The United States faces two planning crises: housing has become increasingly unaffordable and most U.S. cities remain automobile dependent. Both of these can at least partly be attributed to parking policy. The widespread practice of bundling parking in rent costs obscures the true cost of parking for car-owners, while also imposing additional costs on households who do not own vehicles. While scholars have focused on the costs and travel behavior effects of bundled parking, they have paid less attention to how bundled parking affects decision-making in housing searches.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Los Angeles renters, a text analysis of approximately 52,000 LA Craigslist rental listings from 2006 to 2025, and a randomized survey experiment with 387 California renters, I find that 1) a listing with bundled parking increases stated likelihood of future car ownership among car-free renters, supporting the idea that the widespread practice of bundled parking has causal effects on vehicle-ownership intentions; 2) parking arrangements are rarely disclosed, suggesting bundled parking functions as an undisclosed marketing default; and 3) framing parking as an add-on cost rather than as a discount from a parking-inclusive rent leads significantly more car-owning renters to opt out of parking, demonstrating that the framing of the same economic decision can shift renter behavior. Together, these findings show that bundled parking obfuscates a significant component of car ownership costs in the housing search process and that this encourages increased and sustained vehicle ownership.