How Parking Requirements Help Walmart and Hurt Small Businesses

On Black Friday, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns asked his Twitter followers to take pictures of parking lots on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The evidence they returned was pretty damning: Retailers like Walmart, Kohl’s, and Target — some compelled by mandatory parking minimums — provide way more parking than shoppers will ever demand. Marohn collected 70 pictures of wasted asphalt on this big shopping day.

In a follow-up post today, Marohn explains that a lot of the big box stores depicted in these photos are happy to have laws requiring huge expensive parking lots. It keeps the competition down: