Opinion

Want your city to thrive? Start by rethinking parking lots.

These micro wastelands drain the life from neighborhoods, blighting American cities. It’s time we imagine better.

Surface lots occupy, on average, nearly a quarter of available land in city centers. That number is even larger in Kansas City (29 percent), in Orlando (33 percent) and in Arlington, Tex. (39 percent). They are holdover eyesores from the commuter past when the almighty automobile remade the landscape. Access to quality parking is still vital for most cities, but downtowns have come back to life as places where people stay past 5 p.m. They are desirable communities. Still, the lots remain.

The problem isn’t simply a matter of fresh asphalt and new paint. Surface lots eat up people space. “They’re often large fields of empty space,” says Derek Hoetmer, founding principal at urban design firm MCLV, “contributing nothing beyond the sole purpose of storing personal property. They lack the ingredients of what makes cities great: a sense of place.”

The nation faces a housing shortage and scarcity drives up prices, yet empty lots house no one. Loneliness also leaches our cities, where third spaces and random encounters grow increasingly rare. Still, people remain separated by voids of pavement and fences. City centers need density and connection; surface parking lots destroy both.

“In cities, humans want activity, enclosure and sensory experiences,” Hoetmer says. “When you stumble onto a surface parking lot, you lose those qualities, thus producing a sense of decay, discouraging further exploration and creating an experiential vacuum between neighborhoods.”

Surface lots also rob cities of revenue. Property tax is based on the value of things such as homes and buildings, so density means dollars. However, cities fail to grow their tax base when they let parking lots pockmark the landscape. In fact, property taxes on low-use lots actually work against a city’s best interest. The lot is assessed at a low rate, so corporations and landowners sit on their cheap land, waiting years for a top-dollar bidder as downtown real estate gets more expensive. The longer they wait, the bigger the profit.

This system slows the pace of downtown development — and thus suppresses the very investments that would help cities build bustling communities. Compounding the problem are outdated regulations in many cities that mandate overabundant parking for new development, while failing to levy meaningful penalties for neglect of urban acreage. So the cycle continues.

During Kansas City’s most recent Super Bowl victory celebration, groups of children filled an empty lot near the parade route to practice their best Patrick Mahomes impersonations. Their play was soon interrupted by a uniform-clad guard, walkie-talkie and all. When I asked, the man confirmed he had kicked the kids off the property. A bank in a tower nearby owned the lot, and the company didn’t want the liability, I was told. Never mind that the lot has done nothing for the community for years; this spontaneous, joyful use of empty space could not be permitted. A bank representative later told me the owners have no current plans for their several unused lots.

Our cities need to take concrete action. Hoetmer said one way to spur cities and landowners is through a land value tax, which assesses property based on its potential value instead of its current assets. We also need to create stronger penalties for land squatting and better enforcement. Steeper prices would result in less hand-sitting.

City leaders should also encourage land sales by actively seeking buyers, offering financial incentives and reorienting preexisting blight programs. If we can place landowners between a rock and a way to keep the ledgers black, I’m confident we’ll see positive change.

Some argue that offering tax incentives for rich developers is morally dubious. Others rightly worry about gentrification. However, nuanced approaches to new, affordable housing and needed retail amenities are always better than leaving inactive parking lots to rot, a.k.a. doing nothing.

Many of our downtowns have seen incredible growth in the past few decades. I want this trend to continue, but there’s only so much room to grow. To make the most of what we have, let’s tear down our fences and rethink parking.