Parking reform used to feel like a niche fight. Now North Carolina has eliminated most parking mandates statewide, cities are following one another’s lead, and Tony Jordan says he sometimes finds out about reforms only after they happen. The Parking Reform Network co-founder explains what comes next once cities stop requiring businesses and homes to build parking by formula. That means dealing with crowded curbs, empty downtown lots, pricing, and the fear that removing parking will make access worse. Getting rid of the mandate may be the easy part, but once the mandates disappear, cities still have to answer the question those rules were trying to avoid: when parking really is scarce, who gets the space?
Hey everybody! This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Ending parking mandates and subsidies is one of Strong Towns' core campaigns, and there's no one better to talk about this than Tony Jordan. Tony is the president and co-founder of the Parking Reform Network. The Parking Reform Network educates the public about parking policy and its effect on housing, traffic, equity, and climate. I am a deep admirer of both the Parking Reform Network and Tony and all that he's done.
Tony, I know we met in person some other time, but the first time I really recall us chatting was at the state legislature here in Minnesota. Anyway, welcome to the podcast, Tony Jordan.
Thanks for the warm introduction. Glad to be here.
Hey, was that the first time we met in person, or did we meet in person before then?
I believe we met a little bit at the National Gathering the year before, but that was the first time we really got to hang out. I think it was at that bill, the People Over Parking Act.
I don't do those very much. I don't go to legislatures very often, but you do those things. That's part of what you do, right?
We're also a nonprofit. We do a limited amount. But I went and did some lobbying for the North Carolina bill that just happened, and that was probably the first time I really was with a lobbyist walking around the hall. Sometimes people invite us to give testimony or comments, and we'll do that from time to time as well. But I find it most impactful to talk to the general public. Small and one-on-one groups are my favorite.
Okay, I want to tell you something and have you react to it, because I'm going to say this and then my board might get mad at me because we haven't decided this yet. We have five priority campaigns, and the fifth one is parking reform. We've had discussions for the last year about having it go away or fold into our housing reform campaign, essentially as an acknowledgement of the good work that you are doing. There's someone running with this in a real professional way.
I'm not going to say we have won, but I feel like the wind is at our backs now on this issue in a way that it certainly wasn't a decade ago. Can you talk about the early Parking Reform Network work and how that has changed? What are you feeling today? What are you sensing? Is the wind at our backs?
Absolutely. I came into this reading Don's book in 2010, and I looked at Portland's zoning code. I've told this story before, even in the Shoup Doctrine. We had no parking requirements on corridors, no parking requirements downtown, and relatively normal parking requirements overall. I looked at that and thought, that's about as good as it's going to be. This was 2010. There was nothing to do here. Actually, this was the gold standard.
At the time it was very advanced. It was only when there was a backlash to some apartments being built with no parking that I got involved, because the city proposed and actually did add parking mandates back for a while. After that, I realized we can win on this. This is an organizable issue. It is also something that people need to know about. Over the next couple of years, I just worked locally on a bunch of things.
Right around when I founded PRN, in 2019, we started to see some cities get rid of their parking mandates overall, and that became the ring to reach for. But there still wasn't a playbook, and a lot of those efforts had been years and years in the making. Minnesota had long plans. San Jose came a little bit later and was part of a whole Bloomberg Cities thing.
Where it really started to take off, I look at South Bend in January 2021. Mike DeVita posted on Twitter, "Breaking news: South Bend gets rid of parking mandates," and it went viral. I started to think then that things were taking on momentum of their own. There have been things we've been involved in directly at PRN and that Strong Towns has been involved in directly, and then there are places that pop up out of nowhere. People have read Don's work, read our work, read your work, and then they go and do this.
As it started to move on a statewide level, North Carolina this last year passed a bill that eliminates parking mandates in almost the entire state, both commercial and residential. I still kind of pinch myself. I almost never dared to dream that it would actually happen. Now other states are looking at North Carolina and going, "This is pretty exciting." So I think it definitely has a lot of momentum, and it opens up the field for the other parking work that needs to be done, particularly commercial parking and on-street management.
Let me delve into the North Carolina one. If you told me this happened in New York or California or Massachusetts, or you told me it happened in Texas or Arizona, I could put a red-blue partisan veneer on it and try to explain it. But North Carolina, correct me if I'm wrong, is a place where you actually had to have a coalition of people behind this. This couldn't be a party-line, cram-it-through kind of thing. North Carolina would not have been the place I picked out of the gate to do this in this way.
First, I'll say I didn't pick North Carolina. I'm a big organic, see-what-happens, ground-up person. We'd heard from some folks at Catawba Riverkeeper. A fellow named Ryan and his coworker Ellie came up with the idea of pushing this because they wanted to protect rivers and streams in North Carolina. Fishing and all that nature stuff is big there. They'd just had Helene come through, so there were runoff and stormwater issues, and this was a way to combat that. The initial bill also included some sealant provisions.
North Carolina was not on my radar for a place where this could happen, although there had been some great reforms. Raleigh had eliminated parking mandates. Durham, both the county and the city, had also done it, and there were a couple of small cities. So there was some indication it could happen there.
My understanding of the North Carolina legislature is that it's pretty Republican-run at this point. It's a purple state, but there's a Democratic governor. The sponsors of this were Republicans. The key was that it came from this conservation angle, which I found really interesting. It was less political. It wasn't framed as climate change. It wasn't framed as housing.
They explained it to me kind of like Mayberry: You want to walk with your grandkid down to the river, but first you have to walk across the parking lot. Then you get there and the riverbank is eroded and the fish are all dead. That's not good. They also had a big small-business component. The work that Better Block and Strong Towns folks had done in Dallas, looking at the cheesecake shop that closed, fit into that. There was a confluence that was very bipartisan around small business and conservation, while housing and transportation people could also see their own hopes in the bill.
I loved that it wasn't just a housing focus. It made sure the commercial parking requirements, which are some of the most damaging and silliest ones out there, were included. It was kind of a long shot, but the lobbyists and the folks at Catawba Riverkeeper built a big coalition. They were very organized. It's a playbook we're hoping to pass around, introduce people to, and let them run with.
That was the part that was most exciting to me. When you and I were together here in Minnesota, the people supporting the bill were the Democratic Socialist group. That's a little bit of the Twin Cities brand, and I get it. They're pushing the new thing. But it was frustrating to me because the Chamber of Commerce people got up and said, "We're against this."
The big question I had, as a Minnesotan and someone who's been doing this for quite a while, was: Why do you want business mandates? What is it about government mandating that businesses do things that the Chamber of Commerce is so into here in the state? The cheesecake shop was such a good story because I feel like it epitomizes the ramifications of these random regulations cities have adopted.
Can you tell that story a little bit? The aspect I want to get at is really the Chamber of Commerce piece. If we want to support small business, we really want to support parking reform, right?
Right. I believe it's called Val's Cheesecake Shop in Dallas. Val opened a store that sold cheesecake to go. That land use required a certain number of parking spaces. We'll say it was two for the size of the business, whatever the square footage was. Val wanted to sometimes allow people to eat a piece of cheesecake in the shop. Adding a table and allowing people to eat inside changed the land use. This is something I think people don't recognize. I don't know if it became a full restaurant classification, but it changed the requirement.
I believe there were going to be six parking spaces required, and there just wasn't room. This was even more egregious when you watch the Better Block video, because there was a street fair every year on the street where Val's shop was. Only businesses that had the appropriate licenses were allowed to participate. On the day of the street fair, Val had to pay to put a fence around the whole shop and couldn't even serve cheesecake. It piled absurdity on absurdity. I believe Val eventually moved, but the original location closed.
You find these stories all the time. When I was in Arkansas last year, I went into a little gift shop in Springdale called Hey to buy gifts. The proprietor, Andy, asked what I was in town for. I told him I was there to give a talk to ULI about parking. He said, "Parking? I have a story for you."
He was almost in tears. He said, "I just bought a house a couple blocks from here. It was zoned commercial. I want to fix it up for an Airbnb, have an artist studio and an artist in residence, and do little shows. I bought the house already. I go to City Hall and they're telling me I need something like eight parking spaces on the site. Where can I put these? They're telling me I have to do a study to find out if I can put them there. It's going to cost me something like $18,000." The house is directly across the street from downtown, where Springdale had no parking requirements.
I told him, "I'm about to go to lunch with your city development guy, and I'm going to bring this up." I walked into lunch, and it happened to be the development guy and the outgoing city planner. I said, "I was just down at Andy's shop." They said his business model may or may not have some problems. I said, "Well, that's a problem for him. Why are you stopping him with the parking? If there are other problems, let him run into those."
I may have cussed a bit. I was saying, "This is crazy. What happens if he's successful?" They said there were going to be cars to be concerned about. I said, "Ticket them, or he'll move somewhere." That story and these other ones make me think: We say we want local business. We say we want entrepreneurship, and then we put all these hurdles in front of starting a business. You basically have to be a fully developed, successful business. Why are you requiring the number of spaces I'd need as a successful business on day one when I have no customers?
How many parking spaces do you need on day one most of the time? Zero. No one knows to come to your shop. You better hope you're having a parking problem. It's a theme. If people have stories like this, we want to hear them. A major key to advancing this is finding these local stories and sharing them, because the average person doesn't know this is a problem. Then they hear it and say, "That makes no sense. There's no reason Andy shouldn't be able to open. There's no reason Val shouldn't be able to serve cheesecake." These are ridiculous.
Houston is a city where, when you get into the policy-geek arena, everyone assumes, "Oh, Houston. They must allow anything. They must not have any of these requirements." Houston may not have zoning, but they certainly have parking requirements, don't they?
I feel like some of the work you've done in Houston, and seen happen in Houston, is almost a model of what bottom-up change should look like. It feels like these are people who are positioning this correctly to their neighbors, elected leaders, and businesses. I want to give you a chance to elaborate on your experiences with Houston and what you've seen with parking reform there.
It's a new coalition they're putting together. I'm going to my first online meeting for their coalition tomorrow. There's a lot happening in Texas. There's actually a statewide parking reform coalition forming.
Outside of Portland, Austin was the next place where some people really got together, and I would say they did it even better than me because Portland was largely me with a couple of co-conspirators here and there. The Austin coalition was truly a real coalition of folks, so that's a model we like to point at.
In Houston, Ruben Garza, who's a Strong Towns Local Conversation leader, is amazing. They have a coalition that includes an air-quality group and a number of other groups. They're politically savvy and connected. I know they're planning a big PARK(ing) Day event in October. They had their kickoff event. I haven't been out there to be with them directly yet, but we host roundtables where we try to expose people to other things.
This problem is so big and exists in so many places that I was never willing for PRN to pick a state or a city and say, "We're going to go do something here." That's not my place, to tell someone what to do. I want to expose as many people as possible to each other's work and ideas and let them run with it. Houston looks very promising.
A city like Houston removing its parking mandates shakes things up. It's similar to Dallas's reforms. People look at these cities and say, "Man, that's not expected." Those are the best ones. The small cities matter too. As I mentioned with South Bend, when smaller places do it, it kind of shames some of the bigger cities. You hear, "If South Bend can do this, why can't we do it? If this place can do it, why can't Seattle do it?" I think that's a nice, friendly competition.
I also wanted to add an addendum to Andy's story. When I went to the Strong Towns National Gathering, it turned out Andy was a longtime friend of Edward on your side. They got in touch, and Andy came to the National Gathering and told me the city had finally moved their building into the downtown area and they're going to be able to try their business out. He's convinced I did this. I don't know about that, but it was really fun to see the circle close.
Don't be afraid to talk to anybody, because you never know. You walk into a store, you talk to somebody, and it sets off a chain of events where these folks hopefully can recoup their investment and have a successful thing that contributes to the culture of Springdale. It was really fun to see that happen.
I will attest to the power of planting a seed because years ago, maybe a decade ago, I asked a question locally: Why do we have this big parking lot at City Hall? Our City Hall is right downtown here in my little town of Brainerd, which is about 13,500 people.
One of the first or second most prominent locations in our city used to be a hotel. It burned down and is now a parking lot for the city. It's this great empty chasm where there should be life, and it's the parking lot for City Hall. The argument was that city workers use it, but those were never great excuses for me. There's a huge county parking lot a block and a half away that is way overbuilt and never full.
We should want the tax base. We should want the housing units. We should want the commercial businesses. We should want to square up the urban space so it's not dead and so it accents the good stuff going on in our core.
Tony, I have to tell you, maybe in June or July earlier this year, the City Council voted to sell that lot to a developer who's going to put housing there. City staff will now walk the block and a half to City Hall. It is not because of me. I didn't actually do anything. But I feel like this is the power of the arguments you're making on parking.
People have a gut reaction: Where am I going to park? How am I going to get around? What am I going to do? But once you interrogate that gut reaction intellectually for even a minute or two, you quickly come to a place where, my gosh, there's always a better use than a parking lot. There is always a better use than a parking lot.
I want to switch to what comes after we get rid of the mandates and requirements. But as a last transition point, what are you seeing now in terms of energy at the city level? I know a lot of people, particularly when we get into housing, want to make everything a statewide thing. I feel like there's almost a conflagration-level fire here, with cities rushing because they don't want to be the last one to repeal their parking requirements. Are you seeing something similar?
It's almost hard to keep a handle on it because we've never been the organization that's in the thick of it doing consulting or lobbying. We don't prepare these things. I think we just showed a lot of people how silly the rules were and how simple it was to change them. Having the map, showing the progress, showing that you weren't the first one out the door and that you're in a herd, I think that built on its own.
Nowadays we just hear about these things. They happen here and there. If we dig into it and I write to the city planner, they'll say, "Oh yeah, we used your maps," or, "Thanks for this document you had." It's almost hard to keep track of.
There's also an interplay with statewide bills. They don't always get rid of parking requirements entirely, or necessarily mandate that, like North Carolina did. But I've said anytime you can make cities go look at their parking requirements, it's an opportunity to shine a light on something. I liken it to going into your garage and opening a cooler and finding out you didn't clean it out the last time you went camping. While it's closed and untouched, you don't have to deal with it. Once you open it and realize the mess is there, you probably have to deal with it.
Cities naturally open up their planning processes on a cycle, and this is now on the table in a very real way. It's become pretty normal. I think it's going to keep going. The next job is, as you alluded to, dealing with the other policies.
Let me ask you this then. We repeal our parking minimums. We're no longer mandating this. We're no longer requiring you to build all this wasted space just to open a business or have a house. We're done basically pounding our own finger with a hammer.
That doesn't end the conversation, though. It seems like there's so much more to do. I know you guys have a Parking Reform Policy Cookbook. It feels like there's a whole discussion here about what comes next. What comes next?
I think there are two things. One, you still need to work on your zoning and other regulations in order to take advantage of getting rid of your parking mandates. You can have no parking requirements, but if you also can't build certain land uses or additional housing units, that's going to be a problem. So you work on that. You legalize neighborhood commercial. You legalize more types of housing. You let things happen, and then people can take advantage of that.
Then, where it's appropriate, cities need a plan to manage their curbs. Part of the reason we ended up where we were is that in the '40s and '50s, cities saw these cars coming and didn't really know what to do. They figured, "We can just require this off-street parking, and that's going to solve the problem." It kicked the can down the road.
Managing curb spaces, this public amenity for the greater good, has been politically difficult. People don't like it. Until recently, it wasn't even that cheap. You had to buy hardware, send people out to collect coins, and maintain card-reading machines. With cheaper technology to price and manage curbs, and better tools to analyze what's going on, including drones and other data, we're at a point where there's really not an excuse for a city not to try to manage its curbs anymore.
One of the things in the cookbook is a number of examples that aren't even that forward-looking. These are things already in place around the country: parking benefit districts and other strategies to get a handle on the curb. The number-one concern is, "Everyone's going to be parking on my street," or, "There are going to be too many people parking here, and it's going to cause an access problem." The fact is, that's generally a manageable problem.
Until you've tried to manage it, you don't really have a reason to know whether you need a parking garage or a new parking lot. It also sends a signal a business needs to know. If I'm moving into an area and on-street parking costs $5 an hour, I either need to know I can attract customers who can pay $5 an hour, or I'm going to need to find a place where I can subsidize parking for them more cheaply. I'm going to have to find a different way. That's the way it works.
One of the big next stages is locking in some of these policies too. When I got started in Portland, part of why there was a backlash was that we didn't have, and honestly still don't really have, a good neighborhood permit program or much management in that neighborhood. When they started building these apartments, people were anxious and worried the sky was going to fall. It didn't fall. They didn't need a parking permit program. They could use one, but the sky didn't fall without one.
After a while the housing issue overtook that in importance. I recommend that places have a good plan that's not politically driven, that's based on a policy: The curbs are here to provide access for residents, businesses, and visitors. If there's a better way to manage that than price, go for it. I don't know if there really is in the long term. It's a market. Markets are great for allocating a good like parking, and that's what cities need to move toward.
Okay, let me give you the pushback I know we get at the ground level all the time. You say, "manage the curb," Tony. That's a really nice euphemism for charging people for parking. The city has yet another tax, another way to charge a fee. The city is collecting this money and getting fat off residents who are already overburdened. Now we have to pay for parking too, on top of everything else.
When you say managing the curb, talk through what you're suggesting in terms of who pays for what, where that revenue ends up, and what you hope comes out of it.
Great question. First, I'll acknowledge that people's fears and concerns are founded, because around the country, parking management is often done by politicians for political reasons. There's a budget hole, so we're going to raise the price of parking to whatever we need to fill the budget hole. That leads to parking that costs too much, and people should be mad about that.
Then there's the situation where the transportation staff comes in and says, "We have a parking problem here. We need to charge $2," and City Hall says, "No, let's make it $1 because we're afraid to charge $2." They don't charge what it actually needs to be to make a space available. Then people are paying $1 but still can't find a space, so they're also mad.
There's a value proposition here, which I think is important to Americans: You pay for something and you get value. The general rule of thumb is to do what you might call performance pricing. The performance in this case is access. What are you generally trying to provide to people? I'm driving down a street, I see a business I want to go to, and I want to be able to get out of my car and go there.
Right now, in most places, if fortune shines on you, you find a spot right away and pull in. Or maybe you drive a few blocks farther and park. It's either free, or it probably costs the same amount everywhere.
Professor Shoup came up with this idea of occupancy or availability, and I think this is pretty accepted in the parking-management business now. There's a distinction there; I'm not a scientist. But the idea is around 85% occupancy and 15% availability. At any given time, on average, there should be about one space available on a block. You want enough turnover that people can find a spot when they show up.
The key is that you raise or lower the price. You observe. You don't do it hourly or by the minute. It's not Uber trying to get you. You look over time. With all the data we have and our ability to collect and analyze it, it's getting easier and easier to find the right price. Over the course of a year or so, you can slowly raise and lower the price until that availability is met.
That's beautiful because it charges the lowest price that leads to a space being available. It's fair. The city isn't necessarily trying to raise revenue. It's trying to find the lowest price that leads to available space. That also means concerns about driving customers away should be unfounded. If you're doing this correctly, the spaces are generally as full as they were before, and there's probably higher turnover. By definition, you're going to get more customers through if you're doing the job right. Of course, there needs to be accountability to make sure they're doing this.
If it makes money, and it should at least break even, that's great. The key is that the money should not just go into a black hole in the general fund. There's a great comic that Shoup used to use of a person putting money in a meter and it drops straight into hell, where there's a little devil with a wheelbarrow. People see this money disappear. It's also a moral hazard for cities if they're hooked on parking revenue. When they pursue policies to reduce driving, they have a conflict.
Shoup talked about parking benefit districts. You spend the money locally to improve things as visibly as possible. Personally, I say spend the money to do good things or, ideally, to reduce car dependency, because that allows you to get more people into the area. It's a virtuous cycle. If you end up so successful that no one's driving anymore but they're all arriving by other modes, then when your parking revenue drops through the floor, you don't need it. You've solved the problem.
You can pay for bus passes. You can use it to clean sidewalks. You can hire ambassadors to walk around and help people. You can add lighting, which is a huge one. A lot of times people don't want to walk, so improve the journey from parking that's farther away. Make that very comfortable for people. Not only will people be willing to park farther away, but you may activate a street that wasn't activated before. Now people are walking down the street, someone leases the building that was empty, and you get these feedback loops where things keep getting better without direct government investment.
Okay. What if I can't charge for parking because the demand isn't there? I have so many surface parking lots and so much on-street parking that if I put a charge on my lot, it'll just sit empty. Nobody will park there. What is that feedback loop actually telling me?
It's a rough one. I've looked at a place like downtown Lansing, Michigan. There's a lot of parking there, kind of too much. It's a harder problem. You have to find ways to bring more people. You have to increase demand if you want it to work out.
You can do two things at the same time: reduce the supply and increase demand for what's left. That means converting parking to stuff. Food trucks, mobile businesses, little business kiosks. If you have too much parking in your downtown, take some of those parking lots and turn them into bazaars or street fairs, even just part of the week. You don't have to start all week. You have to find a way to get people coming there.
Some of them are going to drive, and now you've removed some of the supply, so the parking that's left is worth more. You can also convert space to bike lanes, bus lanes, or on-street eateries. Even with curb spaces, start with what you've got. Maybe you can only charge for a block, and you might not even be able to charge that much.
The beauty now is that we have app-only payment options, so you don't necessarily have to spend an arm and a leg installing parking meters. Maybe you only charge on Sunday. Ironically, a lot of places don't, but let's say that's when your farmers market is. That's when you should charge. Activating those spaces removes supply and improves demand.
There are other things too. We won't go into them much, but there are tax changes, like land value taxes, that could help encourage redevelopment of these lots. We work with folks at the Center for Land Economics and others who are working on this. I would call that a structural change. But especially with its own lots, hopefully nothing is stopping a city from making little maker fairs or something similar.
I've developed a kind of "prove it" response. In my small town, if you ask people, they'll say there's not enough parking downtown. There's not enough parking. There's not enough parking. I look around and it's two-thirds parking. What are you talking about? There is vastly too much parking. But if you ask people, they still say there's not enough.
I've tried not to casually dismiss that because it is a perception people have. I can park at Walmart and there's tons of parking. I come downtown and it feels different. It feels like if I can't park right in front of the place, there's not enough parking.
My response, not just in my city but in other places, is that if you can't establish a price, if there is literally no price you can charge that people would be willing to pay, that is saying one of two things. Either your downtown businesses are so horrendous that nobody values being there, which is clearly not the case in most places, especially if you've got offices people are visiting and other activity. Or you simply have so much supply of parking that there is no price on it.
It's like you're at the North Pole trying to sell ice cubes. There's no price because there's an excess amount. To me, that seems self-evident. Am I simplifying it?
You can't push a string. You can't get blood from a stone. All the same things.
I think it's also telling that the solution a lot of people want is to build a parking garage. If you can't charge $1 to park on the street, why would you pay $1 to park in the garage?
Another thing I respond with, and we've said their name a lot here, is Better Block's little tag: "It's hard to find parking in great places." That's a tremendous comeback to this. Yes, it's hard. It's okay. I've had to stop trying to appease people. There are going to be problems sometimes. There are problems now, and there will always be problems. There are places where parking and congestion are going to be bad, and somebody is going to miss an appointment. That's inevitable.
Can we reduce that? Also, once you get out of your car, how good is the place? The question isn't really about parking. Can we have these businesses? Can the corner have a store? What are we holding back because of this fear of not finding a parking space? Can we get over that and make better places?
Tony, I wrote just one word: transition. On one hand, let's take a city that has vastly too much parking and say what we really need is more stuff there. We need more places to visit, more homes, more shops, and that will drive up demand of all sorts.
At the far other end of the spectrum, we have a place that is in such demand and so delightful that homes have been built near it, people can walk to it, and it's really hard to find parking because the land is so valuable and there's so much going on. You don't just go from one to the other. There's a transition.
A lot of what you and other people working in the trenches on this are asked to do is take away the pain of that transition. My response has always been that, at the end of the day, you're choosing an acute pain: I'm having trouble finding a place to park, or I don't like paying for parking, over this chronic pain of my city going broke, my kids not having a place to live, there being no local businesses, or there being no startup opportunities.
How do you deal with that acute-versus-chronic pain issue? The parking one is very visceral to people. But if you line it up and ask, "What are the issues you really care about?" people say, "My taxes are going up." Why? Because my city is half parking lot that generates no revenue. "I can't afford to live in this neighborhood." Why? Because there are no houses. We're not building any because we've dedicated all this space to wasted parking.
I'm asking you a psychology question. What's the therapy to walk people through when they're dealing with that person who says, "I can't find a place to park, and it bothers me"?
When you talk about the transition, I think it is useful sometimes just to go there with people and ask, "What's the worst thing that's going to happen here?" We're talking about parking. That's part of why I love it. It's hilariously both not important and critical. It's this weird zone where it's the most valuable thing and the least valuable thing.
One of the reasons I'm attracted to Strong Towns and love working with your folks is the idea that you don't have to solve every problem everywhere. I just did Upzoned with Monte Anderson talking about making new main streets. I was talking to some folks in Georgia and looking at their town. I said, "You have all these strip centers. You're trying to save this one square that's really screwed up, with state highways running through it. But you can have 10 more main streets. You can make a new square in each one of these places."
There's so much opportunity. One way to approach the transition is to get people excited about it. The transition is the opportunity. People are going to make money. They're going to generate local wealth if you let them. There are new places opening. It's a chance to do something different.
I also think we need to project competence and abundance. I know abundance is a whole other movement, but there is a level of saying, "We can do this." We've lost our way a little bit. Are we able to build things? Yes, we can. We can build a main street.
One key is that we can't build main streets the way we did right before the end, where we took our main streets and then froze them. We have to build those main streets and let them continue to grow. You have to let the second and third stories go up eventually. You have to not be afraid of tearing that building down and putting the next thing there.
These are positive messages. What we really need are leaders in cities who can project a vision and competence. That's tough. You have to find those folks in your community, but they're there.
I feel like you're describing a frontier. I heard Andres Duany say this once when he was talking about Detroit and the opportunities there. I think it was when we were at CNU in Detroit. He said this place is the West, the equivalent of "Go West, young man." For people in the 1800s, there was this frontier where you could roll up your sleeves, work hard, and make something yourself. Here it is, right in front of you. His point was almost a lament: Why aren't more people doing this?
In subsequent years, I feel like I've seen a lot more people doing it. If you take the pressure off and allow parking reform, then allow people to build housing here too, allow a corner commercial spot, allow an old-fashioned building where you might have a business in front and a house in back, something that was common for thousands of years before we banned it 75 years ago, then lots of things become possible.
We could use the word abundance without the political connotations. We could create lots of opportunities for people to do really cool, creative, entrepreneurial, artistic things.
I watch you guys, and I'm not going to say your brand is moving beyond fixing zoning codes, because I think it's always been broader than that. But I see you now, in a policy sense, embracing this broader framework. Can you talk a little bit about the Parking Reform Network, the resources you've got, and some of the places you're helping people make these adaptations? I think you're doing some really innovative work.
We mentioned the cookbook. I got into this not from the zoning angle but from the transportation angle. The on-street transportation side has always been a big part of it. I don't have a car, and I want to be able to go to stuff. Can we have neighborhoods where we can walk to things?
There are so many policies this touches. I'm also a connector. I love introducing people. I go to a shopping-center conference or a transportation conference and say, "Hey, you need to talk to the person from the housing conference. You need to talk to the person from the Strong Towns conference."
We're going to Climate Week. Climate environmentalism is a political angle, but there are a lot of people who care about it, and there are a lot of city policies that are just good policies to do. They make life better for people, make our cities function better, make our cities more economically resilient, and increase their capacity. They also have the side effect of making a low-carbon lifestyle the easy and more affordable choice.
We're doing a whole track at UrbanClimateSolution.org. We've got 10 events over four days. We're talking about everything from reducing car dependency to infill development to "Why the Corner Has No Store," which is our panel on Tuesday.
Providing a space for community is a lot of what PRN does. We generate a place where people can share ideas and come back to it. To go back to my original story, once I started having a problem when Portland was adding parking mandates back, I reached out to Professor Shoup and he wrote back. I also tried to connect with people in a Facebook group and find other people who were doing what I was doing, and it was hard.
That was part of what drove me to do this. When someone like Ruben Garza gets worked up and wants to fix parking in Houston, we want him to have a place to land. When your Strong Towns Local Conversation folks are working on this, by all means keep doing those other four pillars, but let us help you connect to other people so you can be more effective on this one. That's what we're about, and that's what we're going to keep trying to do.
If you're trying to build a coalition of people working together on something, parking is a great place to do it because you can bring in environmental people, the Chamber of Commerce, anti-regulation people, and bike-walk people. You can build an incredibly broad coalition, and it's a great way to make friends. Everyone has an opinion on parking.
As they did in North Carolina, you can find common ground on a policy and build some trust. Then maybe on the next project you say, "We worked on that together. Maybe we could do some single-stair reform. Maybe we can do an accessory commercial unit. Maybe we can revitalize this parking lot in our downtown."
It gives me hope. We're in crazy times, and doing positive things and meeting people who are doers is a great way to move forward and keep your sanity.
I've had you on my list of people I wanted to circle back to and chat with for a long time. The team here that does all the scheduling is really smart, and I think they probably scheduled this knowing PARK(ing) Day is going to be about three days after this comes out. We would be remiss if I didn't let you talk a little bit about PARK(ing) Day before we end. What is it, where can people plug in, and why is it important?
PARK(ing) Day is a fantastic holiday, if we want to call it a holiday. For those who might not know, years ago these folks in San Francisco, Rebar, paid for a parking space, put some chairs and sofas in it, and hung out in the parking space. It's an upstart way to reclaim space, and I think that's always a good thing to do.
PARK(ing) Day could be any day. Some years we've been more involved and some years less involved in coordinating around it. I know a lot of your Local Conversations do PARK(ing) Day activities, from putting out a chair and tabling to what they did in Fayetteville, where they built a whole house that fits in a parking space.
We heard from someone in Berlin who's doing a whole street installation. They're finding old cars to park next to new cars so they can show how big one car is compared to the other one. It's a great opportunity to get creative and think about your space and an activity you can do. If you're a local organization, it doesn't even have to be on PARK(ing) Day. The Houston folks, I think, are doing theirs on October 3. You can play with the date. It gets people's imaginations going. In some places it has almost turned into a street fair.
If I have one critique, it's that PARK(ing) Day has sometimes turned from this indie thing into something where cities have a whole guidebook and you have to fill out a 12-page permit. In a way, maybe go the route of doing it the day after and getting back to that independent idea of taking the space back.
But the movement has grown. I think parklets and streeteries have come out of the PARK(ing) Day scene. It's a very visceral way for people to understand the projects. To the extent possible, I always want people to have a little bit of the vegetables along with the candy. Let's have a little bit of the policy talk too. Be aware of how much this parking space costs. That's a harder conversation to get people to have, but I want them to think a little bit about the policy side.
I know what you mean. The thing I like most about it is that it expresses itself differently in Portland than it will in Dallas. It expresses itself differently in Orlando than it does in Manhattan. It always takes on a local flavor that's really beautiful and instructive for people who are there. That's why I like it so much.
It's fantastic. If folks are listening and they have an installation they're going to, and you haven't told us about it, send us an email or photos because we like to share what's going on around the world. In a way, it's a bigger event outside the United States. Europe has a lot of installations that go on around it.
It's awesome. Tony Jordan is the president and co-founder of the Parking Reform Network. You can get plugged into the Parking Reform Network at parkingreform.org. I know they're on other social media sites too. If you search for Tony Jordan and parking, you're going to get inundated with stuff because they're doing great work.
Tony, I love the chance to talk to you. I feel bad that it's been a little while. We won't make it another 12 months. We'll do this again. If you have something you want to update us on, let us know. We'd love to have you on. You're doing some of the most important work in the country, so thank you so much.
Thanks for having me, Chuck. It's great to see you, and I'll see you at the next National Gathering, if not sooner.
I can't wait. We'll be in Sacramento. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening, and don't forget: Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Go have fun at PARK(ing) Day. Take care, everybody.
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