively, across thousands of cities and decades of compounding, they reshaped the American landscape more profoundly than almost any deliberate design choice.
The best design essays often start with the question: who decided this, and did they understand what would happen next? With parking minimums, the answer is clear. Nobody decided to pave a Connecticut's worth of American land. It just happened, one zoning code at a time.