The Asphalt Desert: Why We’re Over-Parking Our Cities (and How to Fix It)
Have you ever pulled into a suburban shopping center on a Tuesday morning and realized you’re staring at a sea of empty asphalt large enough to host a mid-sized music festival? It’s a bit eerie, right? We’ve become so accustomed to these “asphalt deserts” that we barely notice them anymore. But once you start looking, you realize that parking lots are arguably the biggest waste of space in modern urban design.
We are literally paving over our potential, and it’s time we talked about why—and what we could be doing with all that room instead.
How Did We Get Here?
You might think parking lots are huge because businesses want to make sure you always have a spot. In reality, it’s often because they’re forced to be that big.
Most cities have things called minimum parking requirements. These are zoning rules that dictate exactly how many parking spaces a building must have based on its size or use. For example, a restaurant might be required to have one parking space for every 100 square feet of floor area.
The problem? These numbers are often based on “peak demand”—like the Saturday before Christmas. For the other 360 days of the year, those spots sit empty. It’s a rigid, outdated way of planning that treats the car as the most important resident of the city, while humans (and their bank accounts) take a backseat.
The World Has Changed, but the Lots Haven’t
The irony is that while our zoning laws are stuck in 1975, the way we live has shifted dramatically.
- The Death of the Mall: We’ve all seen the “dead mall” videos. As E-commerce takes over, the massive parking lots surrounding these retail giants are becoming ghost towns.
- The Rise of Public Transit: In many cities, public transportation, biking infrastructure, and ridesharing have made owning a car less of a necessity and more of an expensive hobby.
- Remote Work: We aren’t commuting to giant office parks in the same numbers anymore.
We’re holding onto all this pavement for a lifestyle that is rapidly disappearing.
What Could We Do Instead?
If we decided to act on this issue, we could actually make big impacts on some of our biggest societal problems. Here are a few better uses for that space:
1. Affordable Housing
Let’s be real: the cost of living is through the roof. We are currently facing a massive housing shortage, yet we have miles of flat, paved land just sitting there. By converting underused parking lots into multi-family housing or “missing middle” apartments, we could lower rent prices and make cities more walkable. It’s a lot easier to build on a flat parking lot than to clear a forest or tear down existing buildings.
2. “Grey to Green” Transformations
Parking lots are “heat islands.” They soak up the sun and radiate heat, making cities significantly hotter than surrounding rural areas. They also create massive issues with rainwater runoff. Replacing asphalt with parks, community gardens, or “pocket forests” doesn’t just look better; it literally cools the city down and provides a place for people to actually exist without having to buy something.
3. Micro-Businesses and Markets
Imagine a giant, empty lot transformed into a hub for shipping-container cafes, pop-up markets, or outdoor art galleries. It’s about creating community wealth rather than just a place to store a two-ton metal box.
The Bottom Line
We’re at a turning point. We can keep mandating that every taco shop has enough parking for a small army, or we can start reclaiming our land for things that actually matter: homes, nature, and community.
The “asphalt desert” doesn’t have to be our permanent landscape. It’s time to stop planning our cities for cars and start planning them for people. After all, when was the last time a parking spot invited you over for a BBQ or paid a reasonable rent?
If you liked this article, you may want to consider alternative building materials. Check out this post on a more sustainable concrete made with plastic aggregate.
Core Sources & Further Reading
- The “Parking Bible”: * Shoup, Donald. (2005). The High Cost of Free Parking. * Why it matters: Professor Donald Shoup is essentially the godfather of this movement. He’s the one who first meticulously documented how “minimum parking requirements” are based on pseudoscience and how they drive up the cost of housing while ruining urban design.
- Zoning and Economic Impact:
- Strong Towns (strongtowns.org). * Why it matters: This organization is the leading voice on how excessive parking mandates bankrupt cities. They provide extensive Case Studies on how “parking craters” (those giant gaps in downtowns) kill local tax revenue.
- The Death of Retail & Land Use:
- The Brookings Institution. (Specifically their research on The Future of the Shopping Mall).
- Why it matters: They track how E-commerce and changing consumer habits are leaving millions of square feet of parking lot space vacant and why that land is prime for “adaptive reuse.”
- Housing and the Cost of Living:
- Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.
- Why it matters: Their research consistently shows how parking mandates can add anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000 per unit to the cost of building affordable housing. If you want to know why rent is so high, look at the parking garage under the building.
- Environmental & Heat Island Data:
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (Search: Heat Island Effect and Pavement).
- Why it matters: The EPA provides the hard data on how asphalt-heavy urban areas can be 1°C–7°F warmer during the day than surrounding areas, and how replacing that asphalt with “green infrastructure” (permeable surfaces and trees) fixes it.
- Public Transit & Walkability:
- Walk Score / Redfin. * Why it matters: They provide the statistical link between reduced parking/increased walkability and higher property values and lower personal transportation costs.