Build Cities for People, Not Just Cars

Walk through most American towns and you’ll notice something: the buildings are islands in a sea of asphalt. Everything is spaced so far apart — to make room for parking — that walking from one errand to the next is impractical, so you drive. And because you have to drive everywhere, every adult in the house needs a car, and the whole place gets built around that assumption. It’s expensive, it’s isolating, and it didn’t have to be this way.

The hidden culprit: parking mandates

The single biggest reason our communities sprawl is parking minimums — local rules that force every shop, apartment, and restaurant to build a set number of parking spaces. Those mandates push buildings apart, bury neighborhoods under parking lots, and quietly make walkable life impossible. They also funnel us toward the big-box stores and chains with room for giant lots, while the corner bakery and the local hardware store never get a fair shot.

Why towns won’t fix it themselves

Here’s the honest part. You might expect towns to fix this — but they’re often the ones most attached to the mandates. Change feels risky, neighbors worry about the parking they’re used to, and it’s easier to keep requiring lots than to imagine something better. Left on their own, most towns won’t move. People, understandably, default to the convenient and the familiar.

So this is a place where states should lead. Not by micromanaging neighborhoods, but by setting a simple rule of the road: zoning should treat parking as the exception, not the requirement. Flip that one default — require a reason to mandate parking rather than a reason to skip it — and you don’t have to force walkable communities into existence. They emerge naturally, building by building, as people are finally free to put homes and shops where they make sense.

What we get back

A town built for people instead of parking is a better place to live:

• Lower costs. Families can drop a second (or third) car payment without losing their mobility.
• Stronger local business. When you can walk to it, the neighborhood bakery, grocer, and hardware store can thrive again — tens of thousands of small businesses that car-centric design quietly strangled.
• Real community. Places designed for walking are places where neighbors actually cross paths, instead of just passing one another at 40 miles an hour.

The tax piece that makes it click

There’s a natural partner to this: shifting from taxing buildings to taxing the value of land (here’s how that works). Today’s property taxes reward holding a parking lot or a vacant lot and punish building something useful. A land-value tax flips that incentive — it makes sitting on dead asphalt expensive and putting land to good, human use rewarding. Pair walkable zoning with a tax code that rewards good land use, and thriving, people-first communities stop being a fight and start being the path of least resistance.

We’re not anti-car. We’re pro-choice about how we live — and for too long, that choice has been made for us by a parking lot.

The fuller case is in Righting the Ship.