Air Quality

City Hopes to Draw Constant Traffic to Subsidized Stadium Garages

By Brad Aaron

2:30 PM EDT on September 18, 2007

If you thought it was bad enough that the city seized public park land in the asthma-choked South Bronx, turned that public land over to the New York Yankees to use for parking, and is currently on course to have taxpayers subsidize said parking to the tune of $8,000 per space, well, you’d be wrong. It gets worse.

The triple tax exempt bond plan for the new Yankee Stadium was hatched when no developers stepped up to bid on stadium parking deck construction, and their inherent unprofitability has now led the city’s Industrial Development Agency to seek year round operation of the garages.

Via onNYTurf, the Observer does the math:

If all the new parking slots (9,179 total) are
filled every game day (81 times a year), the operator will bring in
$18.59 million annually from Yankees-related revenue. But the $225
million in bonds, if paid back over 30 years at 6.5 percent, would
require $17.04 million a year in payments.
That leaves just $1.55 million a year for
salaries, maintenance, utilities and other operational costs—not to
mention rent that the operator, the Bronx Parking Development
Corporation, is supposed to pay the city.
“With recent and ongoing South Bronx developments, such as the
development of the Bronx Terminal Market and the new Metro North
Station, we expect there to be strong demand for parking on non-game
days, which certainly help the financial viability of the project,” a
spokeswoman e-mailed The Observer.

So, with the stadium deal, the city hopes to get into the business of inducing parking demand — in an area it says will benefit from congestion pricing.

Photo: The Foo Fighter/Flickr

Brad Aaron

Brad Aaron began writing for Streetsblog in 2007, after years as a reporter, editor, and publisher in the alternative weekly business. Brad adopted New York's dysfunctional traffic justice system as his primary beat for Streetsblog. He lives in Manhattan.

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