Hello, and welcome to the parking episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and
finance news of the week.
I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.
Hello, hello.
I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times and other such places.
Hello.
And we are here with Henry Graber of Slate.
Welcome, Henry.
Thanks for having me.
Henry, you have written the book about parking.
Introduce yourself and what is your book?
I'm Henry.
I am the author of Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World, and well, the book does
just that.
The book is, I hope, one of those books that take something boring and banal that you've
never really thought twice about and enforces you to examine it a little more closely and
ultimately causes you to have an epiphany sell your car and ride a bike.
We are going to talk all about parking on this show with you and why if you are listening
to this show in your car and in the back of your head you're worrying about whether you'll
be able to find a convenient free parking spot that might not be the most perfect and ideal
solution in terms of the planet and the city.
We are also, of course, going to talk about Coinbase and Binance and the SEC and what is
happening to the crypto universe because that happened this week.
It's all coming up on Slate Money.
Hey everybody, it's Tim Heidecker, you know me, Tim and Eric Bridesmaid's and Fantastic
Four.
I'd like to personally invite you to listen to Office Hours Live with me and my co-hosts
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No.
Crypto meltdown.
Felix, what's the latest?
It's a good song.
It's a meltdown.
It's that wonderful feeling of crypto melting all over your hands in the summer heat.
We love it.
We love to see it.
So yeah, the latest is that the Securities and Exchange Commission basically took aim
at the two biggest exchanges that are left standing in the wake of the implosion of FTX.
And the SEC is saying something which it has been saying quite consistently for some
months now, but it's now saying it in the form of an official complaint that both of
them are operating illegal securities exchanges and they're not allowed to do that.
And so now they're being sued by the SEC and no one likes to be sued by the SEC.
Basically what they're saying is that crypto exchanges are illegal.
It's the long and short of it.
And realistically speaking, if cryptos exchanges are illegal and if they're illegal in the
United States, then it's really hard to make crypto exchanges that are not available
to Americans and no one really wants to try and do that because Americans have a lot
of money, then it's hard to use crypto at all.
Like the whole crypto ecosystem starts looking like it's not really worth very much.
And so what the SEC is doing here, at least in my view, is really trying to kill crypto.
The SEC and its complaint against Coinbase named a lot of different tokens and said they
were unregistered securities, but they didn't name Bitcoin or Ethereum.
I think the name of the token is Ethereum.
Those are presumably okay to trade still and exchange.
It looks as though Bitcoin and there's been this sort of semi-public agreement between
the CFC and the SEC that the CFC, the commodities and futures trading commission, will worry about
Bitcoin and Ethereum while the SEC is going to worry about all of the other coins.
So yeah, the SEC is not claiming the Bitcoin and Ethereum as securities.
So then I mean, in a way, is this what the SEC doing is sort of forcing this world back
to where it was like before the bubble, like people will still trade Bitcoin and Ethereum
and it'll be like DeFi, there won't be these corporate exchanges like Coinbase, but the
market will sort of go on in just in a new, different, smaller way.
It's not like crypto is going to go away or something.
So yes, you're absolutely right, the crypto isn't going away.
There are DeFi exchanges which aren't really even owned by anyone, so no one knows how
you could sue them even if what they were doing was illegal.
And as you say, people will continue to own and trade Bitcoin and Ethereum, although
they will have to do so in ways that the CFC is comfortable with and it's not entirely
obvious what the CFC is going to be comfortable with.
If you want to do this legally, then maybe you can create an exchange that only trades Bitcoin
and Ethereum, although even then you need to get on the good side of the CFC and it's
not clear what the CFC is going to require, but it's going to be a lot harder, it's going
to be a lot clunkier, the great dream of this parallel payment system that is just going
to seamlessly enter our lives in all manner of different ways and we're going to be
meta-versing it up and going in and out of crypto all the time doesn't seem to be likely
anymore.
Well, we should also mention the exchanges have had a long time to kind of think about
those and anticipate that the SEC was going to do exactly what they did.
Coinbase and Binance had different approaches to it and there's a great quote from Binance's
CCO from December 18 where he's talking to another compliance officer and he just
says point blank, we are operating as a f***ing and licensed securities exchange in the
USA, bro, and you know, I think Coinbase is sort of taking the approach that they're being
very upfront about what they're doing, you know, they're making the requisite disclosures
and then Binance's strategy is to just build big chunk of the company offshore and try
to just stay out of the US markets as much as they can.
And I don't think it's right at all to say that Coinbase is making the requisite disclosures.
Coinbase, there are no requisite disclosures, so this isn't the kind of thing where you
can make a disclosure and that's not all that's required.
What is required is that you are a licensed securities dealer if you're going to be dealing
in securities and they are not licensed securities dealer.
Coinbase is dealing in way more of these unlicensed securities than Binance's in the United
States, like orders of magnitude more.
And Coinbase is really the one that was thumbing its nose at the SEC and saying we are an unlicensed
securities exchange in the United States, come at us, we are so big you're not going
to and that wound up being false, like they are big and the SEC came at them.
I really believe that Binance was more careful to try and stay out of the United States as
much as possible.
Yes, they were doing things in the United States.
Yes, for the really big American clients, they were saying can you please create offshore
entities that are allowed to trade on Binance.com and they tried to get around the fact that
what they were doing was legal in the United States and they knew that what they were doing
in legal was legal in the United States, but so did Coinbase.
Coinbase knew this all along as well.
What's been very clear for a long time is that there has been no real way for a crypto
exchange to operate legally in America.
I mean, maybe Robin Hood, if it only deals in Bitcoin and Ethereum and Dogecoin, might
be able, and it is a licensed securities dealer, maybe someone like Robin Hood might be
able to get through, but in general, if you're a crypto exchange, the SEC is not going
to license you as a securities dealer and it's going to say that so long as you're not
a securities dealer, you're not allowed to do this.
This is why I'm saying that what they're trying to do is just make the whole thing illegal.
Why?
What took the SEC so long?
They let Coinbase, and you can explain that this is a different part of the SEC, but they
let Coinbase become a public company.
They have all these customers in the US.
They've been operating this way for years now.
It's so disruptive to do regulation this way, to try and sue it, to shut down an illegal
business.
Why not get it when it starts?
I don't understand the overall strategy, and besides you've had Coinbase saying publicly,
at least, make rules for us, so this is the response, I don't quite understand.
When I was talking about disclosures, I'm referring to Coinbase as a public company.
They did have to disclose a lot of things to the SEC in the process of getting listed.
It seems like that would have been a better time to decide that it's an illegal exchange.
It's not as if Coinbase was obscuring what their business model was.
Right.
Yeah.
No, there's no doubt.
Defend it.
Coinbase was always very open about what it was doing.
The SEC, especially after Gary Gensler came in, has always been very clear about what
they're doing as illegal.
Then everyone's just been waiting for this shoe to drop.
You're right.
One of the arguments that Coinbase has made over and over again to the point of being
quite tiresome, frankly, is this one of why did you allow us to go public if you thought
that what we were doing was illegal?
I mean, it's a good point.
How is it not a good point?
Well, there's two different things going on.
Number one is there's big bold letters on the front of the S1, if the IPO prospects
are saying that the SEC has not approved these securities and any attempt to say otherwise
is a criminal offense.
That's the very first page of the prospectus.
If you just page a few pages into the risk factors part of it, they say very clearly, we
are in a regulatory grey zone.
Regulators could come at us at any time and there is a chance the regulators will decide
that what we're doing is illegal and just shut us down.
That is 100% disclosed in the prospectus for the stock, right?
And anyone who buys the stock buys the stock in the knowledge of that risk factor and knowing
that that is a risk.
There is a long history of companies doing things that are illegal and saying, you know what,
eventually we're just going to work out a way for this to become legal.
Uber being a really prime example, right?
What they did was basically illegal everywhere and then the way they dealt with it was by eventually
changing the law to allow what they wanted to happen to be legal.
Another really good example is when Citigroup bought Salamons with Bunny, they weren't allowed
to do that, but they were like, don't worry about it, we're going to change the law and
then they changed the law and that allowed their acquisition to happen.
So the SEC, in general, companies do a bunch of things and they can, as Elizabeth says,
like they're making the disclosures, they're saying like what we're doing is in a regulatory
grey zone at best and what we want, and they've been very, very open about this all along,
what we want is precisely what you're saying, Emily, which is a bunch of rules that will
allow us to do what we are doing within the law.
And what we are hoping for, and the investment thesis for Coinbase was always that eventually
Congress would get around to making some kind of a law that would make Coinbase legal.
And then FTX imploded and after FTX imploded, there was clearly no appetite within
Congress to make that kind of a law.
And I think that is really the answer to your question, is that the SEC was kind of waiting
to see whether Congress would make this legal, because it would be kind of mean to attack
Coinbase for doing something illegal if the Congress was about to make it legal.
Whereas after FTX, it became obvious that there was no way that Congress was going to make
laws saying that, oh yeah, crypto exchanges, they're great.
And at that point, that's an effectively agreed light to the SEC saying, okay, now you can
file this suit.
Right. And I think there's a broader the way American businesses regulated tends to be
just like what you were saying Felix, like more like Wild West, like go for it, try things
out, and the way we'll figure it out later is with lawsuits.
I think that's how a lot of things work in the U.S. and like for companies, it usually
works to their advantage, but I guess in this case, maybe not.
I think we're at SEC that's especially a preferred mode of operation because they're just
understaffed.
And so everything is regulation by enforcement after the fall.
Well, it's also the fact that the SEC doesn't make rules.
Congress makes rules.
So the SEC can't just come out unilaterally and say, here are the rules for how to become
a licensed securities exchange attorney if you're a crypto company, right?
Congress needs to do that.
And Congress is basically incapable of doing that, especially now after FDX.
I don't think it's really fair to blame the SEC for that.
That's so interesting.
If the crypto industry goes under, it's like partly Congress's fault for not supporting
it in a way.
Yeah.
Or, you know, it's Congress, you know, the flip side view of it is that Congress has realized
that the crypto has no social utility, and in fact, can be quite harmful.
And they're quite happy for it to be illegal, and they're quite happy for the SEC to crack
down on it.
So this is all kind of Sandbankman Freed's fault, I think, actually, right?
I mean, if he hadn't done primings, alleged primings and frauds, then the industry wouldn't
look so bad.
I think that's right.
And like Felix said, if FDX happened making it less palatable to do any kind of regulation,
so he kind of like screwed it.
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So, Henry, congratulations on the book.
We've been getting reviews all over the place.
People love to talk about parking because it is something that Americans think about a lot.
What's the general reaction been?
I think a lot of people have never really thought that hard about this subject.
So, I think once you begin to see parking for what it is, is this giant nationwide subsidy
for car ownership?
It does have the potential to produce a kind of epiphany and explain the way the environment looks.
That's what I hope would happen with the book.
And I'm pleased to see that that's happening for some people.
And, of course, other people say, screw you.
You don't understand anything.
Whatever.
Go back to Brooklyn.
So, the general thesis of the book is that we spend not only enormous amounts of money,
but even enormous amounts of space.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is more space devoted to parking spots in America than there is devoted to housing human beings.
Is that right?
Is that normal?
Do you see that in the rest of the planet?
Or is that a uniquely American thing?
I think America is an outlier when it comes to parking.
We have created an absolutely enormous amount of parking, both in terms of the street space that's dedicated to it.
And also in terms of the amount of parking that's folded into homes and offices and stores and all that stuff.
And I think, in fact, parking, one of the funny things about parking that I learned running a parking book is that as much as you think that nobody pays any attention to parking in daily life or thinks about it,
actually most professionals also don't pay any attention to parking, including architects, engineers, transportation planners.
I mean, it's just no one even knows how many parking spaces there are in New York City, for example, which you would think would be pretty low-hanging fruit since the land is worth more than anywhere else on Earth, but no one's bothered to count them.
So that's a long way of saying that I can't say for sure that America is an absolute outlier in these terms, but certainly many other countries have more progressive policies when it comes to allocating space for parking and for other things.
I was looking into the parking situation for some specific buildings, wherever I live in downtown Manhattan.
And I happened to know the architect of the big federal courthouse downtown.
And I was interested in how much parking that has, like just in the basement of the building, so I asked him.
And he had no idea, because as you say, this is a complete afterthought for architects. They don't care about this kind of thing.
They really don't. I talked to a garage owner who was telling me that he just hates working with architects because they don't think about parking at all.
And in fact, they don't teach parking in architecture school. And if you go to an architecture school, you'll see all the designers coming to their crits with these beautiful little models of pretty little apartment buildings and pretty little houses, and they never include any parking.
And it's just like, hello, you realize when you go into the real world, like that's going to be the first thing on this site, like throw throw it all out, throw out everything you've done here.
Unless you're working in lower Manhattan or Cambridge, Massachusetts, parking is going to be the first thing that you figure out how to put on this site before you do any designing at all.
You had a stat in the book, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but just to give people a sense of scale, I think you said there are three parking spots. Was it for every person or every car?
Three per car is considered the minimum, the baseline of how many parking spots there are in the country, three per car. And of course, some of those cars are in motion, so there's always a little bit extra.
You were saying earlier, Henry, and Felix, we have more parking spaces than housing for people yet.
Why can't I ever find a spot? But Henry's book answers the question, and it's all to do with the pricing of the parking, because it's for some reason free.
Is that kind of the market mechanism here that makes no sense?
Free parking has a huge distorting effect on how people use and own cars. And this has been shown in study after study after study, like there was a great study of people who received housing through an affordable housing lottery in San Francisco.
And so it was a pretty basically a random selection of people who applied for the affordable housing lottery.
And what you saw was that the people who wound up in apartment buildings with free parking included were way more likely to own cars in the people who wound up in apartment buildings without parking included.
And what that shows is that having parking is a huge subsidy and incentive towards car ownership. And that's true both in terms of the parking that's included in the buildings, and it's also true of the parking on the streets.
So if you're thinking about how to control the amount of traffic and how to control demand for parking, building more parking usually isn't the solution because you create you create more incentives for car ownership.
And then also obviously the more parking you build, the more you create an environment where people really have to drive because it pushes things further and further apart. And also creates at a block by block level, a place where you don't really want to walk around.
And then obviously you can control so much of this with with parking meters. But for whatever reason, cities haven't really gotten into into using meters in that way to control the flow of traffic.
Yeah, they're not popular. And I think that's in part because they are perceived as a kind of sneaky money making tool.
And residents aren't entirely wrong when they see the way that cities approach parking as not being about proper street management, but rather being about like extracting as much money from motorists as possible.
And so it would be nice to try and reset that that relationship because I think that actually parking meters are the only tool we have to control this precious interface between the streets and the buildings, which is the curb.
And if you don't have meters, you don't really have that many options for how to control how long people park, whether they park, etc.
And so it's a it's a really immensely valuable tool and one that's unfortunately, I think fallen into, you know, a period of mistrust and misuse.
So I have two questions about that, Henry, like you have an amazingly good chapter explaining the fiasco that was the Chicago for a parking meter privatization and I can highly recommend everyone read that to explain.
First of all, like just how much money potentially is in parking meters and also how governments, especially in the Chicago case, seem to be incredibly bad of capturing that money for themselves.
My question is like, is there a city in America? I guess San Francisco, you said, is started to do me to parking pretty well.
And more to the point, when you say that it's true that people are moving towards using these things more as a revenue generation tool than the parking mat than the traffic management tool.
Those two not aligned, like, isn't there a glorious sort of free market solution here that the thing that maximizes parking me to revenue is also going to maximize the flow of traffic.
That's a great question, right, because you would think that you raise the meter prices enough and you clear out a spot, you know, if you raise the prices enough, you have a free spot on every block.
Then everybody who wants to drive somewhere has a parking spot immediately when they arrive and they understand that the busiest high access blocks with the shops and the offices and the restaurants are more expensive.
And then the block sorted by the freeway that's a little further away as little cheaper and there's a space on every block and the prices are coordinated and all that.
And I agree with you, that is designing your parking meter system to optimize for good street management.
But here's the thing about revenue, most revenue in cities comes not from parking meters, but from parking violations.
And so, in a funny sense, if you're trying to maximize the amount of money you bring in from parking, it is not in your interest to create a place for everyone to park the moment they need to park.
Actually, the way to make the most money possible from street parking is to encourage lots and lots of illegal parking and then to ticket those people.
And just to underline the extent to which this is the case, I brought you guys some numbers from New York City, which I will read to you.
The largest category of fines in New York City is parking violations. They make up 60% of the city's fine revenue.
And in fiscal year 2015, that was $560 million. And would anyone like to guess how much money comes from meters and public garages put together?
$1 billion.
No, this is a subset of the $560 million.
No, it's a different number, but it's smaller.
Oh, it's a different number, but it's smaller.
But smaller. $250 million.
That's pretty close. It's $200 million.
So let me rephrase that really, really crisply. You have New York City gets $560 million from parking violations and just $200 million from meters and garages put together.
So they're making almost three times as much money from illegal parking as they are from legal parking.
And to me, that demonstrates that the city has a kind of incentive in a really dark way, not to reform the system, because they're just cranking out the cash from all this double parking.
And obviously that has a lot of externalities, including life sucking traffic congestion, which probably has a huge economic, brings a huge economic penalty as well.
But as far as the city coffers are concerned, legal parking is good business.
And this in a city where illegal parking is, it goes unfind and unpunished and astonishing degree of the time, as again, you write in the book.
Right.
So in New York City, they could, if they were, if they, for example, decided to make a move like, for example, Paris or many East Asian cities and use LPR license plate recognition, which is when you have a car that looks sort of like the Google Street View van, drives down the block, has a camera on the top, scans all the license plates, figures out, cross checks that against the meter payments, figures out who's in violation, who's not issues the ticket in the mail, you could probably double that.
Triple that revenue. But the city doesn't want to do that. I think in part because there's a sense that the political backlash would be so extreme.
Like you couldn't, if you were to actually punish everybody for every illegal parking violation, I think as a, as a PBA had Pat Lynch put it once, like you could, you could house house and feed all the homeless in New York City or something like that.
You didn't have to take it in a lot of cops to you.
As Elizabeth says, like the, the main people who would be paying those extra time fines would be cops and they hate paying funds.
Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, it's not just cops, right? It's like all public sector workers and we were talking earlier about how parking incentivizes driving and if you give away free parking more people will drive.
And I just want to share with you this great study, which is relevant to this, which is that a study of New York City concluded that if government workers,
drove at the same rate as private sector employees, nearly 20,000 fewer cars would enter Manhattan every day.
And that was a study from 2006. So we're talking about placard abuse is not only about policemen parking in front of hydrants and parking on your sidewalk.
But it is also about adding, you know, give or take 25,000 cars to the traffic congestion in Manhattan every day.
But let's, let's move this away from New York City for a minute and just talk about like the broad mass of America because Manhattan is obviously an outlier.
You make the case, I think quite compellingly, that the things that characterize the American streetscape and make it feel so uniquely American, the strip malls and the drive-throughs and all of that kind of thing.
Are really just a natural function and grow out of legislative parking minimums.
It's not like an American thing. It's just like someone came up with parking minimums and that's the architecture that you get when you have parking minimums.
Yeah, it's so true. When you think about the vernacular architecture that most Americans say they like most and say is what they want in their neighborhoods.
You're talking about something that we have actually made illegal to build and one of the reasons that's illegal is of course because of zoning.
But a more fundamental reason even in places that don't have zoning or have relatively permissive zoning is because of parking minimums and the need to provide parking which consumes an enormous amount of space and costs an enormous amount of money.
The average cost of a parking space in a structured parking garage in the US in 2023 is $28,000 and that obviously includes some high-cost places where it costs much more and also some low-cost places where it costs a lot less.
But I mean that's your average. So if you're thinking every space is $27,000 to build, you begin to understand why it doesn't really pencil out to build a row of brownstones or something like that.
And include all that all that parking as well. And as a result, we've sort of eliminated the potential to build places like, you know, for green and Brooklyn or Santa Monica or, you know, Bucktown and Chicago like all these neighborhoods that were built before parking requirements are actually illegal and impossible to build now.
You also talked about how arbitrary some of the minimum requirements are and what they're based on. Like there's something like, you know, one parking space per for theater seats, things like that.
Where have you seen people make more rational and, you know, common sense, I guess, decisions around how to evaluate how much parking is needed and also how valuable it is.
The requirements were originally designed to help cities adapt to meet suburban standards for parking. And so they were very much designed to provide enough parking to suit locations where people would have no choice but to come by car.
And when those requirements were imposed on the city, obviously a lot of that parking ended up going unused because some people still came by bus or by train or they walked or they wrote a bike or whatever where they just parked on the street a couple blocks away into their errands.
And, and so that has been kind of a disaster for cities of the last 70 years to impose these suburban land use types on what had once been pretty dense and tightly knit urban neighborhoods.
Now, there is a lot of reform happening right now and perhaps the most fundamental one is just to say, it's no longer the government's job to tell you how many parking spaces you need.
If you think that the people renting your apartments are going to want two spaces per unit, then you build two spaces per unit. And if you think they would rather save that money and figure out where to park their car after they rent the apartment, then you could build that way and let your tenants figure it out later.
And I think actually that is a subject that's an idea that has a tremendous amount of potential right now because we are seeing so many central business districts that are no longer as full as they were before before the pandemic.
And one of the things that that's created is an enormous surplus of structured parking. And so one of the things that happened in Los Angeles when they reformed their parking rules downtown is developers renovated historic buildings into apartments.
People moved in, there wasn't enough parking in the buildings, but people parked their cars in the office garages that were a couple blocks away. And that's a kind of beautiful symbiotic thing that we could really be doing now in every downtown with all this unused office garage space.
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Can we just briefly talk about what happened in Chicago actually I mean Felix touched on it before but I it's just I was just amazed by the story and I think your book.
Kind of sent it viral because someone before I even got to the chapter in the book someone said to me did you know Chicago souls all their parking meters and I was like I don't understand what that even means.
And then I read the chapter and now I kind of understand what it means but maybe you could explain.
They certainly didn't understand what they did it. In 2008 Chicago was in the midst of a frenzy of privatization of public assets Richard daily was trying to privatize all sorts of stuff that the city owned that he thought the private sector could manage better and in addition that the city could get a paycheck from selling off or renting out those assets.
And in 2008 he tried to do that with the city's 36,000 parking meters he got a bid from a group of investors led by Morgan Stanley.
They offered Chicago 1.15 billion dollars in exchange for 75 years of control of the city's parking meters and Chicago took that deal deal took effect at the beginning of 2009.
And I think everyone agrees it has pretty much been a disaster for Chicago.
So it's been a disaster partly because they just got way less money than it was worth and they the Morgan Stanley group wound up getting its billion dollars back almost immediately and they hiked up meter rates much more than maybe the city would have done on its own and no one realized at the time how much they were going to hike them.
But more to the point and this is I think the most compelling part of your chapter they made it impossible for the city to use that meter parking space for any other higher bed to use because anytime you want to do that you have to pay Morgan Stanley a huge amount of money for some imaginary amount of money that they think they might be able to make from that space otherwise.
Yeah and this is the part that they really didn't see coming I mean you could argue that they didn't see the they certainly didn't understand how much the meters were worth because like many American cities they made more money from parking meter violations.
Then they made from the meters themselves and so when it came to evaluating how much people would pay for the meters they'd never really thought seriously about that question because for them parking revenue was mostly from parking tickets and not from parking meters.
But of course Morgan Stanley had no trouble crunching the numbers and saying you know what garages are this amount of money so streets could probably be priced at a higher rate and the city knew this was going to happen I mean it was no mystery how Morgan Stanley would make money from their parking meters they were clearly going to raise the rates and the city later argued that.
Well we didn't have the political we couldn't have done it you know only a private company could have withstood the political backlash here but you know there were ways around that they could have you know they could have sold bonds that were tied to meter revenue for example and that would have been a way of locking in higher meter revenue in the future.
But still making sure that that money came into city coffers and and that's obviously not the case now but I think Felix you're right that the the hidden consequence here was that when it came time to try and adapt Chicago streets and build for example bus lanes bike lanes open streets farmers markets take your day parades and now electric vehicle charging.
They have very little option with a lot of these big commercial corridors because those are earmarked for meters and the meter money is earmarked for CPM LLC Chicago parking meters LLC which is the Morgan Stanley created entity that that collects that money and every time the city wants to do something with one of those spaces it has to find a new space to meter that it can consider to have equivalent value and that's that's a pretty difficult task because they kind of already did them all you know.
So yeah they've basically given up control and the most inscrutable part of this is that they gave up control for 75 years and so like we're 15 years into this deal the investors have already made their money back and then some.
And there are still 60 years to go it's really a compelling case study for why privatization is bad like it shows pretty clearly like even if you get a bunch of money upfront to give away the crown jewels of your city or your state.
Or whatever it's not worth losing the control like the control is the power it's not just about money also the most appalling piece of that story to me was the fact that.
Daily's administration was arguing that if this deal didn't go through they were going to have a budget shortfall that year which is just a crazy reason to do it.
And when the five people voted against it the alderman who tried to investigate the deal you know we're given two days to look at leasing agreement.
Yeah we're absolutely for 75 year deal right they were definitely there was some brow beating involved and obviously you know the Chicago board of alderman is is no one's idea of America's finest political body but even then they said this was many people said this was their worst decision in their career.
Their decades long career is alderman was selling off the parking meters.
I would I would love to take this opportunity because I think the the opportunity cost of selling off the parking meters is something that only really became clear in the last three years I think a lot has changed in the last three years and yours is the first.
Major parking book to come out post pandemic and is see and this is I guess maybe the hopeful but also the most complex part of the book which is.
How are cities changing and how is zoning changing and how is parking changing and how did the pandemic play into that and how did the pandemic change the way we think about parking.
That is a very big question I want to point to two things that I think we're underway before the pandemic that have created a sense of momentum around.
Parking as a subject of activism and interest and you now have an addition to the followers of professor don chup the chupistas you have a group called the parking reform network which is dedicated to making these kinds of changes in cities which is to say.
Pricing parking properly and ending parking requirements that that mandate all this parking at every site and I think the two reasons that this has been happening over the last let's say five six 10 years.
Number one is the housing crisis and there's a growing awareness that parking is expensive it takes up room it imposes a challenging condition for many small in fill developers and housing is just more important than parking right now.
And that the requirement to provide parking has served as a serious in position and a serious cost on our ability to provide housing and.
That sense of activism around housing has taken a lot of forms obviously the yes in my backyard movement is a big part of it but parking there seems like perhaps the lowest hanging fruit and also is a point where there you actually witness people taking advantage of this arbitrage in real time people living in domestic garages right like an accessory dwelling units which has been underway for decades but the number of people who have decided to turn garages into auxiliary housing units.
Might be in the millions we we don't really know and then on a more tragic note obviously people living in parking spaces in their cars and you know because we have failed to provide enough housing in this country because we have limits on how much housing we can build in any given spot but we have succeeded in providing an ample amount of parking because we have minimum requirements for how much parking is required everywhere.
So the activism around housing is part of the reform movement around parking and then the second thing is climate and the realization that our transportation policy is well the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and also comes with another number of other externalities including you know local particular pollution automobile crashes sort of degraded quality of the urban environment and all that stuff and I think parking is is obviously front and center when you think about trying to reform that.
One thing that struck me in your book early on you tell a story of this developer was trying to build affordable housing in California and she had all these difficulties because of the parking lot she wanted to build the housing on a parking lot I think and.
And you were saying a lot of the people that were upset the parking was going away it was just sort of like like dog whistle arguments that were kind of racist basically because it was a fancy beach side town.
And it would have been a affordable housing and there are a few people saying like if you're you know poor people don't deserve to live by the beach or or just using parking requirements as sort of a way to keep certain kinds of people out of neighborhoods and I was wondering like if if the parking requirements go away those same arguments will surface in other ways like it's just a way it's just a strategy for the same old American story you know of redlining whatever it is.
Yeah, I think it's obviously you're never going to think that I have the power to change people's minds about being prejudiced about new neighbors right but I think what we can do is we can see clearly the choices that are being made when we insist on parking as a condition for new housing because I think those people in Salana Beach are almost like caricatures of the American neighborhood meeting in terms of the way that people will bring up parking.
As a way to stop people from moving in but I think it is true more broadly that Americans often think of the potential new neighbors moving into their neighborhood as coming in parking sized packages and they perceive them as an automatic threat to their to their free on street parking that they've been entitled to for years and you know one argument you could make is well that means we should require parking with new developments so that people will just.
Allow new things to get built but as I hope my book demonstrates that policy comes with a tremendous cost as well and I think in terms of how to get neighbors to to come around the idea that they're their new neighbors don't necessarily have to encroach on their public parking supply mean that that's the challenge right that's that's the big challenge that these activists face I don't think there's an easy answer to that but I think we can at least be really clear about the cost that this demand for parking.
Imposes on our ability to build housing in the places where people need it most yeah certainly people would rather have affordable housing than like homeless people you know like living in parking lots where that instead that's a great example of reframing the trade off right like.
And this is you see this argument around the environment to people say well we don't want more people in our neighborhood because we like our neighborhood being low density and green and it's good for the environment it's like well think a little bit larger like expand your horizon a little bit and realize that when people don't live in your neighborhood and when they don't have.
Close access to jobs and amenities and they don't live in a place where they can ride their bike to a restaurant or grocery store they're going to end up living in the urban wildland interface zone where their house is going to be vulnerable to forest fires and they're going to have to drive 60 miles to get to work every day and that is the choice you're making when you tell people that they can't live in your neighborhood and I think that's true of the parking housing situation as well like yeah okay.
Might be a little more difficult to park but the trade off you face is there's going to be somebody living in a tent on your sidewalk Henry you do have a bit at the end of the book that I found fascinating where you were like we did take the other side of this argument and you said there is a case to be made that having parking in cities is the only way that people who aren't incredibly rich and who can afford to live in the middle of those cities are ever realistically going to be able to get into those cities and is a way of
making cities a bit more egalitarian I think I'm playing devil's advocate there a little bit I mean I do see the argument that that that that that people make around that but I think the larger picture is that the focus on parking is mostly an impediment to building housing and a free parking spot is a pretty lousy consolation prize for not being able to afford to live in the city the other thing I would say about that is that people tend to assume that low income people are going to be
people need free parking because they don't make a lot of money and so the most important thing for them is to park for free but the trade off with free parking in busy destinations is that it's often very hard to find and I think for a lot of low income workers the cost imposed by parking being unreliable is actually greater than the amount of money that that you would have to pay for a parking spot right like it's there there's an implication in some of that argument
that you know people don't make a lot of money their time isn't worth very much and I think it's often the opposite actually they are the one they are some of the people who who need most to be able to find parking where they need it when they need it you know delivery drivers for example right rocking up tens of thousands of dollars and finds right like for those people free parking is relatively it's a cost it's actually a pretty significant cost compared to paying a meter and being able to find a spot when they arrive to do their job.
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So let's have let's have a numbers round and I'm going to steal a number from Henry's book because this is an awesome one.
My number is 21% and that is this fantastic statistic from Henry's book where he says drivers take 21% longer to leave a spot if someone else is waiting for that spot.
Which is just the most glorious sort of like window into the psychology part of parking and I kind of want to do a slate plus on just like how people become the worst form of themselves the minute that parking gets involved.
Yeah parking pettiness but you know there's a new thing now I don't know if it's super new but I've noticed and my husband pointed out recently that people get back to their cars and
these times and they just stare at their phones for a good 5-10 minutes before they leave the spot also it had you see it you sit in your car and you look at the next car and the person over there is on their phone.
I mean I'm on my phone too I'm doing it but the car parked car is now a mobile office it's it's a workspace and you can just sit in your car and do work on like slack on your phone and you're actually working you're being productive and everyone is saying like when you
can get out of your parking space and you're like excuse me but I'm on a zoom call here the number of tiktok's like there is a there is a whole longer now half of
tiktok is people recording tiktok videos in their car you know a car is now a mobile movie studio and Emily what's your number.
My number is not parking related my number is 286 that is the number of corporate bankruptcy filings as of May.
It is the highest total going back to 2010 and it's it's what happens when the federal reserve raises rates really fast as it has done and has thrown all these companies into bankruptcy like bedbath and beyond and the Christmas tree store RIP love the Christmas tree store very sad about that one vice is another one CLE a lot of companies out of business this year.
My number is 222 and that was the air quality index at one of five this morning in New York City the function of fires in Canada and there was an interview with a Columbia professor this morning we're taping on a Wednesday by the way where he said you know this is just going to be a regular feature of climate going on.
I was kind of grayish orange and you could smell smoke like it was New York is now learning what it's like to be California see all the Californians saying like welcome to our lives.
Henry did you ring a number.
Yes I have a number my number is 260 as in two dollars and 60 cents that is how much you would have to meter parking spaces on the upper west side per hour to 16 hour to afford.
MTA monthly metro cards for every single person who lives in the neighborhood.
That's wild.
Oh my god.
And right now to be clear like these upper west side parking spaces which serve apartments which what started like 1.7 million dollars and rapidly go up from there they're all free.
They're all free and there are 18 people on the upper west side for every single parking space.
So they are a they're a rare quantity indeed and they're all free and if you charge just 250 an hour.
You could raise enough money to buy a full year transit passes for all 110,000 people who live in the neighborhood.
So apropos the Chicago argument of like we just don't have the political power to raise parking meter prices.
Do you understand in this you know liberal enclave of Manhattan why it's so hard to put parking meters on those streets.
No.
I don't get it.
I don't get it.
There's 18 people for every one parking space.
So clearly the number of people who actually use these spaces is a very tiny minority but of course it's a it's a minority that would be directly affected by a new policy.
And so they're it's a very squeaky wheel.
And I think for other people the benefits of that policy are pretty diffuse right like they don't really see what the connection is.
And I think I mean this is Donald Chupes idea but if you make it super super clear like I just did and you say look we're going to charge for this space.
But the flip side is you never have to pay to take the subway again.
And it's like oh well that's not bad.
Henry Graber thank you so much for coming on this show it's been awesome having you.
Thank you to Patrick for producing this amazing international show where all five of us in five different cities it's crazy.
But thank you for listening we'll be back on Saturday with another sleep money and keep your emails coming.
Email address as ever is sleep money at sleep.com.
And yeah and if you are a sleep plus listener we're going to talk to Henry about his personal experience.
Our personal experience finding parking.