re: Street parking

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I always assumed it was a product of an older neighborhood that has short 1-car driveways in a society where you have a minimum of 2 vehicles per household.

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You have hit the nail on the head on this in terms of Metairie and New Orleans.

First, New Orleans.

So much of New Orleans was built BEFORE the days of automobiles, and homes in many neighborhoods have no allowance for parking a car on the lot, and they HAVE to park on the street:


St. Ann Street near Bayou St. John

During the 20th century, very many New Orleanians moved out to suburban Metairie. So first of all, they were already ACCUSTOMED to parking on the street. But even so, the situation in Metairie (and other suburbs such as Chalmette and the West Bank) made it hard to NOT park on the street sometimes.

Outside of Old Metairie, the rest of Metairie was built post-WW2 (50s, 60s/70s, even 80s) generally as cheap as possible. The math worked like this:

-- Minimum lot size was 50' X 100', so that's what developers subdivided lots into.
-- Minimum setbacks were 20' front, 20' back, 5' feet on each side.
-- Builders built houses one-story (for the most part) to save money. To maximize space, they built out to the above limits, which gave you 2400 sq. ft. under roof-- a decent-sized three bedroom house.
-- Parish requires at least ONE (1) parking space behind the 20 ft. setback. IF you built out to the limits, this could be accomplished 3 ways:
(1) L-shaped front of house with open parking space not under roof;
(2) Parking under roof as a carport;
(3) garage under roof of the house.
-- Number 2 and number 3 were generally used the most. And under No. 3, basically NO ONE used the garage for car parking, just for storage and such.
-- The driveway in the 20' setback is enough to park one (1) car. The idea of having one parking space behind the 20' setback is that each house will have 2 cars, and both can park off-street.

But when people don't use garages for parking, or as their teen-age kids get their own cars, someone is invariably parking on the street, or as we can see in this example (on the left side), squeezing in a 2nd car and blocking the sidewalk:

Ithaca Street in the Bissonet Plaza neighborhood of Metairie

Littering has a lasting impact though, there’s zero negative effect caused by me parking the wrong direction on my small neighborhood street.

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Makes me want to get out and light both cars on fire.

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Now you're talking!