God Lot

80-year-old wisdom on church parking

Someone on Twitter shared a newspaper article from 1949, published in the Dallas Morning News. Among other contents, it quotes at some length remarks by a Baptist pastor.

But I want to start by quoting from the opening paragraph:

Proposal to regulate the building of churches in Dallas looks like poor political judgment....Whatever the merits of the proposal, it can not be expected to win many votes. The electorate is likely to stand with the churches.

What issue do you think this might be about? It sounds like something hostile to churches. But in 1949 in Texas?

Well. It was a proposal to require newly built churches to include a parking lot.

The grounds for opposition are quite clear but perhaps counterintuitive today. It’s an argument from a time when these matters were still live issues, and car-centricity had not yet become the total default.

It wasn’t that people shouldn’t drive to church, or that urban congestion arising from very tight street parking was good. Rather, requiring churches to buy the land for parking lots would make the cost of construction too high, and ultimately diminish the ability of churches to carry out their higher purpose:

Whatever the intent, the effect probably would be to seriously curtail if not virtually stop building of new churches in the city....When in addition to the site and the building they are required to buy the equivalent of another 100x200-foot lot discouragement may defeat them.

In other words, parking minimums, as these regulations are now called, are entitlements to motorists whose cost must be borne by builders and business owners. A guarantee of easy parking is not like a guarantee of free speech; the former exerts real benefits on some people, but real costs on others. And ultimately, on everyone: the cost of easy parking is a reduced number of small enterprises, an increase in the scale at which business is done, an increase in the cost of goods, and a decrease in the ease with which an ordinary person can engage in entrepreneurship.

The clarity of this 1949 article is refreshing. It was clear to many people then that a parking requirement was fundamentally a market distortion. The argument here is not really cultural or political but economic. It is a plain, free-enterprise argument against our current land-use status quo.

And that’s before the Baptist pastor is quoted:

“Dallas is suffering all over the city with crowded parking space. It is one of the penalties we must pay for living in a thriving city.” [An argument for urban vitality which understands parking as a special interest.]

“If you restrict streets where there is public need the churches will provide parking lots in line with the need.” [A trust in the ability of people and markets to coordinate and cooperate.]

“The minimum lot, rear yard and side yard provisions [various proposed elements of zoning] bear the earmarks of scientific nonsense….These provisions are so impracticable as to be almost prohibitive.” [A critique of zoning as a technocratic pseudoscience.]

This is striking. These arguments are indistinguishable from the kind of arguments urbanists and zoning reformers make today, but this all predates any real self-conscious “urbanist” movement. What that says to me is that at some point between 1949 and the birth of New Urbanism in the late 20th century, we completely forgot what cities were.

I wrote about church parking lots, once, while we’re on the subject. I noted that while suburban churches basically need large parking lots, the zoning can prevent them from making any other sort of use of them. Opening that empty space up to farmer’s market, for example, might be construed as a commercial use. Using the lot, or the church itself, for a homeless shelter might be considered a residential use. These regulations limit the ability of the church to be a full participant in society.

The other really interesting thing here is the scale issue. Very small enterprises, commercial or not, can only really exist in the absence of a parking requirement. There is a whole category of activity at a very human scale that these regulations squeeze out. They operate as a floor on scale.

And in classic urban environments, as the pastor argues, a parking requirement is effectively a ban on construction. Or, as we found out throughout the 20th century, a requirement that new urban construction cannibalize old. Every time you see a parking lot in an old downtown, you can be almost certain that a building once stood there.

It reminds me of my hometown’s decision to scrap its off-street parking requirement for downtown businesses a couple of years ago. The mayor concluded that the parking requirement, far from bringing in motorists to shop on Main Street, was actually keeping Main Street empty. It was simply too expensive for a business owner in a little old storefront to buy enough off-street spaces to fulfill the requirement. The town didn’t get lots of stores and lots of parking; it got no stores because the parking demanded by the code did not realistically exist on the ground.

The costs of zoning regulations and parking minimums are very real. But—like God—they are mostly unseen.

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Related Reading:

A Peek at What’s Possible

It’s the Scale (Is It?)

Acid and Alkaline

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