What happens when something people have always treated as free suddenly gets a price tag? A USA Today article, “Shopping Malls Are Charging for Prime Parking. It’s Not Going Well,” looks at what happens when a long-standing free amenity suddenly has a visible cost. Carlee Alm-LaBar talks with Parking Reform Network founder Tony Jordan and developer Monte Anderson of Neighborhood Evolution about what changes when shoppers are asked to pay directly for that convenience. For owners, “free” parking has never actually been free: the lot still has to be paved, repaired, cleaned, secured, and eventually rebuilt, even when much of it sits empty. If the land is expensive to maintain, could it be doing something more useful?
Shopping malls around the country are starting to charge for parking spaces closest to the entrance, and there's been plenty of backlash. At some malls, tenants have complained about fewer customers coming through, and in response, several operators have already backed away from the fees. A recent USA Today article by Jessica Gwin titled "Shopping Malls Are Charging for Prime Parking. It's Not Going Well" looks at these experiments and the reactions to them.
By putting a price on these spaces, the malls have raised basic questions about the trade-off: Is being 50 feet closer to the door a convenience that I'm willing to pay for? Would I rather walk a little farther? Does the fee change how I think about that convenience?
We know at Strong Towns the cost of providing that parking was always there in the land, the pavement, and the maintenance. What's changed is that shoppers are now being asked to pay for that cost directly instead of having it buried somewhere else. That starts us with a bigger question: What do we do when something we've always experienced as free finally comes with a price?
Welcome to Upzoned, a podcast from Strong Towns, where we take a story in the news and look beyond the headline at the systems, trade-offs, and assumptions shaping our cities and towns. My name is Carlee Alm-LaBar. I'm so glad to be joined today by Monte Anderson and Tony Jordan.
Monte, of course, is familiar to many of us. He's a developer based in Duncanville, Texas, where he has spent decades working on incremental development and bringing new life to neighborhoods and older commercial properties. He's president of Options Real Estate Investments and a managing partner at Neighborhood Evolution. Tony is based in Portland, Oregon, and is the founder and president of the Parking Reform Network. Since starting the organization in 2019, he's been focused on how parking policy shapes housing, transportation, development, and the way communities use land.
Tony, I'll start with you. What was your first reaction when you read this?
I'm not surprised. I read a lot about parking, so I've come across a lot of the articles cited in this article. I thought it was pretty well balanced. I really appreciated that it talked about the costs. It even gets into college campuses and other land uses and the cost of the parking. I also appreciated that it had a quote from at least one person who enjoyed paying for the parking for the convenience.
I think this is something that more malls should probably do. Everyone should manage parking for the best use and for good access to the amenities that it's supposedly supporting.
Monte, how about you? What was your first reaction when you read the piece?
My thoughts on paid parking and parking in general are different than when I first saw the title of this. I thought, why would anybody charge at a mall? You can't even get people coming to the malls anymore. My thought was, where's a mall that could actually get away with this? There is one. I think there's one mall left in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that actually can get away with it.
Somebody in the article said the cost was a grab by the developer, but I can tell you this: Managing a parking lot is expensive. Sweeping it, striping it, keeping it clean from people who dump stuff on it, keeping people off of it who are not supposed to be there, people selling stuff, trucks pulling in and tearing up your parking lot, running over your landscaping - it's 100 things. The photos in my phone are full of parking lot pictures of violations by somebody. It's expensive to manage this, and it seems to be getting worse.
People think they can put donation boxes out on your parking lot. They just show up there, and I've got to tear them down and throw them away. It's very expensive to keep up a parking lot, so I can understand why any developer or anybody who owns a piece of land like this would figure out how to make some income from it.
What I can't understand is how we got here in the first place. We built all this parking with no income coming in from it, and it's expensive to build. Why wouldn't we do that from the beginning?
The thing that stuck out to me was the parallel with local governments coming under financial stress. To me, this is an example of private landowners coming under financial stress and then needing to consider, "We have no revenue associated with any of this land. What can we do about that?" It's another theme of the high cost of free parking, as we would say.
Tony, this is the kind of stuff you deal with every day in your work. People are used to free parking, and you see this when you work in communities all the time. How do you work in communities and help manage the transition and set expectations for residents who are suddenly asked to pay for parking in a downtown area or a business district? This is the same thing, except it's a shopping mall.
One thing I recommend is always thinking about value. There is a lot of education and outreach that needs to occur around what the goal is, and I also think the motivation behind the goal is important. If these are developers who are hard on their luck and they're trying to get blood from a stone by charging for parking, I think, to Monte's point, that's not going to work. If no one wants to go there, you're not going to get much from parking.
We do see cities around the country, my own here in Portland in fact, that are trying to raise rates on parking sometimes in places where it's really not justified. They're trying to fill a budget hole rather than expanding paid parking to other areas. But if there is a reason - for example, they're trying to keep rents low for the tenants in the mall, provide convenience, or maybe those paid parking spaces are of a higher quality and shaded - and you provide a reason and a value for what you're doing, then people are not happy to pay for it, but they're not as mad.
People tell me all the time, "No one wants to pay for parking," as if it's some sort of special magical good. I reply, "No one wants to pay for anything." If I go buy a cup of coffee, I would rather not pay for it, given the choice. If it's free, I can't complain about it as much. If it's a cold, free cup of coffee, beggars can't be choosy. But if I pay for it, it has to provide value.
I think that's where a lot of the disconnect and anger comes in communities: Cities or vendors charge for parking that provides no value. People are still circling, or it's a bad experience. Then you paid for something and didn't get value for it, and you're rightfully angry.
Monte, from a developer's perspective, what are the things that could lead you to think about charging for parking? I know you have developments where you've chosen to use parking differently and intensify the land uses rather than keep it as parking. Is that an option for some of these landowners?
One of the points in the article was that a mall still had more than 7,000 free spots and about 10% were designated as paid spots. How do you recommend developers look at this question?
I could see charging for parking when the pressure gets there. If you pull into a mall and there are 7,000 spaces and 700 occupied, that's a different story than if I put a bunch of townhomes or apartments on the parking lot and I pull in and there is not good parking. I would expect to pay for parking in an urban area where there's not much parking around. I don't even think about it now if I go into downtown Dallas. I'm just prepared for it. It would feel really odd to pull into an empty mall and have to pay for parking.
What I'm doing right now to create value on parking lots is building residential on them. Here in Duncanville at Wheatland Plaza, I got zoning on a 90,000-square-foot neighborhood shopping center built in the 1960s. It's built with a neighborhood around it, and I got the zoning to put 50 units on the parking lot.
By the time I got to that and started seeing what my parking pressure was going to be as I leased up the shopping center and retrofitted it to new uses, I downsized that from 50 apartments to 12 townhomes. I retrofitted the shopping center to be more like Main Street uses, where only 20% is retail. We've got government services, medical, karate studios, and other things here.
I thought, if I push the pressure too much here and start charging today in Duncanville, we'll never get another one done. So I'm going to go back to where people are and bring them along one step at a time with 12 units. But I could see, in the future, the best spaces up against the building becoming paid spaces. That would keep employees from coming in and parking up against the building.
Right now, employees who run these little retail businesses will pull right up to their front door and park there. I say, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want your customer to have a good experience?" Reusing these spaces matters. I've done it in office buildings too, where I put little kiosks in the front parking lot. I just finished one on an office building where we took away a bunch of parking and put a park and two food kiosks up there. I could probably get away with charging for parking in front of those kiosks now, compared with parking in the back and walking a little way.
We're not used to that yet. Like Tony said, it's education. Thank goodness for Tony and his people, because here in Dallas we did a pretty good job on parking reform. We went from having horrible parking rules to having really good stuff that we're able to work with. I could see, maybe in my lifetime in Texas, getting to a point of charging for parking in a shopping center. I don't know about a mall, but maybe a shopping center.
What I hear embedded in everything you just said about Wheatland Plaza is the incremental nature of what you do. Maybe you'll charge for a couple of spots. When you were talking about building housing, you went from 50 to 12 because you weren't ready for 50, but maybe one day.
That was one of the things that stood out to me in the article: the backlash and the places where they've had to scale back. Did they move too fast, or is this just a bad idea? Tony, can you talk a little bit about incrementalism in parking reform and why that is so important?
It's funny because, on one hand, when it comes to abolishing parking mandates, we're not for incrementalism. We feel you should just go all the way because these numbers are arbitrary at any stage. But for enforcement, incrementalism can work, especially now.
Ten or 15 years ago, the technology was different. One of the things that enables a mall to do this now is that it's more cost-effective to meter or charge for just a few spaces than it would have been in the past. If you had to buy hardware or do a lot of intensive money collection, the overhead would be hard. Now there is an opportunity for communities or businesses to experiment with less risk. They don't have to invest $10,000 in a pay station. They can put some QR codes up and see who pays.
The proof would be in the pudding. If people are willing to pay for these spaces, then clearly it's okay. If they have a paid parking area and it's empty, then I think they've made a mistake. We had a presentation at the last National Gathering where we did some back-of-the-envelope math on how much a city can make on parking spaces. One of the keys is, if you're not investing a bunch, there have got to be a couple of spaces in your town. You're maybe not going to charge for everything, but the most valuable or privileged spots can be where you start. I think that's a smart approach. I don't know whether these malls have a good theory behind what they're doing or not.
Your point about the infrastructure being different and giving landowners more flexibility to experiment is a really good one. At Strong Towns, we talk all the time about small bets, and this allows people to make small bets on charging for parking. Reading the article, it seems like maybe there were a few places that made some big bets that backfired, and now they're recovering from those. But it's a method where they don't have a lot of sunk cost, other than if they really anger some people.
There's also some irony in the whole topic of malls that hollowed out Main Streets. If they start charging at the malls, maybe people decide, "If I'm going to pay a dollar for parking anyway, I might as well be on a Main Street rather than in the mall." I don't know if that's a calculation people will make.
That's another story, because how do you make the mall Main Street? That's how we think about it. In most places, you can't tear them down. In Southern Dallas County, where I'm from, if you tear stuff down, it won't come back. It'll just be land for a long time. In retrofitting this stuff, you've got to look at all of that.
Some of the Main Streets around here have city-owned parking, and the cities are having a problem keeping up the parking and the trash. They're saying, "We'll put a public improvement district in and charge all the tenants." But I was just thinking as we were speaking: Maybe they start charging for parking, and that's how you pay for it.
Then the people who use the spaces pay, but if nobody comes to the businesses and uses them, you've got a problem. It's that education piece and coming along a little bit at a time. Incrementally coming along slowly over time is important.
I've talked to folks in places like Lansing, Michigan. I go on Google, look around, and think, this is rough. Downtown Lansing has a lot of parking, and you can't push a string. There are places that have the good problem: They need to charge for parking, or there's technically not enough. Then the far worse problem is that you've got so much parking that you can't do anything.
From that incremental approach, a place that's really trying to deal with that, like the Main Streets you're mentioning, Monte, has an option nowadays to activate those spaces in another way with food carts, kiosks, pop-up temporary retail, or other low-stakes uses that can fill those spaces. Then you attract activity, which increases the parking demand, which makes it possible to charge for that parking, and you're also collecting rent.
I think there's a pretty good formula we can use to rehabilitate some of these places. You also need rules and regulations that allow people to start businesses with low friction, or they're not going to be able to. First, you've got to create some parking pressure before you can really charge for it.
You've got to create the parking pressure. How do we do that? With food trucks, trailers, kiosks in the parking lot, townhomes, or whatever we do. I think it's a two-step. We've got to create that pressure, and these malls don't have any pressure. It didn't make sense to me as much as it might in some places.
It's the high cost of parking. It's more than just the paving out there; it's what people do to you as a property owner. Parking lots need to be monitored. The bigger you get, the more you need security. If somebody's car gets broken into, now it's your fault. Somebody calls and says, "Somebody hit my car while I was here. What are you going to do about it?" What would you do if you were at the Walmart down the street and somebody hit your car? Would you call Walmart? If you parked in front of your house and somebody hit your car, you'd call your insurance company. Don't call me.
Monte, do you think this helps us think about public infrastructure differently when we see private landowners struggling with their costs too? Granted, we're seeing some backlash, but I think that is at least implied in the decision to charge for parking: These places are trying to keep up their buildings and infrastructure, so they need revenue and see this as a potential source. Does it help the overall conversation about infrastructure, or is it going to get too caught up in other things?
I think it should definitely be part of the infrastructure conversation. It's easy when a place is really new and has clean parking with no grease on it yet. It looks a certain way. Then it starts to look old. When we're planning these places and planning our cities, I hope we're waking up to the need to plan for that. How is it going to last the next 50 years or 75 years? How is it going to look when all the original tenants leave? What's going to be left, and who gets the calls when there's a pothole in the parking lot? The cities get calls.
What cities should first be saying is, "We don't want a bunch of parking lot. We've got to have at least so much per acre on our tax rolls, so you're going to have to figure out how to get that." If you want to build a parking lot and charge for it and we can get some taxes off of it, okay.
I always say: How do you survive the boom, not the bust? It's really easy to talk about surviving a bust because you're busted, you're desperate, and you've got to do something. But when it's booming like we are in North Texas right now, how do you say, "What are you going to do about this parking lot?" They'll laugh at you and go, "What do you mean? We're going to live forever."
We've got to look way past the consequences of change and think about how our infrastructure is allocated. Sewer lines and other infrastructure cross these places. Whether the private owner has problems or the city has problems, the city is going to have to get involved if it isn't fixed. Cities are always going to have problems. We have to get ahead of where the infrastructure is going.
Twenty years is not very long. Thirty years is not very long from now. We need at least a short-term plan that's longer than private equity's three-year plan to build, fill them up, and flip them. Think about stormwater too. You've got a big mall, and every taxpayer in these places is paying that stormwater bill every time it rains. That mall from 1980 isn't dealing with it. It's tough to figure out how to make people pay for that.
Especially where you're from, Carlee, in Lafayette, you've got those problems more because you're closer to sea level. We're not dealing with that same stormwater situation, but flash floods are a huge one here too.
Speaking of that, Monte, I know you're helping out with a mall redevelopment here in Lafayette. Between you and the folks on the project, it's turning into quite a remarkable story. I think their parking lot will probably prove to be one of their greatest challenges as well. They're doing an amazing job, but they have an expanse of parking that is going to be a big investment as they move forward. I'd love for you to share a little bit about it.
We're working on one in Lafayette, Northgate Mall, and there's another one in Elkhart. These malls have some crazy constraints. The one in Elkhart has a Kroger and some other things left in the mall, and they've got view lines. You can't just build on the mall parking lot because of storm sewer lines, sanitary sewer lines, and view lines from retail tenants who have to have views to the street.
The good thing about the one in Lafayette is none of those people are left. They've all gone out of business, so they can do what they want. One of the first things they're doing is turning the mall inside out so you get storefronts outside the mall, which it didn't have except for the entrances. Then you've got to figure out what you're going to do inside the mall. You have to stabilize that mall first and get the occupancy there so you have demand for the parking.
Right now, the parking lot has no demand, there are holes in the parking lot, and you can't afford to fix them. Somebody has to fix them, so they're going to reach out to the city or the economic development authority for help. You have to create the demand first. In a mall like the one in Lafayette, you're looking at a 10- to 20-year plan. Who plans like that these days?
In Elkhart, the city owns the mall, so the city is putting in the infrastructure right now for future streets, townhomes, and small retail buildings that are going to be built in the mall parking lot. They're doing that as we speak, and it's hugely expensive because you're not working with a clean sheet of paper. You're working with existing conditions built by mall developers 50 or 60 years ago who never thought the mall was going to go bad, so they didn't have an infrastructure plan.
It was just, "What's the cheapest place to dump our stormwater? What's the quickest place we can get a sanitary sewer?" If it goes sideways across the mall and cuts it up the wrong way, you've got to deal with that. Once you start moving those lines, it gets really expensive. Then you say, why would I do that? It's too much trouble. The mall deteriorates more and more, and finally the city tears it down because people don't pay taxes on it and let it go. It becomes the city's problem because there wasn't long-term planning for the infrastructure.
I love to think about these places and work on them, but the solutions are going to look odd if we do it affordably. It won't be perfect urbanism. We're all new urbanists here, but it's got to look odd. Somebody is going to say, "Why did they do that?" It won't look like it made any sense unless you know what happened underground.
We're getting close to the end. Tony, what does this really say about how we value land in our community? Can this help change the conversation?
Maybe. Anytime there's a parking conflict, there's an opportunity for some conversation. Sometimes I'll go on TikTok and argue with people. I grew up in San Pedro, California, and they just did a beautiful harbor-area redevelopment where they were talking about charging for parking. There was an Instagram story where people were complaining, and someone asked, "Why are they charging for parking for nearby residents?" I said, "Why do nearby residents need parking? Just walk down there. What are you doing?"
I got into a little argument with someone, laid down some real content, and I think changed at least one person's mind. I don't do it all the time. It's not the best use of my time to argue one-on-one on Instagram, but these conversations can bring things up.
As Monte points out, there are a lot of complicated aspects here. It's not even always the parking mandates that are the problem anymore. One of the places mentioned was Perimeter Mall in Dunwoody, Georgia. They got rid of their parking mandates in 2019. For all the reasons Monte mentioned and many more, it's not always just the city requiring this. A lot of the businesses that go into malls have corporate requirements that say how much parking their franchisees are required to have.
In the end, these kinds of articles are always an opportunity for conversation like ours, and I encourage listeners who are more educated on this than the average person to engage in the debate.
Absolutely. When I read it, I see some of the stress of mall developers and landowners having all this land and needing to be creative about how they can maintain a nice experience or halt the decline of their mall, depending on the situation. It's really interesting to me, but certainly in the context of the debate, we shouldn't miss the opportunity to have the conversation.
Monte, this will be the last question for you. In your work, do you see the cultural element of free parking? We've had it for so long that people expect it, particularly in mall environments, and coming back from that is hard. Coming back to a place where land has value feels like it has a lot of twists and turns.
For sure. Culturally, you've got a bunch of old baby boomers who are used to parking and used to pulling up to the diner and getting the space right at the front. They complain if they don't have that. The culture is going to take a generation or two, and that's why I appreciate Tony's work and the work we do too.
We're pushing those boundaries. How far can we push it and not break it, where the city says, "We're not going to experiment anymore with your crazy ideas, Monte or Tony"? How do we push it as much as we can and bring people along? A little bit of death here and there always solves a few problems. We've got a road warrior here in town who has gotten old and isn't active anymore, so we don't have to talk about six-lane roads with 15,000 traffic counts anymore.
We're not going to stop driving our cars a few blocks until we get pressure and there's pain. We don't learn from things that are easy. We only learn from pain. Somebody is going to have to be the first one there. To do that, we have to recreate places that people really want to go to, not just the artist or the restaurant, but the medical office, the doctor, the Department of Motor Vehicles office, or whatever it might be.
Until we do that, we're not going to quit driving our cars, even if it's just a few blocks. Even me: I walk seven days a week, but I'm going to drive if you make it easy on me to drive, especially in 110-degree temperatures like we have down here. I see us moving in a good direction. Maybe the young people we're bringing up now will see this better than people my age have.
We posted in the Commons, our member platform, right before we recorded, and one of our members, Chris P., had this comment, which I think is interesting. Maybe we'll wrap with this before we go to the Downzone: "I think this makes sense if the goal from the start of the malls was to have premium parking cost a fee, but it's coming when most malls' economic vitality or viability is ending, and so it reads to me more like a last-gasp effort to monetize before the whole thing goes under." Tony, do you have a reaction to that?
I hope, for the sake of the people whose businesses are in the malls, that it's not the case. I think the work that Monte and his folks are doing is fantastic. I highlight it all the time. I think that is the way out here: Use these spaces and let a million Main Streets bloom. There's a lot of opportunity to reactivate these spaces and create tremendous value and opportunity.
Monte, any thoughts?
I'm right there with Tony. We definitely speak the same language. I'm grateful for what they're doing, what you're doing, and what Strong Towns is doing to push this. We've been talking about parking lots and Black Friday for several years now.
I'm grateful that conversation has happened, because this wouldn't have happened in Dallas without people like the two of you and your organizations. It wouldn't have happened here. Let me tell you, it hasn't hurt anything. It hasn't hurt any business here. In fact, I think it may have made businesses better. That's the odd thing, because people want what they can't have.
If they can have it too easily, they're not going to want it. We're not going to go to the restaurant when there are too many cars in the parking lot. We want to go to the one that's full of people, where people are sitting outside and you can see them in the windows. That's where we want to go.
I think there's a perception that malls are struggling, but the reality is that the malls probably successful in charging for parking are the ones that aren't struggling. They've created high-demand places, which allows them to capture this revenue from customers and potential customers. There are a lot of behavioral things at play here that make it really complex and interesting.
Think about it today: Every mall, shopping center, office building, and single-family home has to be retrofitted. None of it is relevant. Everything we know has to be retrofitted because we're living differently. Our family living in a house is different. Retail is different. Office buildings have completely changed. Our income and wealth gap are wider.
It's history repeating itself. We have to go back. I think people have to make more wealth, and we have to have more entrepreneurs, which means we might have more things in the parking lot and do more small things, like our country was built.
Monte, as you said earlier, it's always awesome to do this work alongside you guys. Thanks for all the work you're both doing. Let's switch over to the Downzone. Tony, I'll ask you to go first. What are you reading, watching, or learning that you want to share with the Strong Towns community?
I came back from a trip to England, which was really fun, and I got to see a lot of great Main Street activity there. I'm also working on a project for Climate Week in New York. You can go to urbanclimatesolutions.org - or urbanclimatesolution.org, I think - and see it. We've put together 10 panels for Climate Week with partners like NRDC, WRI, and the Metropolitan Abundance Project.
I'm doing a panel that I think might be particularly interesting on why the corner has no store and about zoning - why we don't have neighborhood commercial. It ties a lot into this conversation. That's all I'm working on lately, so it's kind of the only thing in my mind.
That's great. Monte, I'm going to go second because I'm going to talk about you, and then I'll pass it off to you. For my Downzone, I get to see Monte next month in Pensacola at the Civic Leader Summit from October 6 through 8. It's in partnership with the Center for Civic Engagement down there in Pensacola. Monte is going to be one of our keynotes talking about housing, and he's also going to join us to talk about that mall I was sharing in Lafayette.
Monte, I always love when I get to see you in person, so that's what I'm certainly looking forward to. Normally I would go last out of courtesy, but I wanted to brag about you a little bit.
I appreciate that. I always love doing stuff with Strong Towns. I've been around since the very beginning, since the very first event. Some people don't know this, but I was the very first keynote speaker for the very first Strong Towns event in Minneapolis many years ago. We go back a long way.
There are two things I'm really into as I've gotten older. One is my health. I should have been into it a long time ago, but I want to walk down the street. I want to park way away because I try to get 13,000 steps a day, seven days a week. My whole office has a thing going for the month of September on walking and getting our steps in. I thought, this is a really good way to not drive our cars. The health thing is real because my old partner is having a lot of health issues right now, so walking is a big thing.
The other part is money. I'm talking a lot about money lately because a lot of us with Strong Towns and the new urbanists are do-gooders. We want to do good, but we don't make enough money sometimes. A lot of our little entrepreneurs work really hard and don't make money.
The thing I like to say is making money is the most important thing, and doing good is equal. But I didn't say do good first. I encourage people today to be a little more focused on money. I like books like Think and Grow Rich. It's an old book and one of my favorites. Without the money, we can't do the next thing. I don't care if that's building on the parking lot, sweeping the parking lot, or selling memberships to your organization. We have to do that.
More and more, you're going to hear me talk about building middle-class wealth back, owning your own properties in your town, and building your net worth on your balance sheet. That doesn't sound very sexy, but I can tell you this: I can get a restaurant to come to Duncanville, Texas, if I show them how they can own a building. If I talk to them about leasing a building, I can't get a good one here.
I was in Lowell, Arkansas, last week. Northwest Arkansas is very impressive. How do you get a good business to come to town? You get them to own a building. You help them build net worth. You help people build money. We help each other in our village. It's very important to me that my tenants, colleagues, and people around me make money and have money here. I'm not talking about having a private jet, although it'd be nice. I'm talking about the basic stuff, where people who do good can also make money.
I've had money and I haven't had money. It's a whole lot better to have it.
I think that's about it for Upzoned this week. Thank you so much to our guests, Tony Jordan and Monte Anderson. If you've got a reaction to this conversation or you want to take part in it yourself, you can join us on the Strong Towns Commons at commons.strongtowns.org. We've shared the article there, and you can join the discussion.
We'll be back next week with a new article and a new team to chat about it. As always, take care, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.