I agree with the article's overall thesis, but the example used -- Hartford, CT -- wasn't convincing. Having lived in Hartford and knowing quite a bit about the history there, I think the proliferation of parking was just another symptom rather than the cause of the urban decline.
The downtown core had already fallen into decline when the Interstate got punched through and when most of those parking lots got created; the Interstate (I-84) was a very conscious form of "urban renewal."
The elephant in the room is the phenomenon usually called "white flight" -- there was a sort of positive feedback loop created by the introduction of the automobile after WWII, where people who could afford cars discovered that they could live outside the cities where there was more room, and as they did so the urban core areas become less desirable places for people with means to live. This fed on itself, until the urban core areas became economic and racial ghettos, and the surburbanites started demanding big freeways so they could get in and out to work more easily. Those freeways were constructed by bulldozing the ghettos, sometimes with ill-concealed racism.
That pattern was a big part of what occurred in Hartford, which until very recently was a place that people from the surrounding areas just didn't go except to work, buy drugs, or catch the occasional Whalers game (and not enough of the latter). That is starting to change, or so I've heard, but slowly.
But it's not like the parking lots caused the decline; the parking lots were only created after things had already started to go downhill. They represented a sort of coup de grace to cities, since they oftentimes involved bulldozing beautiful buildings the likes of which will probably never be rebuilt, but they were a predictable effect after the people with money and influence departed for the suburbs.
Parking is also one of the lowest-overhead ways to generate income from a property. Low cost to get started, and very little in the way of operating expenses and maintenance.
The downtown core had already fallen into decline when the Interstate got punched through and when most of those parking lots got created; the Interstate (I-84) was a very conscious form of "urban renewal."
The elephant in the room is the phenomenon usually called "white flight" -- there was a sort of positive feedback loop created by the introduction of the automobile after WWII, where people who could afford cars discovered that they could live outside the cities where there was more room, and as they did so the urban core areas become less desirable places for people with means to live. This fed on itself, until the urban core areas became economic and racial ghettos, and the surburbanites started demanding big freeways so they could get in and out to work more easily. Those freeways were constructed by bulldozing the ghettos, sometimes with ill-concealed racism.
That pattern was a big part of what occurred in Hartford, which until very recently was a place that people from the surrounding areas just didn't go except to work, buy drugs, or catch the occasional Whalers game (and not enough of the latter). That is starting to change, or so I've heard, but slowly.
But it's not like the parking lots caused the decline; the parking lots were only created after things had already started to go downhill. They represented a sort of coup de grace to cities, since they oftentimes involved bulldozing beautiful buildings the likes of which will probably never be rebuilt, but they were a predictable effect after the people with money and influence departed for the suburbs.