With a distinguished history and at least two and a half million people, Brooklyn likes to proclaim itself “a real city,” one that would be the nation’s second largest – well actually the fourth largest – if only it hadn’t merged with New York City in 1898.

How ironic and sad then, that the borough where I live often comports itself like a distant suburb of shopping malls and subdivisions, seeking to keep newcomers out while in contrast accommodating new automobiles as much as possible. While there are many ways the borough does this, in the interest of brevity this article will focus on only one of these: parking. I focus on Brooklyn here because its policies and situation are particularly poignant, but the argument applies to all boroughs and many parts of Manhattan.

Here’s the problem: New York City in its zoning codes essentially requires all new buildings, whether residential or commercial, to provide parking spaces for their denizens. The City basically has a sliding scale of parking requirements, with more parking required the less dense the zoning area is. Only in the Manhattan core is this requirement completely lifted. This policy has the most impact in places like Jackson Heights in Queens, or Crown Heights in Brooklyn, places that are at a crossroads and set to become either more urban or suburban in character as new development increases.

The parking requirement follows the theory that new buildings generate new demand for parking, and so the businesses should provide that parking. While this theory is flawed even in the suburbs, it’s particularly so in a dense urban city equipped with mass transit and good sidewalks.

What apparently most people don’t realize is that the more parking you provide, the more cars there will be on the street. Period. Parking breeds automobiles. By requiring the construction of parking, the city is essentially ordering that automobile use be subsidized. And by promoting parking construction, the city is helping break up the urban fabric and making its mass transit system, on which billions of public money is spent annually, less workable.

The city should scrap its parking requirements. An even better, more pro-active, policy would be to put a cap on the number of spaces a developer can provide. Essentially, this would impose a parking maximum on new construction, rather than a parking minimum, which is what we have now.

As a way of taming streets, controlling parking has a lot to be said for it. As Josh Brustein of Streetsblog.com pointed out recently in a three-part series on parking there, New York City does not need state authority to control parking. That’s not the case with more publicized efforts, worthy though they may be, like congestion pricing. New York City could substantially reduce traffic and make streets more pedestrian-friendly by implementing market-rate parking on the streets and implementing caps on the amount of new parking that can be constructed. As an additional agenda item, it could copy Copenhagen and start a policy of actively reducing the total number of parking spaces a few percentage points each year.

Absent policies such as these, we are likely to see a rise in hostility toward new residents. This is unfortunate. Although I am personally critical of many aspects of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, I was dismayed to read a recent op-ed by the novelist Jennifer Egan in The New York Times who, despite some excellent points, often sounded like the quintessentially suburban citizen as she criticized the project on the grounds that it would bring a rise in population to the borough, and thus more problems with traffic and parking. She apparently failed to see that if the state and city insisted that the project not provide parking, much of these problems would be eliminated.

The Atlantic Yards project is set to provide about 4,000 parking spaces, or the equivalent of a 40-story parking garage as big around as the World Trade Center. This includes a controversial “temporary” surface parking lot for about 1000 cars that would be in place for a decade or more. Since these spaces will be used multiple times, that means many thousands of additional cars on the streets of Brooklyn, and an urban fabric that has been torn rather than mended.

But with good policies and good urban design, the influx of new people into Brooklyn and other boroughs can improve, not degrade the overall quality of life. Unlike automobile-based suburbs, urban cities generally work better with more people in them. More people means more money for more public services, from mass transit to better sidewalks. While our streets are at capacity for cars, they have plenty of room for more pedestrians and cyclists. Our mass transit system, given decent funding, also can easily be stretched to accommodate newcomers, especially in the boroughs. Imagine if instead of requiring developers to build parking, we required them to fund the mass transit system that their residents would use?

The city needs to reevaluate its policies toward parking. Through this tool alone, the city could make the streets more livable and in the process make newcomers more welcome.