Yesterday I needed to go downtown. Specifically, I needed to go to the Hennepin County Government Center. We’re still waiting for our new Fit to arrive, but in the meantime I needed to apply for a duplicate title for our old trade-in because for whatever reason I just can’t find the original title.
Anyway, downtown. I normally would have taken the light rail, as I live within walking distance of a station, and the Government Plaza station is about 100 feet from my destination. But there were just enough extenuating factors to make it seem like a good idea to drive instead. The ultimate determining factor was that it probably wouldn’t cost much more to park than to ride. I would’ve spent $4 on a 6-hour pass, and I expected parking to be somewhere between $10 and $13.
So off I went on my merry way. After conducting my business with the county, I decided to stay downtown for a while, to have lunch at one of my most-missed lunch spots since I stopped working downtown last March, and then to do some work at a nearby Caribou. Such is the luxury of being able to carry your entire office in a messenger bag.
In the end I spent a total of 3 hours downtown before heading back to the parking garage. When I put my ticket in the pay machine, I was aghast — aghast, I tell you! — to see the price for 3 hours of parking adjacent to the government center. $23. Let me repeat that in a more suitable fashion:
$23. For 3 hours of parking.
Assuming that these exorbitant rates are only in effect between the hours of, say, 7 AM and 5 PM (and not even considering evening and weekend parking), and assuming that there are approximately 500 spaces in the garage (which seems a reasonable, conservative estimate, having been inside it), then Allied Parking is raking in over $38,333 per weekday, or $9.97 million per year, on this one garage alone. I realize it is a large physical structure and it requires maintenance, but the parking and payment process is fully automated, so they’re not even paying someone minimum wage to sit in a little glass box and collect their ransoms for them.
Contrast this with the apartment building I used to live in downtown. Our rent was something like $1200 per month. There were 24 apartments per floor, and 28 floors of apartments. Even assuming everyone was paying that much (which probably isn’t the case, since ours was a 2-bedroom but 20 of the apartments on each floor were only 1-bedroom), the apartment building’s revenue would work out to only $9.67 million per year (but like I said, in reality it’s probably significantly less than that), and they had a staff of maybe 20 or 30 people, and a lot more maintenance than a 6-story parking garage would require.
Bottom line: if you want to make money in downtown real estate, just build a parking garage. Frankly I’m surprised there’s anything downtown but parking garages.
On the off chance that this is somewhat comforting to know, that’s about what I’d expect to pay for parking in Manhattan, even for so short a time.
Well, yeah. I’ve never been to New York, but I’ve spent tons of time in Chicago, so I’m used to that kind of thing there. It’s just kind of insane in Minneapolis — I had no idea things had gotten so out of hand.
Actually, come to think of it, this information is decidedly discomforting. I would expect parking in Manhattan to be substantially more than it is here, not approximately the same!
Chicago’s city council just approved the LEASE of ALL PARKING METERS to a single company. They are saying that over five years, the price of an hour of parking at a meter will be $6.50 (who has that much change?), and that all meters will be 24/7 with no exceptions for holidays.
This, to me, seems completely insane and must be a touch illegal. But this afternoon on my site, I’m going to post a little piece about how much more insane it could become ;)
OK, thanks guys for giving me perspective on Minneapolis vs. the larger cities. I think the biggest difference in all of this though, and the reason why this kind of parking rate in Minneapolis seems especially egregious, is that public transit is much more ingrained as part of daily life in Chicago and New York. It’s getting moreso here, now that we have rail transit, but at this point there’s only one rail line — between the airport and downtown Minneapolis. A couple more lines are currently in the works, but the first of those won’t be operating until 2014 (assuming the financial crisis doesn’t ruin that too).
So, in other words, yes I could have taken the train, or, if I didn’t happen to live half a mile away from the 12-mile corridor of the light rail line, the bus. And when I worked downtown, I did take the train every day to work. But I would say less than 50% of the people who work downtown take public transit and if you don’t work downtown you’ve probably never set foot on a bus, and the only time you’d have taken the train is if you rode it to a Twins or Vikings game as a novelty.
I really shouldn’t complain though; I don’t have a commute at all, and even when I did it was short and I was driving a fuel-efficient car. (After I quit working downtown in March I worked in a suburb for 3 months before going solo.) Paying $23 once, that is something I can just call a mistake. Or I can think of the duplicate title has having cost $40 instead of $17. (That’s probably how I’ll think of it.) But really… I just don’t think a car-sized piece of real estate in downtown Minneapolis is worth that much. And it really bugs me that the money went to a private company. If the city or the county owned that parking garage, the money could go into the government budget to improve public services.
CAPTCHA: “old keister.” That’s appealing.
Just thought you’d be interested to know that at a recent meeting of your old company, we found out that 70% of the employees take public transit to work. I have no doubt the overall figure for downtown Minneapolis is quite a bit less than that–your estimate of less than 50% seems a good first approximation to me. Maybe it’ll increase somewhat when the NorthStar line starts operating.