How much are we paying drivers to park in Adams Morgan?

DC is effectively paying drivers to park on city streets, but the way our parking system is set up makes this subsidy almost invisible. To illustrate this, I calculated the true cost of a parking permit for a spot in Adams Morgan.

Imagine that the District of Columbia owned a one-bedroom apartment in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. The market rent for that apartment is $2,300 per month, but the city lets you live there for $18 per month. The city is giving you an incredible deal, allowing you to use a prime piece of real estate at an absurdly low price. Taxpayers are subsidizing $2,282 of your rent, and you’re getting something for less than 1% of the market rate.

There probably would be many objections to this. Why does the city need to give this apartment away at such a low price? Is there any civic benefit to this arrangement?

However, this is what we have done with parking. We take public land and give it to people at a steeply-reduced price to store their cars. The market value of these spaces can be $4,000 a year or more, but the cost of a parking permit is only $35 a year for your first car.

The true cost of a spot on Cliffbourne Place NW

Take one short block in Adams Morgan: Cliffbourne Place NW. The street is about 100 yards long and has space to park 19 cars.

A few yards away, someone is renting a parking spot in the alley for $15 per day. But if you have a residential parking permit, you can park on the street for only 10 cents per day.

$15 per day is $5,475 per year. Let’s say that you would get a 20% discount for buying a yearly permit, so the market value of one parking spot in Adams Morgan is $4,380. The difference between the market rate for parking and the actual price we charge for a parking permit—our annual subsidy of each residential parking spot in this neighborhood—is $4,345.

For Cliffbourne Place, the annual subsidy for these 19 spots is $82,555. Why are giving the car drivers of Cliffbourne Place such a huge subsidy every year? The District of Columbia has abundant and heavily subsidized public housing, except that housing is for cars.

Cheap parking encourages waste of public space

A common defense of cheap residential parking is that people need to park their cars near home so they can get around the city. In other words, street parking spots are an essential part of our city’s transportation system. That doesn’t have to be the case, but let’s leave that argument aside for now.

At $35 a year, some people store unused cars on the street. Why leave them anywhere else? At Cliffbourne Place and Calvert Street, there is a car with flat tires that hasn’t moved for months. The car is a rusting, leaf-collecting eyesore. But it does have a current Zone 1 sticker, and by all appearances, is not breaking any laws.

We encourage this behavior by giving the parking away for next to nothing. Why are we paying $4,345 per year to this car’s owner so they can store their non-functional car on our street? This parking spot—this public real estate—is no longer contributing to the city’s transportation system. It’s just taxpayer-subsidized junk storage.

If we end the massive government subsidy of parking and see the demand fall, we could repurpose some of the parking to actual parks, loading zones, bike and scooter parking, or anything else. We can redesign entire streets so lanes previously used for parking could be bus lanes, bike lanes, or wider sidewalks.

We can choose as an entire city, drivers and non-drivers alike, the highest and best use of each parking spot. But the critical first step is to understand how valuable all of this real estate is.