At least with a normal loan if your priorities change you can shuffle your budget accordingly.
Not so in Chicago, it's just going to line the pockets of rent seekers.
To see this in action, stroll into a popular part of town, check the rate for parking on the street for a few hours, then check the rate for doing the same in a private lot on the same block.
Metering is purely in the interests of the business owners on the block, who don't want people parking for more than a few hours - ie anyone except their customers.
There's so much propaganda on all sides when it comes to automobiles in the US that it's hard to tease out reality, but I'd wager anything states and cities have hard numbers behind what they do.
When it comes to things like that, where solid data isn't public I just assume the world is not run by idiots who don't know more about their area of expertise than me. I feel reasonably certain that urban parking subsidization is done at least to a large extent because it makes money.
I would take the opposite side of that bet for most cities in the US. The smaller ones I have been involved in are shockingly captured by a minority of random business owners and retirees that bother to show up to meetings and demand their lifestyles be protected. I think parking subsidization is done largely because it's a visible cost to car owners who will oppose it strongly.
Parking spaces, in Seattle at least, are not subsidized. They are a massive source of revenue for the local govt.
So are sidewalks and bike lanes. I'm not aware of a single toll sidewalk or bike lane.
Nevermind the policy nightmare of not being able to freely reallocate street usage, and being obligated to maintain the spaces as sold for 75 years.
Upthread logic seems to indicate, no fleecing occurred.
Would you mind to walk us through your calculations, and share how did you discover that NPV of that income stream is a lot more than $1.6bn and what figure did you arrive at?
> being obligated to maintain the spaces as sold for 75 years
Technically - and as the court correctly pointed out - this is not the obligation. The obligation is to preserve the income stream. It is true that if the city gets rid of the spaces, it would be hard for it to preserve the income, but there could be options - like create more parking in different places, etc. Of course, when undertaking such an obligation, as with any loan, you sacrifice certain flexibility - if you take a mortgage, you have to pay $X per month no matter what, even if this month you'd rather spent it on a nice vacation. It's just that the city assumed that since the income stream comes from the citizens and not the city budget, they essentially got a billion dollars for free. But turns out it's not exactly so. It's not the fault of the investors though - it's the fault of those who made wrong assumptions on the deal. And those aren't some naive gullible simpletons, or at least those are not supposed to be in charge of billion-sized contracts in a megapolis like Chicago. One has to assume they were aware of the implications, and chose to get the cool $1.6 billion anyway.
It is worth noting that at no point was privatization of parking in his platform previously, and his approval rating dropped to record lows in large part to deals like this, but Chicago lacks a recall mechanism and he chose not to run.
We are also talking about a mayoral administration that operated with impunity. Despite contracts with the state and the FAA, the city used bulldozers to destroy the runways at a general aviation airport, stranding planes and its own fire department helicopters there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigs_Field
This certainly looks very shady, but by itself doesn't change the financials on the deal. The claim above that this deal costs "a lot more" than a billion - I'd love to know how much and how did they know it.
Blaming CPM for Chicago's inability to manage their finances is unreasonable, and no, I'm not a CPM investor.
Chicago unfortunately lacks a recall mechanism, and voters were unable to punish Daley for this plan that had not been part of his campaign, because he declined to run after his approval rating sank to record lows.
I'd say that any contract longer than around 3 years (and/or larger than a certain dollar amount) should require direct approval by voters, or it shouldn't be considered as having been duly executed. Furthermore any terms of a contract that restrict/require a municipality to enact certain laws/ordinances (including through financial incentives) should be straight up illegal and thus unenforceable.
As for practical reform, especially with this failure in court? It might still be possible to get a majority of state politicians to constrain the city politicians. More centralized government is unfortunately one of the few remaining checks in this day and age.
Illinois is even more corrupt than Chicago.