Intimately connected to freeway infrastructure, the parking lot emerged as a key signifier of mid-century anomie West Coast-style; desolate but functional and even futuristic, the surface parking lot became a polyvalent sign of the modern city. Both urban and suburban municipalities began to require that new construction account for widespread dependency on cars — a stipulation that often remains in force in the present day. As Michael Manville and Donald Shoup put it, “new development is contingent on the creation of new parking, and so although all cities have a shortage of streets and freeway space … many have a surplus of parking.” 34 Moreover, as major transformations of the built environment, freeways and interstate highways established in the postwar years tended to generate both fanfare and protest. Surface parking lots, in comparison, were (and still are) built much more frequently, gaining at best minor recognition. “Parking lots were parking lots,” write Jakle and Sculle. “For the most part they existed not so much from building something new as by demolishing something old.” 35 Jane Jacobs called parking lots “border vacuums” — bleak spaces that nullify urban form. As the 1960s dawned, the parking lot was emerging as the ultimate manifestation of spatial clearance, cleansing, and removal — of permanent temporariness in cities. 36
An area that had been notorious for human overcrowding was soon overpopulated by parking lots.
West Oakland lost a total of nearly 14,000 residents between 1960 and 1966; 8,000 units were razed. 37 Three-quarters of the 8,000 demolished dwellings had been occupied by low-income, mostly Black people. 38 Contributing to this reduction in housing density, Oakland zoning after 1961 performed exactly as Manville and Shoup describe, requiring that all new apartments provide one off-street parking space per unit. As a result, “the land was suddenly burdened with a new requirement to provide parking that residents did not pay for.” 39 The number of units per acre fell by 30 percent; land values fell by 33 percent, and property-tax revenues and construction investment declined proportionally. As substandard housing was removed from West Oakland, still more vacant lots were left behind — and a portion of these remained unbuilt, converted into surface parking lots for a new population of commuters from the East Bay suburbs. An area that had been notorious for human overcrowding was soon overpopulated by parking lots.
Urban renewal, then, intensified the precarity of Black life in West Oakland. Black labor had been key to Oakland’s wartime emergence as an industrial powerhouse. But, as state and federal governments poured funds into the advancement of White suburbanization, the urban core was left to decay, a polluted pavement-scape littered with vacant parcels, surface parking lots, and unfinished projects — industrial carcasses, scars.