In 2009, Chicago traded 75 years of parking meter revenue for a $1.2 billion payment that helped fill an immediate budget hole. Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Tony Jordan, executive director of the Parking Reform Network, and Edward Erfurt, chief technical advisor at Strong Towns, to look at what the city actually gave up and why its recent $3.3 billion bid never made it to the finish line. The lease still shapes decisions about removing parking for bus lanes, bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while the revenue keeps flowing to a private operator instead of back into the places generating it. That leaves Chicago with a much harder question than whether the original deal was bad: what would it take to manage the curb again, regain flexibility and use that money to improve the streets themselves?
Welcome to Upzoned, where we take one big story from the news and we ask the questions behind the headlines and think about it from a Strong Towns perspective, today we're talking about one of the most infamous municipal finance deals in North America, the Chicago parking meter lease, and a remarkable twist that has emerged nearly two decades later, according to reporting by Mick Dumke in the Block Club Chicago publication, the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, and his team quietly submitted a $3.3 billion bid to buy back the city's parking meter operations. Those operations were sold to Morgan Stanley in 2009 for $1.19 billion, which in today's dollars is about 1.8 billion or one and a half billion less.
A stated goal of buying back the parking meters was to restore Chicago's control over its curb space, but the deal fell apart before it ever reached the finish line. On the surface, this sounds like another city hall controversy, but we think there's a much bigger story here. What happens when a city treats one of its most valuable public assets as a short-term financial solution, and what does it take to recover once those decisions begin limiting what future generations can do? So, to help us unpack that, I'm joined by two guests who think deeply about streets and how cities manage them. First is Tony Jordan, executive director of the Parking Reform Network.
Tony has spent years helping cities rethink parking and parking requirements, not simply as a way to store cars, but as an important public resource that shapes transportation, land use, and local economies. Tony, welcome to Upzoned.
Thanks. It's great to be here,.
and then also joining us is Edward Erfert, Chief Technical Advisor at Strong Towns. Edward works with local governments across North America to coach them on transportation, land use, fiscal resilience, and helping communities understand what today's infrastructure decisions do to tomorrow's possibilities. Edward, it's great to have you back.
Great, thanks, Norm, and it's always great hanging out with Tony.
We get to talk parking. How thrilling is this? So let's start with what actually happened. According to Block Club Chicago, the Johnson administration submitted a bid of roughly $3.3 billion to purchase the parking meter concession from its current owners. The offer exceeded every other competing bid by hundreds of millions of dollars, but before the transaction could move forward, they withdrew their offer.
Reports indicate that the financing wasn't fully secured, the purchase hadn't been authorized by city council, and many of the aldermen only learned about the proposal after it had already fallen apart, so politically it's become a story about secrecy and transparency and executive decision making. But for us, that's almost beside the point. That's sort of the story that is the big items. But for us, what we really want to think about is what do you do when you've made such a consequential municipal financial decision, one of the biggest ones in modern American city history. Back in 2009 when they leased nearly all of their parking meters to a private consortium, they got $1.18 billion in upfront cash.
But the deal became infamous because the contract limited Chicago's ability to manage its own streets. If the city removes parking spaces to install a protected bike lane, create dedicated bus lanes, widen sidewalks, or make other changes that reduce meter revenue, it's found that it needs to compensate the concessionaire for those lost revenues. In other words, what looked like, hey, we're going to get money for something that we're not maximizing, has now turned into a deal that is about who has a veto or a toll to enact for any changes to public streets, and now just 18 years later, Chicago is apparently prepared to pay nearly three times what it originally received just to regain control and flexibility.
So, yeah, this might be a story about secrecy and transparency. You'll read that in the article, but it's also about a bigger question: What do we do when we've made decisions like this? How do we recover from it? How do we value our streets, our curbs, the places where parking occurs, and what do you give away if you sell off or lease your parking meters? And so that's where we're gonna go today, Tony.
Let me start with you. For someone who hears parking meters and thinks that this just some obscure local government story, what's the bigger issue here? Why should people pay attention and care about what's happening in Chicago?
Well, I think that the Chicago parking meter deal has been covered in Henry Grabar's paper. It's it's something that comes up pretty often on social media. If you watch TikTok or YouTube videos about urbanism, and let's to be clear, it was a bad deal, Like this was something that should never they shouldn't have done this. They were under underappreciated the amount of money and revenue that the parking was worth. But it's often looked at in a couple ways.
Is that well? There's there's one school of thought that says well, it did allow this privatization of the curb could work because it could lead us to depoliticize the curb management and raise the prices properly, and then there's this other argument around the deal that it really prevents the city from doing, as you mentioned, bike lanes, street fairs that they have to pay this what they call the true up fee to the concessionaire when they do this, and I think that one of the one of the misconceptions here is that neither of these things really worked out as we as we thought the for one they did raise the price contractually after they instituted the deal in 2009 I think in the loop, it's around $7 an hour.
But they haven't, and there are there are some areas where the prices are more and less. But there is no true what we would call performance pricing going on in Chicago at this point. They don't regularly adjust the prices up or down to produce availability and access at the curb. This Shoupian ideal of 85% occupancy. The any increase in the parking meter rate still has to go through the City Council of Chicago.
It's written directly into their city ordinance. So they didn't even get this good thing that they could have had, which was if the if the concessionaire was allowed to actually or even required to maximize availability by price, the price would be floating, and maybe the city could have got a cut of that additional revenue when it was when it was there. On the other hand, the city's actually not paralyzed about using its curbs. It does have to pay true up fees when they reduce when they're shown to have done something that reduces the amount of revenue that could be gotten on the meters that were there when they put the deal in place. But nothing prevents the city from adding new meter districts, extending the meter areas.
There are many areas in Chicago that aren't metered and could be metered. If the city adds meters in those areas. They get they don't get all the money. I don't know the exact figure, but they get a good portion of the money back. So the city could absolutely do some things where they would remove parking and meters on one stretch to add a bus lane and then add them in another area, which makes a lot of sense because if you remove the supply, you're going to squeeze that demand to some other area, and you should be able to charge a similar amount and prevent having to pay the concessionaire a bunch of money.
The trick in Chicago, I think, what makes this deal specifically deadly is the combination of aldermanic privilege and the concession requirement. Because moving those meters from one area to another, they either need to remain basically in the same district, or the receiving district for the meters has to agree. They kind of have veto power, and there's very few aldermen or alder people who are who are willing to take parking meters into their district and the political hit that takes. So, so, so there's like kind of this stalemate that goes on. Now the city's attempt to purchase these back is probably pretty smart.
I mean, we're talking. There's still 70-seven years left on this deal, or something, And or 60-seven, maybe it's 70-five years. I don't know. So, so there's a lot of decades left on this deal, at some point, it could end up costing them tons of money. If for example the city was effective at reducing driving and the demand the revenue dropped, They could be on the hook for paying those guaranteed fees forever anyway.
So they probably should look at either buying it out or it's been proposed at various times that they should just default on it, and then stop paying. Make it clear to the concession that the it's going to be a legal problem, and then try and negotiate them down to something that is more of a true market value for what they're doing. So that's kind of the background of what I think some misconceptions are about it. But I think I would say the main problem here is, as far as street activists and other urbanist type folks or strong town folks is concerned, is really a political one here. The city has flexibility; getting them to manage their curbs is still a problem in most cities across the country.
Yeah, Tony, you're you're really generous with thinking through all that, because when I look at this, I think about 2008 and with the struggle that every city across North America had at that moment in time, that all of a sudden the stock market is crashing, the housing market is crashing. Every city is being told that if the.
Federal Reserve doesn't make a move in Congress, the banking system is going to collapse, and I could just imagine Mayor Daley at the time at the Chicago Athletic Club sitting around with some of his colleagues figuring out how am I going to fill the budget, what I'm going to do, and off the cuff, like the youngest of the group, so somebody probably in their 60s was like, "Hey, what if, what if we just cut you a check? What assets do you have? Can you sell us a building? Well, no, City Hall, we can't do that. Can you sell us a bridge?
No, that has too much liability to it. Well, nobody likes to issue parking tickets. Why don't we just take that on? When you look at the amount of money that they're generating off of this, there's actually no incentive for the operator to raise parking rates. Like the amount that it's obscene the amount of money they're generating per year.
So okay, we raise it 5% That just means there's more work and more people going to complain about the parking. What I went through and did the so we go to 2008. Let's let's solve that. We see lots of cities. I know we just recently saw some stuff out of Buffalo, where cities all the time are looking for ways to back their budgets.
So how do we how do we generate revenue this year to solve our financial problem at this very moment? Well, we do something like this: we sell an asset that we have in the city to somebody else, and we put this out. I ran through some of the math on this because I just I couldn't help myself because when we are talking about billions with a B, and this side of scale, even for a city like Chicago, it's huge. So we're talking about 1.2 billion for the 75 year contract. If I think about what that annualizes out over the 75 years, that's only like $16 million a year.
The city is generating revenue. So in 2008 2009 that budget looked great. But every year after that, it's just like a small. I mean, for Chicago, this probably what they have for stamp fees for like one, weird permit in the city, like such a small piece. When we look at what that generates out, that's about $1.20 a day for every meter in the city that the city's getting.
That's that's pretty wild. When we look at what they've, and I wasn't sure if I on the revenue they've talked about to this point, but in the article when they talk about the 2.2 billion in revenue, that I'm not sure if that's accrued through this or out, but that ends up being instead of $1 and a quarter a day, that's anywhere anything depending on how you want to do the math? Anywhere from like nine to $10 a meter up to $300 a meter a day in the city, and we're talking about that over what is it like 30 36,000 meters. These are astonishing numbers. We talk about high costs of free parking, Tony.
This like these numbers dwarf. I mean, how many cities would you like to work with where they figured out that parking has a capital return, and they're talking about these types of numbers running in their city? I.
mean, I mean, we know New York is leaving tons of money on the table, and they're actually, I think, looking. They just released a report today. We're recording this on July 9. I think there was a report that was released today by New York about parking management. I think they're going to try and do something about it.
So I think that.
is, and this not like a blue city thing. Like I can't tell you how many kind of red city folks that are like, hey, we don't want to have to hire a bunch of staff to run parking meters. We should privatize it. And there's lots of great companies out there that go and they'll put in all the meters for free at no expense to the municipality. They'll hire all the staff.
They'll either they even have their own little parking authority, so it's not a city council thing. So great, we'll we'll put that out. And I've seen so many of these companies out there. Clearly, this a lucrative business. So, like this case study in itself, when we're talking about billions of dollars for all of the meters, and I've been to Chicago a lot, and like not every street has a meter, so we're not even talking about every street in the city.
No, no, I mean we did a little, we did a presentation during the national gathering that was where I did some. It wasn't scientific math, but just showing like 10 meters at a certain dollar a day. I we encourage people. I don't have the slides in front of me, but it's like you can raise $100,000 a year pretty easily from like 10. If you're down downtown, has 10 contested meter spots.
Just making sure that someone can park there when they need to can raise 10s of 1000s of dollars pretty easily. Now with the like, as you point out, the level of vendors and technology and the ease of implementing this, it actually doesn't need to be a big deal for the cities, and we're hoping that more cities do monetize their curbs, just not privatize in the same way that they did in Chicago, because that's do would not recommend at least also the 75 year term of this also just particularly egregious, If this was a 1020-year, term. It would have been bad, but they'd be nearing the end of that, and they could they could figure out what they're doing.
But the length of this condemning future generations to locked in streetscaping is pretty bad.
Yeah, none of the signers or people that agree to this or that were on city council will even be alive when this contract expires.
2083 Yep. Yeah. Here we come, baby. Yeah.
I look at this stuff and I think through it. I've worked in city government, so let me just say that I'm speaking from some level of experience. Local governments don't do this type of math. Like they, they barely can. I'm amazed when I'm finding a city manager that could tell me how many lane miles that they have in their city, let alone how many parking meters or parking spaces.
Like this the type. There's so much information that cities are trying to absorb and understand. This like number of parking spaces usually at the bottom of the list, and nobody worries about it because we just have a parking requirement code in the zoning, and that'll take care of it. So we miss the opportunity piece here. So in a city like Chicago, in 2008 when the world is on fire and you're trying to figure stuff out and you have moments like this deal happened probably very quickly because that's why there's so much controversy to it.
There was no staff report, there was no engineering firm to come in to count all the spaces and do all this stuff. So it was like a guesstimation. Now that they've actually done this and they've had the collections on it, imagine like the, the oh my god moment, the first week of returns, and you realize that hey, we're ahead of our projections. So now, if I'm thinking about a deal, we actually have what the real value is beyond closing streets down and some of those true up costs. We actually know the true value of this asset that has now been given away, and if the three whatever point billion didn't move it move forward.
Maybe for whatever reason, it leads me to believe that this particular asset has a value in the banking sense far greater than that. I.
mean, it was interesting to me that they bid $800 million more than the almost than the previous bid. I was actually thinking like the city should, to your point, have enough information that they should pretty they should have the best information for pricing the asset if they if they've got that ability or that expertise and so I mean I then just now I was thinking well probably the people who have bid on it, which still has not gone through. I guess the city, the council has to approve this purchase.
So who knows what's really going to happen, But there's, but you would imagine they're probably willing to purchase it at a discount because they're the city's the city's time frame really is this additional 58 years or whatever is left on the deal, where these people are probably buying it for a decade, something similar to the current concessionaire, They're not they're not looking to the long term horizon of the deal. They know they can make $2.2 billion and are probably expecting that to go up somehow. They'll probably ask for the prices to be increased. Who knows? I don't know.
Then and then they'll get out. So that is, it is interesting that the city can't that they weren't that they were so far ahead. I that gap is interesting.
It makes me wonder too, like with an asset this great and the interest that's in it, why Morgan Stanley would want to sell it, like Bank bankers don't just when they have assets, they don't just sell them at a cost. Like they want to see true profit on it. Like this the stuff that you think like Berkshire Hathaway would. Would have come across like these are the underdog performers that are totally undervalued, that are mismanaged, and if you just come in and you acquire that asset and you put some hedge fund folks in it and a little bit of capital, you get tenfold on your return or twentyfold. So yeah, there's there's more to there.
I think that's happening with Morgan Stanley. Maybe they don't want to be in the Chicago market or in parking anymore. Well,.
I mean they yeah I mean they bought it for 1.2 They've made 2.2 so they've almost doubled their money. They're going to sell it for another 2.5 so they're double it again, and we're in. I mean, I think some of it has to be. Yeah, this a very long term deal, so you have that on your. I do think I'm no, scientist here, but I think like that money in the bank is you can do things with.
I guess they could bond against it, but like there's there is or borrow, but there is it's a long term and a lot. I think a lot is possibly going to happen in that time period. I mean, let's we have autonomous vehicles, What however you feel about that, if any version of that plays out, then this asset, sure, technically the city owes them this money, but this you can only get so much blood from a rock, Like they're not going to be able to. They probably are thinking at some point there is a default or some sort of suit, in the in the future. It's it's going to be.
I can't see the city just happily laying on its back and paying this money, for the entire like for the entire rest of the time, it's not like a puppy, Like sure, like it's it's it's gonna fight back on this. I think at some point, and that's I well, I think I think you.
have 1.2 billion in a fund now to give to your contract attorneys. Like here's 1.2 billion to spend in a reserve fund to break the contract. I mean that's almost what I would be thinking about from a management side because there is no way that a city could competently go and collect this much money and max out all their bond ratings to go and acquire this asset that's not going to take all of these years to pay back. When I look at the low hanging fruit here, it's like what is in that contract and what was done wrong that we could peel that back and create a settlement agreement to like part ways.
I do think that this a contract that probably is the elephant in the zoo of bad contracts. But if we look around the zoo, there are many communities, for example, that have partnered with Live Nation, so that a city-owned concert venue is under constant contract and exclusive control and sort of management by Live Nation or by other examples, but TechMaster and Live Nation have been the most prominent with that. Think of concession contracts for local venues. Think of catering contracts where you have exclusive, catering contracts that somebody signed and probably got some sort of a sweetheart arrangement up front, and then belatedly you realize all of the like complications that emerge from that.
I know in Lethbridge, Alberta, where I grew up, they signed an agreement for catering and for the types of things that were, taking this off the plate of the city, so that they didn't have to manage their own venue, and then they ended up having to pay the manager, managing company, a significant amount of money each year because their projected revenues never hit the threshold that they needed to meet. And Saint Catharines, Ontario, seems everywhere I live we have this problem. And so it is interesting that like the biggest animal is definitely this parking contract in Chicago, but a lot of the smaller animals are the ones that probably you can identify in your communities as well.
That like there was an upfront assessment: hey, we could probably offload this, and the longer term implications were not really considered. So, what I want to pivot to is start with Tony. Like, what is what is a street worth? And you mentioned the real revenue raising potential of parking and meters, and sort of putting a price on parking.
But we've actually often said like that is secondary to not the influencing and improving of the transportation potential of a place, the land use potential of a place, and so when we talk about that, especially you want to bring in like parking benefits districts and some of the like early indicators that if you take a different tack to like the funds raised through parking management can actually be a tangible benefit immediately in the place where that's happening, and create this virtuous cycle that might actually get us away from the situation where other people are like, "Hey, we don't ever want to see a single rate increase because that's just feeding the cash cow. Meanwhile, the residents are saying, there's not enough.
Available parking, we've got scarcity and the streets suck because nobody's keeping anything up. There's there's never money in the banana stand for what we need to do. Can you share like what the value of a street is, what it is that they actually acquired the rights to, and then what cities need to really keep it in front of mind, even in smaller communities when they look at a street and be like, ah, what's happening there? Cars parked there, and a few people walk by. Like, so much more is happening.
Do you want to shed some light on that? Then over to you, Edward.
Yeah. So I think one thing is definitely to consider that pricing is the first step, We have situations all around the country where parking is free, and I like to say sometimes that it's it's this weird state where it's both completely valueless because we're not charging for it, but it's the most invaluable thing, Like it's it's it's held to this extremely, it's very valuable the person parking there, and you can't even put a price on it. So putting any price on it starts to have a conversation. We're seeing some like around after post COVID when we instituted streeteries, a couple years later, cities started to say, "Hey, we are giving these restaurants sometimes a larger space than their restaurant is.
Your Manhattan, the most valuable real estate in the world. I don't think that this should be actually free for these merchants to use. But if you're not charging someone to park there, you don't. It's hard to have a conversation. It's hard to justify charging someone, using it as a restaurant space many multiples or even infinite multiples because the it's zero at the bottom like for how much it should be having any price does then you have a simple way to calculate you want to rent this as a streetery let's start with how much it is how much revenue we're getting from it.
What does it cost to buy it out. Similarly, I think conversations around repurposing it for other uses. We know sometimes, often parking is not the best use of the street. Sometimes there's not a there's not a demand really for another use. But I think even though you're talking about removing revenue, it has a you.
You can you can quantify. Then you can make an argument that no, this bus lane is worth more than the revenue the city is getting. We can talk about that. We can talk about saved hours for commuters. We can talk about access and what that's worth.
We can talk about saved injuries. You can you have something you can compare it to. So I think that is as far as the conversation. Then yes, obviously making sure that revenue is protected for two reasons, You don't want the city to Chupas. I have this graphic that Chupa discovered where it's like someone putting money in a parking meter and it drops down the parking meter into hell, basically into the gold coin dropping into the devil's wheelbarrow, and it's like you don't want the public to see and think that money is going nowhere.
The parking benefit district does two things: it prevents the city from getting hooked on parking revenue, because if you're if you're paying for staff or general fund stuff out of or general transportation fund out of parking revenue, if you have a policy to reduce driving to your downtown or to repurpose spaces, you're at conflict with your own revenue stream, and we know probably how that's going to end up. But then, yes, also then you want to show people this tangible value. You have to you have to provide value. The third piece I'll mention before we kick it back over to Edward here is that I also think around the country when cities are looking, cities and communities, people are advocating for parking management.
Management is the key. You're not charging for parking just to make money, That's a bad idea. You're charging for parking in places that it has high demand, and you want to provide access and convenience, or support some higher purpose. So if people are paying for parking and they can't find a space, they're gonna be more mad, There's a common people don't like to pay for parking, and I'll say people don't like to pay for anything. I don't want to pay for a cup of coffee if I don't have to.
If I get a free one and it's bad, I can't complain. If I pay for it and it's bad, I'm upset. Around the country, usually people are paying when they are. Usually, the parking is like free coffee. They don't like it, but grumble, grumble.
If once you start charging them for the coffee, you better be making it good. And we're usually not We're we're charging $1 or two when the market clearing price should be higher, or sometimes we're charging $1 or two when there's no act, not enough demand to even justify $1 or two, and so I think the competence and the ability of cities to actually say no, we are doing this a policy that says we're doing this apolitically and we're doing this in order to provide access, and the money is just gravy that we're going to use to make things better and to actually reduce car dependency or improve connectivity, encourage someone to walk that extra couple steps, from the parking garage, and then you can get all.
Then I do think you can get all sorts of other benefits, If you're if you're building lighting along a dark street so people can walk to the lot, well, I suspect. That foot traffic and the improved lighting is going to activate any empty businesses on that block, and so like you really do. This a very strong town's way of thinking of implementing this incrementally and building off of.
it. Yeah, and I don't want to oversimplify it, but if the mayor really wanted to have money to be able to buy these rights back, it stands out to me.
You would carve up a significant number of parking benefits districts, and then you would do a 50-50 split with all the local business owners, and say, "Hey, you're going to get 50% of the revenue, and 50% is going to go to pay back the cost that it's going to take us, and the revenue would flow in because I'm sure that a lot of these parking benefits districts, under the control of local leadership would say, "Hey, we're actually seeing some really virtuous things by putting a price on parking at the curb, and now we're actually starting to see as again many of these examples show they create a windfall that they don't even have necessarily every there's not enough projects in the district to be able to spend all that money that comes in.
There's a recognition. Oh, we can actually have walking patrols. We can have garbage cleanup. We can have a lot of these different participants doing that work at the local level because we didn't realize how much value actually exists at the curb. If we communicate it properly, people know that their life or their life on that street has gotten better because of parking.
And they're like, "Cool, this working out for us. Then surreptitiously, 50% of that revenue, which they probably wouldn't even miss, 50% could be going back to the big bid to have bought this back. I think you can probably spend more than 3.3 billion. Like you would have that. And so I think that they need to keep up their effort to get the rights back today's better day than tomorrow.
The flip side is probably do it with council approval. Probably do it with some level of like preset financing.
There is one thing to flag there, really though, is that I think that the motivation by the one unfortunate truth is if the city did buy back the concession, the motivation for many of the council members or the all other people would be to reduce the. The argument is we want to get rid of this contract so we can provide free parking again in our communities as opposed to actually managing it. So that would be a hurdle to overcome as we go along. But I think that's the subtext here is the people arguing against the deal aren't necessarily wanting to institute better parking management. They're maybe wanting to take a step back.
Well, because the original contract is a transaction, not a management plan, and buying it back is a transaction. But if we talk about this from a management plan, and this Tony, I love how every time you describe all the experiences you have across the country when it comes to these parking districts. Yes, you can transactionally go and charge for parking, and then you can say a portion of that's going to go to something. But all of these parking districts that I know you've been advocating for, and you highlight what they've realized is their conversation has gone beyond transaction and into management. What are we going to do with the parking?
What is the trade-off from this space for a car versus something else? How do we deal with all those complex issues? And the parking districts that are getting it are the ones that are having informed discussions about the finances of it. They're having informed discussions about the built environment and the experiences, and these are the places that, when they're functioning well, people are willing to pay because they have value in that payment. They're not hunting for parking meters.
They have an understanding of what the rate is for here. They can always find the parking space in proximity to where they want to be, even though they're paying a premium. Like all of that works. So the more that we can advocate for management and have that discussion, I think the rest of the stuff seems to follow in because we're talking about it as a as a business model, as a planning tool, as something that we can actually manage as a community and have a real conversation on.
Yeah, I would. If you have a list of the places that are doing it please let me know. It's like there's there is. I mean, there's places that are doing it pretty good. I think that it's hard to find places that are doing it exactly and there's a there are a number of reasons.
One, there actually we found there are state laws that prohibit good parking management in certain places that restrict cities' ability to spend money or use new technology or charge appropriate pricing. Then when the when the issue is political on the ground, there's very few places that really absolutely just say here's the policy and let the similar let the bureau do its work let the department do its work similar to if a sewer pipe breaks in the street we don't have a committee to decide should we fix it how do we fix it we let the water or sewer department fix the pipe there's a weird.
With roads in the United States, at least city roads, where we don't we don't let the experts or we don't let the policy drive hey this corner has a problem clearly like people are dying here or people can't it's it let's fix it the way no we have to have a whole committee and then probably not fix it the way so I think and that is.
that is emblematic in every part of local government. So I hear the same complaint from the utility departments, from the street works departments, from the parks department. I hear from all of them. The places that I'm inspired on are the ones that are actually having those tough conversations. And yeah, we hear about these that all of a sudden there's a big political shift, there's some seismic move, but more often than not, I think that cities are move that have made this decision, that are talking through this stuff, they are much further ahead than the ones that are stuck in just transactions, and so yeah, I go to lots of places that they ask where is that perfect place?
Our none of our cities are perfect. Like we'll we'll never find that perfect place. But there are things that we find that cities are doing better than others. There are places where cities have figured out how to deal with a struggle or an issue, and there are places that are doing something like a parking district that haven't actually-they actually don't know that's what they're doing. I think those are like those are really exciting places for me because it was like nobody read a book, nobody went to a conference.
They just started to work through their local problems and said, "Oh, if we think about it this way, or that thing in the street actually has some value to it, that these pieces start to fall into place.
Yeah, I want to highlight. There's two great examples of this. That one in Portland here, there's a neighborhood near the Moda Center, near where our basketball games are played in our other event district area, and neighbors there actually some strong towns PDX folks involved have been involved in this for a long time. They the neighbors were upset about people parking in their neighborhood for the games, and so they petitioned the city for years and years. It took a long time.
They finally got a parking permit in place where the permits were relatively low price. They weren't market for residents and they prohibited parking for more than two hours for anyone else. So this was like it would stop the game day parking. What the residents noticed a little bit later after it went into implementation was that people were still parking there and they were upset about that and they asked for more enforcement and the city said we don't have any money these permit prices are very low because we wanted them not to impact residents, and so we don't have it. Then they said, well, how can we have?
If we have more tickets, could we get the money? And in Portland, like other places, most of the money from tickets doesn't go to the city; it goes into the court system, so they don't even get it. What the residents then asked was, "Hey, well, what if we let people park here during game days at market rate at event pricing, what then? And they're like, well, then you can keep half the money for your neighborhood. And they were like, let's do that.
I think that it's like, and then I think somewhere down the line, you're looking down the street, and every car looks like 20 or $40 to you for a crosswalk. I think there is a flywheel there, a way to get people really interested in that. Similarly, in Austin, we one of the folks, Curtis Rogers, who was on my panel at the National Gathering, is the parking manager there. Where they're doing, near commercial areas outside of downtown, there's spillover parking, and residents don't like it, and so they ask for permit programs that can keep people from parking in the neighborhood. And the city of Austin says, "Well, there's a long process to get that permit in there that costs you almost nothing, and also then allows no one to park there.
But if you want to do a hybrid permit program where people can actually park in your neighborhood with app-only payments, and that money goes into a fund, we'll we'll we'll institute the permit for you much faster, and they're building sidewalks all over the place. They're they're they're they're making real money that is improving. So I think there are some models that we can get that are have a very bottom up, idea here where and I and I think the I love the idea of neighbors looking out on the street and seeing, other vehicles there, not as something to be mad about, but dollar signs, My neighborhood is working.
There's people here, and the people parking on the street we're paying in, and it's actually going to improve my ability to walk around the corner or my ability for my kid to get to school safely. I think that if we can message that competently, we can make a lot of progress on this.
Yeah. Hey, we're we're going to close with words from Alex Montero, who's the leader of one of the co-leaders of Strong Towns Chicago, and he shared this in the Strong Towns Commons. He said, "As embarrassing as it is to buy something back you shouldn't have sold in the first place for a markup, it's probably better than leaving the current deal in place. But placing a winning bid with money you're not authorized to spend, then backing out, then refusing to answer questions." About it, and having city council learn the details from the runner-up is an absolute mess. Then I loved Dustin's response.
I said the only advantage is that it means that the parking rate is actually set at a real market rate instead of a wishy-washy political rate. But the fact that it money doesn't go back to the public is just so embarrassing. Great comments. Lots of ongoing discussions about this article in the Strong Towns Commons, which is an area for Strong Towns members to talk about this sort of stuff. To join the conversation here with Tony and with Edward, great to have this discussion.
And let's pivot into the Downzone. We really need to get like some kind of a stinger, some sort of like a musical like interlude that's like, "Hey, we are we are ready for this. So maybe a drum beat. How about that? But let's start with the Downzone.
Tony, do you want to go first?
So this I'm talking about something I'm reading or watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, so I was thinking about this, and I don't read as much as I should, and I'm often reading multiple things at a time. So I thought I'd bring up two books that I'm reading now at the same time, for different reasons, one is called A Wailing of a Town.
I'm from San Pedro, California, the port of Los Angeles. It's where Minutemen and other Minutemen were from. Black Flag played at my high school, not when I was there or before I was. I'm not that old, but played there. And so this a cool oral history of early San Pedro punk rock, which is pretty cool.
I got it for my wife, and now I'm checking it out by someone named Craig Ibarra. Then I'm I got this book when it first came out, Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka. Maybe folks are familiar with this. It's kind of like one of the competency books that are out there. I have a coding background, and I often have thought, looking at city zoning code, how terribly coded it is, like how illogical and a lot of the cruft that we see in bad software development is in is expressed in city zoning code.
So that's interesting to me. But also, it's particularly interesting reading this book post-DOGE. Like I'm just like reading it, and it's like a lot of the programs are talking about the digital service and all the things they were trying to do. I feel like there needs to be a follow up to this. Like what where what's the state of play now?
Because it almost feels like the ground has shifted so seismically under the types of programs that this book is talking about that I don't even know where we're at, but still, I think some great ideas around cities doing things not wasting their money, being more effective and efficient. So those are my two books.
Yeah, that's awesome. What about for you, Edward?
Well, we were all just recently in Northwest Arkansas, and the airlines granted me an extra night in Northwest Arkansas unexpectedly, so I ended up going and spending the night in Bentonville because I didn't have a chance or a national gathering to go there.
I went to the Walmart museum, I guess is what you would call it, which was great because you actually started a gift shop and you end in the ice cream shop, which is typically the a different way around on those sorts of places, but it inspired me to pick up Sam Walton's book, Made in America, and I know there's probably a gasp out there because there was already a lot of controversy about a bunch of urbanists meeting Northwest Arkansas, but I found that his book was really powerful, helped me to understand the model that Walmart is following. All of those ideals, all pretty smart business things that have built up. And as our friend Joe Minicozzi says, "Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Sam in his book outlines the game completely, outlines all the things of how their organization was able to operate and grow so quickly because they just figured things out. And at the bottom line of it, as a company, their founder was just really, really cheap. When you are really cheap and you squeeze every penny, you start to find other innovative things that others don't think about. So if somebody wants to take a breather from all the heavy reading, if they want to go, hear from the Darth Vader of urban development, go take a chance and read the book.
I found it to be a lot of fun, especially after spending time in Bentonville and Northwest Arkansas, because they're describing these different places that I had some time to experience there, so definitely a definitely a different book, but a great one.
Yeah, I feel like it's the dark arts of supplier squeezing or supplier management seems to be the heart of it. And yeah, so very interesting. I'll I don't know if I'll read it, but I'm definitely want to get your thoughts on it further. My bit for the Downzone is the game Microlandia. So Microlandia is a Steam game that Christian Gonzalez is the director or the game developer.
They released it in December of last year and reached out to Strong Towns and were like, "Hey, we're indie developers of a little virtual or game." Why am I blanking on what kind of game it is? It's a computer game, and so I tried it out a couple of nights ago, and it's a brutally honest simulation of what it takes to run a city, and the art style is fantastic, and it's just a really intriguing concept. Where, for example, the moment that I wanted to put in transitional housing, I could see all of the neighbors around it lighting up red, like don't you dare do this! You have to stay elected as the mayor. So every five years, your term comes up for renewal.
And you, if you are not doing well, you hear it from your residents. I quickly backed myself into massive financial problems. I and there's just a lot of very real scenarios that actually emerge there. Then I got whacked by a recession, and imagine that a mayor that didn't think that maybe Happy Days would not always be on the horizon, and that I'd also have to be getting myself ready for some rough times. And so it's actually a city survival game in its own way, but it's really cool.
If you have ever played Cities: Skylines or SimCity back in the day, that's where I cut my teeth on most of everything I know. That is, it's a great addition to the corpus of games on that front. So we're we're at the point where we should probably wrap up because I think we've solved everything. But Tony, jump in.
I'm curious: How does the game handle parking?
It sounds like Tony has something to do this afternoon.
Both of the big game developers in that area both realized if we were to require or sort of a put into a simulation the expected amount of parking of the North American landscape, most of our maps would be consumed by parking, and people would quickly lose interest. There's actually a webinar with that Parking Lot for Cities: Skylines. But in this one, you have to provide on street parking. You also have to provide a lot of like surface parking lots. You have to keep up with that management, or else you get in all kinds of trouble.
And so it's it's in the newspaper that publishes every so often, and yeah, so definitely check it out. Microlandia, along with the story of Sam Walton and Recoding America, we've got some pretty good summer reading for everybody. Then when you're done reading, go and play computer game for a little while. So, fantastic stuff. Thank you, everyone, for listening today.
We appreciate the feedback that we get, I'll also say we are now posting the articles that we plan to discuss as our discussion item. We're posting those as soon as we know what the article is and start inviting people in to talk about it. We post that in the Strong Towns comments, and that's our way of stirring up the conversation and really benefiting from great insights from our members. So come join us as a Strong Towns member, and once you're a member, you'll get access to the Strong Towns Commons, which is our community hub, a member hub that we've long been wanting and finally have. I would definitely invite you to come and check it out.
With that, thanks, Tony. Thanks, Edward. Great to have you aboard on Upzoned today.
Thanks.
Thanks, Norm. All.
folks. Take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns. Org/membership.