A Finger Exercise for Dr. Black
The good doctor quotes the Paper of Record:
Garages near Yankee Stadium, built over the objections of Bronx neighbors appalled at losing parkland for yet more parking lots, turn out never to be more than 60 percent full, even on game days. The city has lost public space, the developers have lost a fortune.
and gets distracted a bit:
With something like a stadium the issue is a bit trickier, though it’s clear that they’ve stupidly erred on the side of way too much parking.
Let’s make this easy. We’ll ignore that it was never difficult to park at Yankee Stadium before. (Driving there is another issue.) Let’s just look at expectations of parking needs by Stadium Seating Capacity:
Looks to me as if Seating Capacity is down more than 10% in the new ballpark. Now there are other changes—ticket prices raised, for instance, and I believe more corporate tax deductions “luxury boxes”—that might have affected the number of people who drive to Yankee Stadium positively.
But there were no other major infrastructure improvements: the 155th Street bridge that I used to walk to games over hasn’t been widened, the FDR and the Harlem River Drive are still the same, the bridges all have the same capacity (though the tolls went up on several of those, which might shift people from driving).
Given that, what would you expect to happen if you added parking capacity?
Corollary question: If you were a member of the neighborhood, and knew all of the above in advance, what would your reaction be to losing park space for commercial parking lots?
Given that the new stadium is literally *across the street* from the old stadium, and is *smaller*… the notion that it’d need *more* parking than the old stadium is a non-starter anyhow. Things like this make you either say a) the notion of rational markets is utter drivel because any developer building a new garage knowing all this is utterly deranged, or b) somebody profited by scamming the city and/or developers on this one (who?).
As a resident of Westchester County which is directly to the north of the Bronx I can tell you the biggest change is the construction of a Metro-North train station at the new ballpark. Now every Yankee fan in Westchester and Fairfield County can take the train to the game. With parking costing $35 or more and a round trip train ticketing costing $18, its a no-brainer for people in the northern suburbs. It’s not surprising that the bonds issued to finance the construction of the garages trade at deeply distressed levels.
On losing park space I am not sure what you mean. The City and the Yankees have built a great complex on top of the Rupert Plaza garage for soccer and football with a wonderful running track around the field. Plus, the baseball fields built where the old stadium used to sit are spectactular.