Highlights from #BlackFridayParking 2021
Earlier this week, Steve Mouzon—the author of The Original Green, an architect, and a member of the Strong Towns Advisory Board—tweeted about Strong Towns’s annual #BlackFridayParking social media campaign. Too often, he wrote, the theme of #BlackFridayParking posts are something along the lines of, “Look how stupid cities are to require so much parking, when this much is empty on the busiest shopping day of the year.”
Mouzon said he was going to be focusing on a different storyline in his own #BlackFridayParking posts in 2021. Rather than bashing planning departments, he would emphasize “the massive economic development opportunities if the retail destinations were to redevelop their unnecessary parking.” He continued: “Some great town centers were once malls before their extreme makeovers. Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations should be powerful enough to get people’s attention, beginning with the fact that for the property owners, it's free land that's sitting there unused all year long.”
When I went out today to document the vast amount of unused parking in the shopping centers near me (the fruit of mandatory parking minimum requirements) I thought back again and again to Steve Mouzon’s Twitter thread. By the end of the day, as I was standing in a half-empty mall parking lot, the thought came to me: “I’m standing on buried treasure.” There was treasure—in the form not just of wealth, but also financial resilience and social vitality—trapped under that sea of asphalt. Releasing it doesn’t have to be difficult; it could be as simple as hitting the delete key on one section of the city’s zoning code.
Even as I was out taking my own pictures and videos, I was checking in what other Strong Towns advocates were posting on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Below are a few of my personal favorites. (To see a real-time feed of this year’s social posts, go here.) What great posts did you see on social this #BlackFridayParking Day? Let us know in the comments below!