What if Your Parking Spot Was a Studio Apartment?

Across the country, parking reform is snowballing. Cities from Willmar, Minnesota, to Raleigh, North Carolina, are coming to grips with what they lose by mandating and subsidizing productive land on automobile storage. Nevertheless, the topic of parking—even when it’s statistically oversupplied—is often a non-starter.

That’s why the New York City-based nonprofit Open Plans decided to take a much-needed conversation about parking from the theoretical realm to the physical one. And they did so by converting two below-ground parking spots into a makeshift studio apartment for a day.

*Two spaces in the garage, as used by cars.*

*The same amount of space taken up by two cars can be used for a studio apartment.*

“Before we did it, we had a lot of people say, ‘No way. You can't build a studio apartment in two parking spaces!’” Sara Lind, Open Plans’ co-executive director told me. “But people don't realize how big [parking spots are] and how much space they take up.”

On average, a single parking stall requires approximately 200–350 square feet of space. In occupying two spots in a garage on Ainslee Street in Brooklyn, Open Plans’ People Over Parking installation was able to simulate what many onlookers described as “about the size of my first studio in New York.” Letting people come to that conclusion by physically placing them in a reimagined parking spot was crucial for Lind, especially as New York City is on the cusp of abolishing parking minimums.

Have other ideas on what wasteful parking spaces could be used for instead? Share it with the world on #BlackFridayParking day!

In fact, the garage Open Plans used was one mandated by the city’s minimums. Yet, Open Plans didn’t have to chase anyone out of a spot to pilot the idea. “Nobody was using these spots,” Lind pointed out. “It’s one of several parking facilities in the area that developers were required to build, but in the end are underutilized. Some are even sitting empty.”

The problems with underutilized parking, Lind explains, can be broken down into two overlapping categories: cost and space. Building parking—any parking—but especially podium or below-ground parking like the garage on Ainslee, is expensive. In New York, Open Plans estimates that a single below-ground spot can cost up to $150,000. When it comes to new developments, developers shoulder these costs until they’re offset to residents, regardless of whether the latter owns a car or not. As a result, residents not only pay more for their apartments, but those without cars are also subsidizing their neighbors’ parking spots. In some cases, they’re subsidizing a garage that next to nobody uses.

Parking also requires a lot of space. Not only does each parking spot average several hundred square feet, but their design is difficult to retrofit—they weren’t designed with human habitation in mind. Not to mention, the parking requirements that spawned the parking accommodations in the first place would stand in the way of conversion.

What’s more: New York City, like most cities, doesn’t even know exactly how much parking it possesses. Lind pointed out how there’s no centralized database in which an elected official, planner, or curious resident could glean an understanding of how much automobile storage exists, whether public or private, paid or free. “You end up with the absurd situation that planners sitting in an office in Manhattan are determining how many parking spaces a building in Brooklyn or Queens has to build, when they don't even necessarily know how much parking already exists in that vicinity,” Lind explained. It’s a recipe for empty parking garages on some of the city’s most valuable land, which is exactly what she has observed.

Ultimately, Open Plans wasn’t trying to convince onlookers that the spots they reimagined as a studio apartment should become a studio apartment. The goal was to let people physically interface with the trade-off when we prioritize parking over people. “We could have a café, retail, a laundry room, a community space, or a home here,” Lind said. “Instead we have spaces nobody necessarily asked for [and] clearly nobody is using... And we’re all paying for it.”