The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #4: Parking Garages. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.
[intro music]
Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl. Featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand. I’m Duncan Crary.
Today’s topic: parking garages.
Duncan Crary (interviewer): Well, Jim, we’ve made it to our fourth KunstlerCast. Congratulations.
James Howard Kunstler: Thank you very much.
Duncan Crary: We’re getting a lot of comments from listeners around the country. I have one from Columbus, Ohio. Would you mind if we just play that right now and get into it?
James Howard Kunstler: Columbus, Ohio, that wilderness of free parking.
Listener Caller: Hi this is Carl. I’m calling from Columbus, Ohio. I love the KunstlerCast.
I heard Mr. Kunstler mention something in show number two about the ridiculous amount of surface parking in downtown Columbus. And I just wanted to let you know that the city is talking about dropping $30 million to build two new parking garages downtown.
The mayor put out some press release saying, “Parking has long been the top concern of businesses looking to move downtown.”
And don’t get me wrong. I’m all for moving people downtown. But bringing them in cars is a little misguided. I mean why not spend that money on improving the bus system?
Building more parking garages will only encourage more traffic and congestion. And plus there’s no street-level retail in the designs for these garages.
So I just wanted to know, from your perspective, what can people do other than throw back a few beers and call your show?
I mean I guess parking garages are better than parking lots, but let’s face it, they still suck. Thanks.
Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, well I don’t know if there’s anything left to say. I think Carl covered it all, but what are your thoughts on these parking garages?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, there actually is quite a bit more to say, although he did present a pretty coherent picture of things.
What we’re not seeing here is any recognition on the part of municipal leaders, or even the people they’re serving, that these are bad investments because the future’s not going to be about parking.
In very, very few years ahead, we’re going to have enormous problems with motoring and everything connected with it: the fuel, the oil, the gasoline, people getting the cars, being able to buy them when they’re tapped out on their credit cards and their credit generally, I mean.
The whole happy motoring dynamic is really going to be fading fast. And the fact that the city leaders all over the United States are totally clueless about it and are willing to invest $30 million –which by the way will probably be bonded, meaning they’ll be assuming a lot of debt, and paying a lot of debt service at fairly high rates now because we’re in the middle of a municipal debt, credit crisis.
Duncan Crary: This is just another example of a municipality subsidizing sprawl to yank suburbanites into their town in the hopes they’ll spend some money.
This happens in Albany, where I work, too. You have all these suburbanites who drive into the city to work, they don’t spend any money when they’re actually there and then they’re gone. And the mayors of these cities are so obsessed with luring more people.
It’s kinda sad.
James Howard Kunstler: Well, they only know what they’ve known in the past. They don’t really get the fact that we’re facing a discontinuity, a break from the past.
They only know that in the past, people have lived out there, somewhere outside the city, and we’re desperate to get them inside the city.
Now, I’ve been to Columbus five or six times in the last 10 years.
Duncan Crary: Yeah, me too.
James Howard Kunstler: And interestingly, already about 75 percent of the former downtown core of Columbus, Ohio is surface parking. So they’ve already done a magnificent job of destroying most of the fabric of the town. You could make the argument that, “Oh, well, it’s better to stack the cars up in a five-story building, ” but…
Duncan Crary: I mean, it is better, but you could still design a better parking garage than the one…
James Howard Kunstler: Even on its own terms, it’s a bad design.
Duncan Crary: Yeah.
James Howard Kunstler: OK? And the guy who called in is correct. ‘Cause let’s say hypothetically during the period where it seemed like maybe a good thing to do, like maybe the early 1990s, the idea was: OK, you’ve got to build the parking structure. At least line the ground floor with some retail so it has a relationship with the street that is more or less like a normal building, so it provides some destinations for people who are walking around town, gives people something to look at as they’re traversing the block, etc, etc.
These things are fairly self-evident, but I would maintain that continuation of building parking decks is just an enormous waste of whatever dwindling resources we have.
Duncan Crary: You can’t even retrofit these buildings. I remember I heard you talking about this here in Saratoga Springs when they were going to build the new parking garage. And you were talking about if you made each floor taller –- ’cause what are the heights of a regular parking garage?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, when you’re building something other than a parking deck, you need some room overhead to run the ductwork and the plumbing and the service lines and all that stuff. So you have to have more than a seven-foot ceiling, and the trouble with these parking decks is that they have fairly low ceilings that don’t lend themselves to be retrofitted.
And also, there’s the problem of needing a central lightwell. In a structure that large, if you were going to turn it into offices or apartments, you’d have to have a core in the center that would be a lightwell that would allow you to get light in from the outside to the apartments or offices that are more toward the center of the structure.
Duncan Crary: Well forget apartments. You can’t even build a warehouse in these things, right? The ceilings aren’t even tall enough to have…
James Howard Kunstler: Well, it would be a warehouse with very short floors.
Duncan Crary: Jim, have you ever actually seen a parking garage that had liner buildings and taller ceilings and…?
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, you bet. Well, not taller ceilings, but the city of Charleston had a very successful program in the 80s and 90s under their wonderful mayor Joe Riley, who’s been mayor for like 35 years there, and is among the few elected officials in America who actually has a very firm grounding in the particulars of design.
So they built a bunch of parking decks in downtown Charleston, but they took pains to make provision for retail on the first floor. I believe I saw something like that in Savannah, too, but I don’t quite remember. But they’re around the country.
We did it in Saratoga Springs, as a matter of fact. We have a bunch of new apartment buildings about six stories high on a stretch of our downtown that used to be kind of Desolation Row. They felt they had to provide parking for the condominiums and understandably so in the age that they built them.
In any case, they did build parking into the project but they built it in such a way that they could put retail on the ground floor and load the parking in the back and they sacrificed a few spaces to get the retail on the ground floor and it was a good idea. So sure, they do it all over the country and it works fine.
Duncan Crary: So Jim, Carl, asked what he could do other than call our show. And other than cloning the Mayor of Charleston, what can people do?
James Howard Kunstler: I think it’s a very, very tough problem. And the public consensus is simply that we’re still continuing with all of the motoring and all of the accessories that got with it and we’re not willing to think about making a different kind of adjustment. The psychology of previous investment is just too big an obstacle at this point.
There will be some moment in the years ahead, probably not very far, when the shock of recognition will thunder through the population and we’ll get it. But right now, the public doesn’t get it, they’re being well represented by officials who don’t get it and the prospects of getting over something like this are not very good.
By the way, I don’t really like the idea of promoting people to be just depressed about stuff and not do anything. I think Carl should probably go through whatever motions that he feels are necessary to pursue this. And he should write a letter to the editor and go to the planning board and shout. I don’t even think it’s necessarily an act of futility. Sooner or later, the consensus will change and maybe it’ll help if one person begins by making one small move.
I, myself, go to meetings around here and you know I shout a little bit about the dumb things that we do, even though I’m under no illusion that — Here, in this town, which is a classic American Main Street Town, which has been very fortunate, there’s a consensus that we have to keep going with the car thing. In fact, tragically and, really, deeply ironically, in the previous mayoral election, we elected a so-called progressive Democratic mayor, who then took the position that it was not a good idea to continue downtown infill, which was an absurd position to take.
But she was very adamant about it and she attracted a lot of supporters. And the whole reason was that these people thought that they couldn’t park close enough to the things they want to get to. So even though the political progressives are clueless about this, and it really shows where we’re at in this country.
Duncan Crary: In an earlier show, I mentioned that I have a car, I drive a car, I like to have it sometimes. Honestly, I hate having my car, too. It’s a convenience, but most of the time it’s a nuisance. I went six months without driving it and I got squirrels in the car. They died when I turned it on, it was a horrible stink.
James Howard Kunstler: Did you eat them by the way, did they heat up there on the engine block? ‘Cause some guys have ways of cooking stuff on the engine block. You know, you put a squirrel in tinfoil…
Duncan Crary: Yeah (sarcastically)…
James Howard Kunstler: By the way I once did a story for a magazine about roadkill, and I went around interviewing a lot of aficionados of roadkill cuisine, and I asked this one guy, “What’s your criteria for freshness?” And he said, “My bumper.”
Duncan Crary: Yeah, so getting back to the topic at hand. You gotta actually maintain your car. You gotta drive it regularly or it doesn’t work.
And I’ve been thinking, my cousin lives down in New York City and he uses this thing called “zip car”, where you can just sort of like rent a car for a couple of hours, you leave it in the neighborhood. I would rather see a system like that in my town where I can just pick a car for three or four hours.
James Howard Kunstler: Well it’s very sane and rational and all. And they’re popular in Europe, they’re called “car clubs”. The zip car is one of its American manifestations.
And the idea is you don’t have to go through all the grief of car ownership and maintenance and payment. You join this club for like $800 a year and anytime you need a car to go on an excursion or go on a picnic in the country or go to a store and bring something bulky home or move to a new apartment or to a new house, you go out and you get one of these vehicles from the car club that has many kinds of different vehicles.
They have sporty vehicles for excursions and they have pick-up trucks if you need to move your stuff and blah, blah, blah.
And it would seem to be a sensible thing. But, remember, you have to have the whole social urbanistic and architectural infrastructure in place for that to work. It works fine in Amsterdam, because Amsterdam is a wonderful, walkable city. I’m talking about Amsterdam, Holland not Amsterdam, Arizona, New York, Michigan or wherever there’s another Amsterdam.
But Amsterdam, Holland is, you know — they never destroyed their traditional urban pattern. People are living in row houses and apartments in row houses fairly close together. And certainly, well integrated with all the shopping and entertainment and civic and cultural and educational stuff, all mixed in very richly — with parks, by the way, wonderfully designed green spaces, wonderful squares and full of cafes.
And so they’re not suffering from that, and anytime they need to get a car, it’s — you know, they’re not prevented from making an excursion. And any time you want a car, you go down and you get your car from the car club and you drive out to the countryside, blah, blah, blah.
You know, one of the upshots in America is that sure, we all have our own cars at our disposal all the time, but because of that, there’s almost no place in America that’s worth being in or going to. That’s one of the unintended consequences of mass automobile use is that you actually destroy the terrain so voraciously that nowhere is worth driving to.
But the other one, of course, is it’s estimated to cost oh somewhere around $6, 000 a year to keep any car on the road between the payments, the maintenance, the insurance, and the fuel… That’s generally the going rate. So if you’re only paying a thousand bucks a year to belong to a car club, and you can have one anytime you need one, you don’t have to worry about storing it and parking it or insuring it or all that stuff, great!
Duncan Crary: Yeah, I think it’s great. If they can only get a critical mass for the need in my town, I would definitely join one.
James Howard Kunstler: Well I don’t know if it’s gonna — in the United States, it’s going to be a problem because by the time we have a critical mass for that stuff, the whole motoring scene maybe in complete disarray. Between the oil problems and the problems of people affording cars in any form because we’re hemorrhaging affluence, I’m not convinced that that’s going to happen quite the way we imagined.
Duncan Crary: Well, then I’ll join a zip horse and carriage club because, as you’ve pointed out, if you watch the movies, they drive horse and buggies as if they’re Chevrolets. But really, they’re pretty complicated devices to hitch up a team.
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. You don’t just go out there with a key and put the key in your horse’s behind and take off.
Duncan Crary: You can’t just leave your horse and buggy sitting there at the curb all day.
James Howard Kunstler: No, you can’t leave your horse and buggy in the Wal-Mart parking lot for three hours.
Duncan Crary: All right, so I’ll join a horse-and-buggy zip club at the end of cheap oil.
James Howard Kunstler: It’s called a livery stable… they used to have ‘em.
Duncan Crary: Jim, thanks a lot for joining us. It’s always a pleasure and pretty darn funny, too.
James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’m glad it’s funny for you. I mean, it’s torture for me. I have to sit here and think up all these jokes.
Duncan Crary: Take care.
James Howard Kunstler: Bye.
Duncan Crary: You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler.
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