Empty Spaces

Over the last several months, I have had the opportunity to look at office space at several locations in North Dallas.  Two conclusions from this - - the first is that all the space begins to look the same.  Office space is office space is office space.  The second is the number of empty parking spots associated with all the buildings.  Regardless of the building, if you are on the 8th floor and can look down onto the parking lots and parking decks, all you see is empty - - empty as in zero automobiles (and this is with claims of 85% occupancy - - which illustrates one of the impacts of the Great Recession; much fewer employees per square foot and many empty parking spots).  It was very surprising.

I ordered Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking by Eran Ben-Joseph several weeks ago.  I have not been able to get to it yet, but The Wall Street Journal had a book review by Dan Neil yesterday (I Know It's Here Somewhere).  Neil also comments on this obvious over-supply of parking with the following:

"Along the way, cities developed zoning formulas to determine the number of parking spaces needed - typically between six and 10 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor space.  Mr Ben-Joseph argues - as did Donald Shoup in "The High Cost of Free Parking" (2005) - that these ratios created an enormous oversupply of parking, designed to accommodate only two or three days of maximum use per year like Black Friday.  This seemingly minor miscalculations has had a dramatic effect on urban environments.  In some U.S. cites, such as Little Rock, surface lots cover a third of the land area.  Mr. Ben-Joseph estimates that there are 500 million surface-lot spaces in the U.S., covering more than 3,580 square miles, a landmass larger than Puerto Rico."

I think I can find a parking spot.