Los Angeles has over 100 square miles of surface parking. That’s almost one-quarter of the city’s entire size. For scale, imagine Manhattan multiplied by a little over four, and you have a sense of how much land L.A. reserves for cars to sit.

The problems with America’s love of cars and the space devoted to storing them are well-documented. In the entire country, New York is the only city that has more households than parking spots. Elsewhere, the ratio is skewed. Jackson, Wyoming, for instance, has 27.1 parking spaces per household. Los Angeles, like many other cities, has strict minimum parking requirements attached to buildings: Each residential unit must come with around two off-street parking spots, and for every 100 square feet of commercial space built, a developer also has to provide for one off-street parking space.

What else could be done with all that space?

The architecture firm Woods Bagot decided to investigate the latter in a new study, called More LA, which it recently presented to designers and residents of the city. In More LA, Woods Bagot quantifies the amount of space parking eats up in L.A., and asks the following questions: “What if L.A.’s miles of parking could be unlocked for more productive urban uses? What if they could be repurposed–for affordable and market-rate housing, for ground-level retail, for community and cultural uses, or landscaped open space, or other more economically and socially valuable activities?” (You can give feedback to these questions via an interactive model of the city that Woods Bagot developed for the study.)

Los Angeles, says Woods Bagot CEO Nik Karalis, “has an important role in urban history as this sort of postwar utopia where you could have the perfect house and a car–but it just kept sprawling and sprawling.” In the middle of the 20th century, car transportation became the norm, and as more and more people fled for the suburbs, leaving cities relatively empty, the amount of space given to vehicles felt like an asset, not an issue. Now, though, more people are moving into cities, and fewer young people are opting to own cars. If they get around by car, they’re choosing to hail a Lyft or Uber, or opting for car-share or a subscription–all models that keep vehicles moving, rather than idling in parking spots. L.A.’s parking-centric design feels impractical and outdated. But now, Karalis says, the city “presents the perfect prototype of how we can reverse that trend, and enable people to enjoy their so-called utopian ideals, but in the context of a more densified city.”

Converting surface parking lots in Los Angeles, the Woods Bagot found, could create space for 750,000 to 1.5 million new inhabitants. This new density help Los Angeles address its homelessness issue, which has grown more extreme in recent years due to lack of housing and high cost of living. And welcoming this many more people could help boost the city’s economy in the form of more filled jobs, and more taxpayers to fund issues like homelessness.

Often, plans to eradicate parking elicit pushback. Business owners sometimes balk, thinking that exchanging parking for more space for pedestrians or cyclists, for instance, will result in a decline of customers. But usually, the reverse effect holds true–more space for people, not cars, is generally beneficial for local economies.