Parking Lots
Michael Kimmelman has a very interesting piece in the Times on taking parking lots seriously as architectural structures and community spaces. There is much to agree with here. The gigantic Wal-Mart parking lot that is at best 25% full on everyday but the days after Thanksgiving and Christmas is an ecological and architectural nightmare. The idea that parking is hard to find in America is almost always absurd; how often does one really have to park more than a few blocks away from your destination, barring you are going to Manhattan? Almost never. We have way too much parking and a century of federal policies backing up the continued paving of America.
So what to do with all this parking? Kimmelman points to a few examples of dead shopping mall parking lots becoming weirdly useful community spaces. But these are extreme exceptions. For every dead mall lot hosting hot dog trucks and farmer markets, there are 100 sitting there with no purpose except for drug transactions and sleeping in your car. Since Kimmelman focuses so heavily on the dead shopping mall, it’s worth examining this a little more. One of the biggest problems with dead shopping malls is the incentive of stores, often big grocery chains, to open ever larger stores nearby from their original store and then sit on the property to keep any competition out. As one example, in Hyde Park, New York, Stop & Shop moved from one big lot and built a larger store a half mile away. Rumors have it that the company is now going to abandon that newer space, go back to the original and build a Super Stop & Shop. While that might solve the current blight that affects this part of that historic town, it just opens up a new dead space. You see this kind of thing around the country. Winco, a Northwest chain, has held onto a space in my home town of Springfield, Oregon for at least 15 years. That whole mall is dead.
That’s a major urban issue that the government needs to deal with. There are concrete possible solutions–heavily penalize corporations that sit on dead malls, encourage them to sell those lands to home or apartment developers to redevelop the spaces into housing within the existing urban footprint, offer to buy up those spaces, tear up the parking lots, and turn them into parks. Any of these ideas are better than allowing the land to sit there with no penalty and no plan for redevelopment.
In the end, we can and probably should take parking lots seriously as community spaces. But they aren’t always very useful community spaces. They might provide a farmers market a decent space, but a park would probably provide a better one. Turning them into bus stops has value, but so does having the buses go to the neighborhoods where people live rather than making them drive there. The hot dog stands are great, but again, placing them in spaces where people actually go is even better. Any model that succeeds in finding something to do with these spaces is completely worth supporting, but far more important is figuring out how to turn the levers of government at all levels into reducing our parking spaces.
One word:
Kelo.
That is all.
Before taking the land at the dead malls, or taking the excessive peripheral lots, they could try some zoning changes (allow more uses, remove the minimum-parking requirement) and see if that’s enough to get the underutilized land redeveloped.
That sounds like a plausible idea. Remove the bottlenecks that propagate such dead parking lots and see if they can naturally be reduced over time.
Local governments ought to have all the legal tools at their disposal to prevent companies from sitting on dead malls. If they want to, can’t they buy these areas up under eminent domain and then do whatever they like with them?
Errr…there’s such a thing called “PRIVATE PROPERTY”.
And to use emminent domain you’d better show a really really good reason why you wish to use the full force of government to rip that property out of the hands of it’s rightful owners.
Cuz you want to or because you don’t like that it’s an empty mall just doesn’t cut it…unless you’re Hugo Chavez.
A dead mall surrounded by empty parking lots is pretty much the textbook definition of blight.
I assure you, the use of eminent domain to combat blight is not, in fact, a novel policy of the Bolivarian Revolution.
It’s cute that you think I’d take your comparison to Chavez as an insult.
What’s cute is that he thinks taking a dead mall off the hands of some corporate property holder is state power run wild while local right wingers all over the country use eminent domain to take people’s homes to build commercial property for, primarily, personal gain.
It’s cute that you think I’d take your comparison to Chavez as an insult.
heh…
If you’re not insulted by a comparison to Hugo Chavez, then it’s pretty safe to assume that you agree with Chavez about private property.
Hugo Chavez is an avowed socialist.
Hugo Chavez has the balls to state to the world that he’s a socialist.
You don’t.
I’m a socialist.
Do voters want less parking? I mean, as a bossy liberal I of course want them to, but I’m not sure they do.
For every dead mall lot hosting hot dog trucks and farmer markets, there are 100 sitting there with no purpose except for drug transactions and sleeping in your car.
Well, the ways things are going, we’re going to need a lot more of those.
There are concrete possible solutions–heavily penalize corporations that sit on dead malls,
This is America. We don’t punish corporation who are having hard times, just individuals. Beyond that, if we are talking about empty stores within malls, chances are that the mall owner is still getting rent (in fact, usually higher rent than when the store was open*), and will fight tooth and nail to not rock that boat.
encourage them to sell those lands to home or apartment developers to redevelop the spaces into housing within the existing urban footprint,
There is not a lot of demand for housing now. Probably won’t be fore years.
offer to buy up those spaces, tear up the parking lots, and turn them into parks.
Parks that don’t get used won’t be significantly better than malls that don’t get used. Beyond that, even dead malls pay property taxes. You think cash-strapped municipalities will spend money they don’t have, during the same budget cycles they are laying off teachers and firefighters, in order to lower their tax base going forward?
*Most commercial mall leases contain covenants that the store be open – mall owners want foot traffic within the mall. You pay penalty rates if you close your store.
And now that I have had coffee, I did not mean this to be snarky, and apologize if it comes off that way. But I think the institutional hurdles to your ideas are pretty insurmountable.
Those institutional hurdles may be insurmountable, but I’m thinking out loud here, not trying to convince a city council or state legislature to pass legislation.
Another factor that hasn’t been touched on the tax incentive to keep a ghost mall. All the rent that you’re not collecting can be claimed as a loss to offset the profits from your successful mall. There are limits, of course, but a lot of income can be kept away from the tax man this way.
I have no idea how to patch the tax code to fix that problem that doesn’t have horrible repercussions for private property.
Shift the tax base away from income taxes and towards consumption taxes, including taxing the unimproved value of land as a consumption tax (which it is). That’s fairly radical but it’s been done elsewhere.
The tax breaks aren’t THAT big (you can’t normally deduct lost rent unless you pre-booked it somehow.)
Usually it’s more the cost of cleanup that keeps them vacant. Just the cost of demo can be extremely large. If you add any remediation it’s just not worth it. I’ve heard (without checking AT ALL) that parking lot can cost 1k/10 sq feet to demo a parking lot b/c of all the oil and car products after 50 years of drainage, especially in a place like Oregon. I’ve been paid over a Christmas break to just jackhammer stuff up and hope nobody sees it.
If you want to see where good Republicans might have a point, think of that. As an environmentalist, what tradeoffs are you willing to make there? Would you be willing to trade a Gerald Ford Republican a more pristine urban environment for quicker remodels of urban environment?
All by itself asphalt is a petroleum product and can’t just be dumped anywhere, never mind the automotive seepings that it’s saturated with. Brownfield development (untouched land is a “greenfield”) makes a lot of people nervous as there’s no telling what the previous developer decided to bury. In DC a few years ago an excavator uncovered a WWII-era 800 pound bomb.
Actually, there’s a couple of ways in which an unused park is superior to an unused parking lot: water runoff, space for urban wildlife, heat retention, air pollution mitigation, not to mention a subtle but real effect on stress.
A little over a dozen miles and two towns south of Hyde Park, in Fishkill, NY, there was a Mays store which anchored what at the time was a small to medium-sized mall. It sits right by Rt. 84, a major east-west highway, which branches into CT PA, and NY City.
Mays closed that store about 30 years ago, and the whole mall is now dead, the parking lot empty, except for a McDonalds.
In a more rational, less auto-centric, country, the parking lot would either be turned into a park, or a park-and-ride, where you could leave your car and take a short train or bus trip to connect to the Metro-North train station in Beacon, and go to work in NYC. Or, build a bus station there which could provide semi-express service to NYC.
But no, there the mall sits – vacant.
Oh, and I don’t see the choice as parks v. hot dog carts. What could possibly be better than to have hot-dog or taco stands in a park?
No reason to limit it to tacos or hot dogs either. A few chop bars selling fufu and ground nut soup would greatly improve the culinary diversity of the US.
Agreed!
Kenke or red-red might be more to Americans’ taste — it was to mine — but point taken.
Is America’s auto-centric development really that unique? Japan is the most transit oriented of the developed countries but even in Japan, there are millions of people who like to drive. Going further, other large and not densely populated first world countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa have emphasized automobile oriented transportation policy outside a few select metropolitan areas.
The UK, the most densely populated English speak country, tore up most of the tram systems after WWII and placed more emphasis on the car than the bus, train, or tram outside of London. Although, the overal rail system is better. Even many developing countries like Brazil, Argentina favored cars and buses over trams and trains in their transportation policy. Only Japan, Germany, and to a lesser extent France placed emphasis on transit through out the country rather than in a few places.
America’s auto-centric transportation policy might be more extreme than other countries but its not unique or even that different from world policies.
It’s a good question. My sense is the difference is not so much auto-centric as parking lot-centric. What seems far more rare when I’ve been traveling outside the US is the gigantic, open, single-level parking lot taking up several acres.
This and the lack of “true automobile suburbs”* is the real distinction between other developed countries and the United States. In other countries, transportation policy might be geared towards cars more than we think but developments tend to look a bit more traditional in design and there aren’t massive big parking lots, either parking lots are small or parking is curbside.
*That is as far as I can tell. Although, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn if the other large and not dense countries like Canada and Australia have true automobile suburbs.
The Kimmelman article confirms a fact already amply demonstrated by some commentary on brutalist structures: there is NO architectural achievement so ugly, so ill-advised, so loathed or so useless or near universally condemned that it lacks for people eager to talk about how wonderful it is and can be. (Cough Trinity Square cough.)
Sadly, the first thing that jumped out at me in the header picture of the article is that apparently 95% of the cars in Disney World are white, blue, or red and the same colors tend to park in little clusters.
That is a weird picture, to be sure.
I wonder if the parking areas are designated by color, and it’s just easier to remember that you parked in the blue section if your car is blue?
Want to know about the red, white and blue cars? Fun fact: most rental fleet vehicles are white, so the Disney lots are always filled with white cars. The locals in both Florida and California drive more red cars than the average (don’t ask me why; blame douchebaggery or that they look cooler in the sun.)
This gigantic WalMart parking structure is where?
(A frustrating feature of many blogs is that the author assumes everyone knows where they are.)
Strangely, I can think of very few examples of the “sitting on the land” phenomenon where I live, and they’re in the outer suburbs. The stores around me expand/remodel in place rather than move nearby and leave the old site empty. Or go out of business, which isn’t the same thing at all.
Why are there so many dead malls? The answer is quite relevant to why the mortgage sector melted down: because mall developers unload the risk, which produces for them an incentive to do more business than the underlying market can really handle.
Mall developers operate through a system in which they build the mall, own it for a couple of years, and then sell it. They really make their money in the sale, not the operation of the mall. They build and quickly sell the Nice, New Mall in the area, and then get to work building a Nicer, Newer Mall. As their older versions drop down the scale, lose money, and end up as dead malls, it doesn’t effect their bottom line.
I find it interesting that this is the same model that the corporation that built Lowell’s mills (and many others in this area) used. They weren’t mill operators building themselves more and more mills to operate; they were primarily mill developers, and their over-saturation of the textile-manufacturing market was simply not their problem.
Obviously Dr. Loomis is not the kind of guy who spends significant amounts of time standing around in parking lots having inane discussions and consciously wasting time. Jeez dude, visit the south before you get all anti-parking lot.
[...] a good reason. •A NYT article about the use of parking lots as public space, and a more skeptical response from Lawyers, Guns and Money. I’m not sure I agree with the underlying assumption of both [...]