Yankee Stadium Parking Boondoggle Getting Worse Every Day

The subsidy for the new Yankee Stadium’s 9,000 parking spaces keeps turning into a worse deal for New York City taxpayers. Juan Gonzalez reports in the Daily News that the garage operator is deep in the red, even after last year’s extended championship season:

As of this month, Bronx Parking Development LLC
owes the city $8.7 million in back rent and interest. That tab will
soon grow to more than $10 million because city officials have allowed
the firm to defer the rest of this year’s rent as well.

Meanwhile, Bronx Parking, which has no connection to the Yankees, has yet to pay a nickel in property taxes.

The House That Subsidies Built: It’s now in the city’s financial interest to see more traffic overwhelm the streets around Yankee Stadium. Photo: Simon Akam/Bronx Beat

One thing I’d add to Gonzalez’s excellent piece is that this whole outcome was predictable, given the sordid politics behind the Yankee Stadium deal. Back in 2007, the geniuses on the board of the NYC Industrial Development Agency approved the subsidized parking deal before conducting an economic feasibility study. As Gonzalez notes, profitable Yankee Stadium garages now appear
to be a delusion of the wishful thinkers at the NYC Economic
Development Corporation.

The larger point is that the current situation proves the folly of the initial parking subsidies. Perversely, if the city is ever going to see revenue materialize from these monstrous garages, it’s in their interest to see more cars drive to Yankee Stadium and flood the streets of the South Bronx. That pretty much sums up why a city that’s purportedly committed to a sustainability plan should never subsidize parking.