Paving Paradise

More than a quarter of downtown Atlanta is given over to a single land use, the parking of idle cars. If this “sea of parking” were put to better uses, as housing, retail, offices or green space, downtown would benefit, as we learned from our January 2024 book Paving Paradise. So is the city preventing property owners from redeveloping parking decks and surface lots? Actually, no. As we see in this article, downtown doesn’t have parking requirements. Economics and shortsightedness are holding landowners back.