The other week, I visited Syracuse, New York to meet with city officials and organizers about their land policies. Syracuse, despite its history of de-industrialization, still has a charming and nicely developed downtown. Nevertheless, Syracuse shares a problem endemic to most modern American cities: excessive parking lots in prime downtown locations.
This came as no surprise to me; at the Center for Land Economics I am constantly modeling urban areas across the United States, viewing them through the lens of property tax data records and GIS tools like Google Earth. So, in advance of my visit to Syracuse, I already knew what to expect. Walking Syracuse in person, I experienced the pervasiveness of parking lots that steadily drain economic opportunity away from the city’s most valuable locations.
Parking lots as economic drains
A city is, among other things, a fixed plot of contiguous land. So too is its downtown–a “city within a city,” if you will.
In our downtowns, this fixed amount of land derives market value from its productive potential. If a plot of land can yield $10m a year if I develop on it, I would pay far more for it than a different plot capable of generating only a few thousand dollars. In a sensible market, we would expect development to track with the value of land (that is, the land’s selling price), because higher land selling prices imply higher annual returns from building on that land.
Yet, plenty of American downtowns look something like this:
This is a simplified downtown featuring a mix of multifamily apartments and offices with rowhomes around the corner. Yet, right in the middle is an empty plot of land dedicated solely for parking cars.
Our cities gain vibrancy and value from human activity and significantly more of that activity occurs on parcels where things actually happen: whether its coffee shops providing caffeine and conversation, housing providing living and leisure, or offices providing employment and enterprise.
Now, look at the following image.
Instead of buildings, each parcel is represented by a vertical bar that measures its net economic contribution. That is, how much value a parcel creates for the community compared to how much value it consumes simply by existing as land. Think of it like this:
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