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May 20, 2011
After Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars Of Public Subsidies, Barely Used Yankees Parking Garages Face Financial Collapse
Transportation Nation
by Jim O'Grady
The Bronx's All Hallows High School baseball team has been rendered nomadic by the Yankees, having to play all its games on the road. But that's not the half of it. This is a must-read story for those who want to learn how an auto-centric stadium plan has turned into a fiscal and urban-planning fiasco.
The team, like the rest of the neighborhood around Yankee Stadium, is still waiting for promised replacement fields.
But so few Yankee fans are parking at eleven garages and lots around the new stadium that the company managing them may soon default on $237 million in tax exempt bonds used to build them. In an effort to stave off collapse, the garages recently hiked prices to $35 a game. But as of last month, they were two thirds empty on game days.
These guys must have slept through Econ 101. No one's parking here, so we'll raise the price of parking?
According to public documents and two separate analyses, the Bronx Parking Development company owes the city $17 million in back rent and other payments. The city is paying $195 million to replace the parkland it gave to the Yankees. And New York State spent $70 million to build Parking Garage B. That’s where Derek Jeter and his fellow players park, along with VIP ticket holders. The garage is not open to the public, and allows those who use it to enter directly into the stadium.
Bettina Damiani is project director at Good Jobs New York, a government watchdog group. “It doesn’t seem to make sense to publicly subsidize the stadium and also publicly subsidize the parking garages,” she said, adding it isn’t just about the money. “This is about the impact it’s had on an entire generation of kids who have not had access to open public park space the way they did have.”
The new Yankee Stadium is smaller than the old one. But when the team insisted in 2006 that it needed 2,000 extra parking spots, the New York City Industrial Development Agency issued 237 million dollars in tax exempt bonds for an expanded parking system–paving over the neighborhood’s only regulation baseball diamonds to do it.
The Yankees insisted from the beginning that they needed 9,000 parking spots, 2,000 more than before. They even made it a legal condition for not moving out of the Bronx.
...But the MTA tells WNYC that more than 50% of a typical sell-out crowd arrives by train, bus or ferry. Many fans who do drive skip the $35 dollar charge for a spot at a Yankee garage and either park on the street or at cheaper lots in the neighborhood. One local garage advertises on a flyer that says, “Don’t pay 35 dollars.” Its prices start at $15.
Little has changed from 2006 outside the stadium on game days. Traffic cops stand on corners directing the circling cars. By first pitch, every one of the area’s 3,200 curbside spots is filled.
Angel Castillo, a car-owner who lives four blocks from the stadium, sees it all season. “Oh my God, sometimes if I come and the game starts, I gotta wait when the game finished one hour after the game,” he said. “After midnight.”
NoLandGrab: Mayor Bloomberg, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Yankees management and others responsible for this disaster were egged on in 2006 by discredited "sports economist" Andrew Zimbalist Jr., who wrote then in a New York Times Op-Ed that "all parking revenue would go back to the state and more than pay off the investment."
Related coverage...
ESCHATON, Getting Everything Wrong
Nobody could have predicted rich out of touch assholes would get everything wrong. First, it's New York. Not everybody drives. Second, if you charge $35 for a parking spot people are going to look for cheaper options, even in New York. Third, a big f**k you from the kids whose ball field you took away. Fourth, stop handing taxpayer money to rich assholes, especially if those rich assholes are building unnecessary parking garages in New york City.
Posted by eric at May 20, 2011 12:19 PM