Paved Paradise

December 1, 2022

With King, the New York Times best-selling Eig ( Ali), a former senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, draws on recently declassified FBI files to create a bold new study of Martin Luther King Jr. (100,000-copy first printing). Drafted by the FBI as a trilingual counterterrorism researcher, Billy Reilly went to Russia when it first invaded Ukraine's Donbas region and promptly cut off all communication; it was unclear whether the FBI actually sent him, but Reilly's parents asked Wall Street Journal reporter Forrest to find their Lost Son (100,000-copy first printing). AsSlate staff writer Grabar clarifies in Paved Paradise, parking matters; we've distorted our landscape to find cheap and easy ways to store our cars, with much valuable real estate devoted to vehicles sitting empty when space for affordable housing is desperately needed; at least Grabar proposes solutions. Following This Is Not a T-Shirt, a memoir about his clothing brand, Hundreds (aka Bobby Kim) limns his venture into NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), Web3, and the Metaverse in NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future (75,000-copy first printing). Former secretary of the Treasury and cochair of Goldman Sachs, Rubin draws on six decades' worth of experience in business and politics to explain how to make smart decisions in an uncertain world; it all begins with sketching out the possibilities on a simple Yellow Pad (or now an iPad). In Traffic, former BuzzFeed editor in chief Smith shows how Nick Denton's Gawker and Jonah Peretti's HuffPost and BuzzFeed fatefully duked it out for control of internet media in the early 2000s, arguing that the unintended consequence was a rightward shift in the internet's orientation. Windham-Campbell Award-winning South African writer Steinberg shows how the marriage of Winnie and Nelson Mandela reflects the course of South African history and tensions within the antiapartheid movement, as Winnie moved toward supporting armed insurrection while Nelson was jailed.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 6, 2023
“In our quest to make it as easy as possible to park, we’ve made it awfully hard to do anything else,” according to this eye-opening jeremiad from Slate columnist Grabar (editor, The Future of Transportation). Noting that, in the U.S., “more square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person,” Grabar explains how mandatory parking minimums, which require a disproportionate number of parking spaces for new construction projects, severely limit options for building more housing and improving public transit and traffic patterns. Using vivid examples and illustrations, Grabar sketches the history of parking in the U.S., demonstrates the inefficiencies baked into parking minimums, and examines how their elimination or reduction has improved the quality of life in Chicago, L.A., and other cities. Throughout, Grabar grounds his astute analyses in empathetic profiles of reformers and activists like Baptist pastor Nathan Carter, whose desire to build a neighborhood church in Chicago was complicated by regulations mandating that he “needed one parking spot for every eight seats.” Contending that parking “is access of the most superficial sort, one that often papers over deeper inequities we’re unwilling to address,” Graber builds a powerful case that making parking a little more scarce will make Americans’ lives a lot better. This deep dive into an overlooked aspect of the modern world delivers. Agent: Alice Whitwham, Cheney Agency.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
A deep dive into how the complex rules of parking are affecting us all and what we can do about it. Grabar, a staff writer for Slate who covers housing, transportation, and urban policy, introduces us to the issues surrounding parking with an example that begins with a dispute and ends with assault and arrest. "You may feel...shocked to learn that disputes over parking spaces can and do lead to violence," he writes. "In a few dozen incidents each year, they even lead to death." Examining the development of cultural rules involved with parking (not all of them are actually laws), the author illuminates a variety of related, interconnected issues, including the nation's lack of low-income housing; how the downtown cores of major cities are effectively blocked from development due to efforts to increase parking areas; and how parking and urban development rules are being manipulated to aid money laundering, tax evasion, and theft. Grabar investigates the problems from the points of view of housing developers, architects, parking enforcement officers, garage owners, city councils, app developers, and analysts and consultants who think they have solutions. The author highlights both success stories and failures--e.g., when the city of Chicago signed away the rights to their own parking meters to a Wall Street firm for a century, costing the city billions of dollars in unexpected costs. Although we all understand what ideal parking means--"immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most important, free"--attempting to figure out where it exists and who is responsible can be overwhelming. "Parking lies at the intersection of transportation and land use, a bastard field of study shunned by both architects and traffic engineers," writes the author, who proves to be an adept guide to this knotty topic. An engrossing examination of parking and the many other issues that intersect with it.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
For as much time as one can spend in ones' car--commuting to work, driving to a vacation, making the weekly grocery-store visit--the fact is any car spends the majority of its time parked. Grabar presents the overarching story of how the unquenchable infrastructure required by parking has determined nearly every aspect of urban planning. As car ownership proliferated, city planners across the world largely cowed to the automobile and, especially, the ability to not only park but to also park as close as possible to most destinations. Grabar expertly lays out the many ways that the goal of providing the mythical idea of enough parking has ultimately led to greater reliance on cars, poorer access to public transportation, and more traffic congestion. Cities also adopted often-mystifying laws around parking minimums, which require new constructions to provide a certain number of spots, leading to higher upfront costs and thus fewer small businesses and less affordablehousing construction. Grabar mixes policy talk and profiles of both the parking professionals attempting to change the system and the entrepreneurs and real-estate developers whose projects have foundered in the face of parking minimums. All library shelves will benefit from having this definitive account of an everyday drudgery that deeply affects drivers and nondrivers alike.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2023

Grabar, the urban affairs columnist at Slate, traveled to various cities and conducted interviews to investigate why parking spaces are so important to Americans. He found that a billion parking spaces don't seem sufficient, yet most lots are underused. Some road rage parking disputes have resulted in assaults and murders. Case studies include a San Diego area developer who proposed low-income housing, but parking regulations and a lawsuit from neighbors defeated the project. Generous space requirements for vehicles were a factor in U.S. architecture throughout the late 20th century. Sketches illustrate the sort of mass constructions for large car lots or garages, and recent designs give priority to living space. As a cash business, parking revenue was vulnerable to skimming by corrupt officials and organized crime. Around the year 2000, urban planners realized too much cheap parking was bad for cities and the environment. Curb lanes were converted to transit, bike lanes, or mini-parks; detached garages became tiny houses. Then pandemic lockdowns cleared the streets, transforming parking infrastructure into vaccination clinics, hospital waiting rooms, and caf� patios. VERDICT Grabar offers an intriguing, wide-ranging, readable perspective of the urban American parking scene, its issues, and possible future.--David R. Conn

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.