The provocative subtitle of Henry Grabar’s new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, may be a little hyperbolic, but perhaps not by much when considering how the world in Greater Boston has taken shape and what animates current debates about new development.

Grabar says the build-out of post-World War II America, which we think of as marked by the explosion of suburban subdivisions and sprawl-fed shopping malls, was really driven by the arrival of the automobile age. And with the rise of car culture, he says, came the growing preoccupation with where to park all those vehicles. 

Grabar, speaking this week at a Boston forum organized by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, said development policy became centered on a single axiom: “more free parking.” 

“Parking – its quantity, its price, where it is located – determines how people travel, determines the character and appearance of our neighborhoods, determines the architecture of individual buildings,” he said. “It determines the price point and the floor plan of the housing that does get built.” And an ironclad corollary of that, he said, is that “fear of parking shortage is a motor of NIMBY politics, it powers opposition to new housing.” 

With that framing, Grabar’s look at the seemingly mundane matter of how we stow cars  suddenly has a lot to say about the battles now sprouting over the state’s push for more multi-family housing to be built across Eastern Massachusetts. 

Under current zoning rules in many communities, which require a minimum number of parking spaces for each new housing unit, the existing build-out of cities and towns, particularly areas close to business districts, would not be allowed today.

Meanwhile, Grabar said, those parking requirements drive up the cost of housing, while also cannibalizing land that could otherwise be used to further alleviate the regional housing shortage. “Parking costs a lot of money to build, and it takes up a lot of space,” he said. “So required parking not only adds tens of thousands of dollars onto the cost of every single American home, but also for every completed building with a bunch of parking, there’s a blueprint for an unbuilt structure that didn’t pencil out.” 

The “good news,” said Grabar, is that we are in the midst of a “parking science renaissance,” a reassessment of the role we have allowed cars and parking to play in how communities grow. 

In 2010, then-Boston Mayor Tom Menino famously declared, “the car is no longer king in Boston.” It still seems to carry some royal status, but things have certainly shifted. At the extreme end, some new housing projects near transit stations have been approved with no off-street parking – and sometimes even with provisions in leases in which tenants agree not to have cars that will be parked on the street. 

At the MAPC forum, Everett’s transportation director, Jay Monty, said he warned city leaders that existing parking minimums would ultimately destroy downtown vitality. “I’ve said, look, if you go down this road, we will cease to have a business district in the next 10 to 20 years. That won’t exist because you will have replaced it with parking,” he said. 

Three years ago, Everett adopted a new ordinance that shifts approval of parking requirements for new development from the zoning board of appeals to the planning board. “That sounds like a small change. It is huge,” said Monty. 

He said the zoning board had limited leeway to grant variances from required parking minimums. Under the new ordinance, the planning board now uses a scoring system that lets developers reduce the number of parking spaces, which he said are generally financial losers for them, in exchange for everything from added green space to bike-share stations or providing a shuttle service to the closest T station. 

“The practical impact this has is that without actually repealing parking minimums, we repealed  parking minimums,” Monty said. 

While the crowd of smart-growth enthusiasts cheered talk of the various moves to curb the role of parking and cars, MAPC’s executive director, Marc Draisen, offered a tempering reality check, pointing out that for all the parking science “renaissance” that planners and policy-makers have welcomed, he’s seen a strong backlash to such policies emerging in recent years. 

Draisen cited the emotionally-charged debate in West Roxbury over city plans to reduce the road going through the Boston neighborhood’s central business district from four lanes to three, adding a bike lane and taking away a small number of parking spaces in the process. 

“These issues have been very tense,” he said. “It now seems like we’re facing more organized, angry opposition to these policies that is much more informed as a part of the national political debate and dependent for its arguments and its data on national right wing websites. It creates a situation where the discussion is extraordinarily tense and it’s very difficult to break through one side or the other because people are so fixed in their positions.”