Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The City That Sold Itself To Wall Street

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Cautionary Book Club: When Morgan Stanley offered to lease Chicago's parking meters for the princely sum of $1 billion, the City Council were convinced that they had struck gold. They hastily signed the deal. But they soon learnt that they hadn't just traded away parking revenue - they had traded away the streets themselves... In this hybrid episode of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford first tells the story of the Chicago parking metres fiasco of 2008. In the second half, Tim is joined by Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise, to discuss the lessons we can glean from Chicago's deal with Wall Street, and why parking is such an emotive issue for so many.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Protect our children from being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics. This is the story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. And an English teacher caught in the middle. I broke down running in the whole egg. And I think it was, it was, it was, tears not out of sadness, not out of being matched. Stareified. From the team that brought you South Lake, The fear is not out of sadness, not out of being managed. It's terrifying.

From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. A winter's day in Chicago.

Early 2009, it's cold. Scott Wagger's pack, a newly elected alderman for the north side of town, is keen to impress. Despite the freezing temperatures, he's pounding the streets, personally investigating a complaint about some garbage blocking an alley. As he surveys the scene, piles of paperwork everywhere. He realizes that this is no ordinary pile of trash. This paperwork is all about the recent controversial sale of Chicago's parking meters to a consortium led by an investment bank, Morgan Stanley. The parking meters weren't the first chunk of the city that Chicago's mayor had sold off.

Mayor Richard M. Daily was famous for it. It was more than in the air, said Daily's chief financial officer Paul Volpe. We were the leaders in it. You couldn't go anywhere without Mayor Daily's reputation for being a leader in this industry being brought up to you. Daily had privatised the toll road that ran between Chicago and Indiana. He privatised the Linguent Tax Collection, to sit his janitorial services,

and was even working on a deal to privatise Midway Airport. So, when the idea came to privatise Chicago's parking metres, a lot of people shrugged and said to themselves, sure, why not? The idea had been raised in early 2008, a year before Scott Wagger's Pack had found all that paperwork in a freezing alley. At the time, the global financial crisis was brewing, and the city needed some cash. So it held an auction for the right to operate Chicago's street parking meter system. Whoever won that auction would run the meters and keep the revenue.

There were only a couple of bidders which wasn't ideal, but one of those bidders, the consortium led by Morgan Stanley, offered over a billion dollars, 1.156 billion dollars in fact, for the right to lease curbside parking meters and collect parking fees across the city. At the time, it wasn't clear who was investing with Morgan Stanley. Scott Wagger's pack had been asked to vote on the deal, but he never felt had been given all the information he needed. Now, by sheer coincidence, he was looking at that information, blowing around in a Chicago back alley. Apparently, one of the main investors was the Emir of Abu Dhabi. Whatever Morgan Stanley had negotiated, it was a sweet enough deal to interest sophisticated investors from around the world. What mattered, of course,

was whether it was a good deal for Chicago. So, was it? On the surface, perhaps. The city was only making $20 million a year in meter fees. Chicago could just stick Morgan Stanley's money in the bank, earn a couple of percent interest, and make more than that. All money which could fund services for the city's hard-working, tax-paying citizens. Even better, the city would get the rights to the parking meters back, eventually,

although admittedly not until 2084, Morgan Stanley had bid for a 75-year lease. But still, a billion dollars is a lot of money, isn't it? Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Parking is an emotional issue in a town like Chicago. In 2008, around the time the Metadale was being negotiated, Chicago tribunes John Cass devoted a column to describing a fight over a parking space. One fellow, Abe, squeezed his car in too close for the comfort of the other car's driver, Carol. She told him he couldn't park there.

He told her she had nothing to worry about. "'Lady, I'm not going to hit your car,' Abe declared. Then, her husband Joseph showed up and started arguing. There was some shouting, then some shoving, and before long, Joseph was in an ambulance, and Abe was handcuffed in the back of a police car. Abe was an Air Force veteran of the Second World War. He was 82. Joseph, his fallen opponent, was a sprightly 80. Just another day, arguing about parking in Chicago. Given the fact that feelings tend to run high on the topic of parking,

some of Chicago's aldermen were uneasy when the meat-a-leasing deal was placed in front of them. The council's decision-making process seemed rushed, even if the city administration had been working on the idea for almost a year. You had a year, but you're giving us two days, complained one Alderman, Why are we rushing, asked another. The proposed deal was 521 pages long, written in legalese. What does that all mean, lamented a third? Scott Waggers Pack had been in the room. He decided he needed a reality check on the offer.

He hurriedly slapped together his own calculations and almost immediately realized why Morgan Stanley's billion dollar and change offer might be less generous than it looked. Chicago might only be making 20 million dollars a year from meter fees, but some of those meter rates hadn't changed since the 1980s. 20 million dollars was nothing compared to what could be squeezed out of those metered parking spots. It would be easy enough to double, triple, even quadruple rates. In fact, the city's own officials had floated the idea

of increasing meter rates and nearly tripling meter revenues just a couple of years earlier. And it wasn't a secret that Morgan Stanley planned to raise meter rates. Alderman Wagger's Pax estimate was that the Morgan Stanley Group could pay the city three or four times as much and still be in profit. But when Wagger's Pax tried to get the city's budget director to answer some questions during a council meeting coffee break, it didn't go well. He literally ran off, says Wagger's Pax. And Wagger's Pax wasn't a heavy hitter like Mayor Daly.

Daly was the ultimate insider. His dad, Richard J. Daly, had also been the mayor of Chicago. Mayor for life, the joke went after he served for 21 years. Mayor Daly the second was also just about to pass the 20 year mark. A heavy jowl, suit and tie power broker, well into his 60s, who combined old school Chicago politics with the corporate ease of a trained lawyer. Wagger's pack was a dorky looking 30-something from Colorado via Kenya, where he'd served in the Peace Corps. Freshly elected, he was the perfect person to cast a critical eye over the parking

meter deal, but very poorly positioned to do much about it, because the pressure to pass the deal was on. To delay it, puts our budget at risk, declared Chicago's CFO Paul Volpe. This is the deal we either accepted or we don't. Listener, they accepted it. Chicago parking meters, or CPM, the company set up by the Morgan Stanley Consortium, took over the city's meters in 2009.

The early weeks didn't go smoothly. Chicagoans were soon furious, not only about the way that CPM immediately jacked up the parking charges and extended the meter hours, but also about the fact that they neglected to change the signs in forming drivers about the new hours and charges. Adding insult to injury, the parking meters started to choke on all the quarters that were being fed into them. CPM couldn't get round to empty them fast enough. Even when the meters were working, drivers didn't enjoy having to carry buckets of quarters around in their cars. enjoy having to carry buckets of quarters around in their cars. Every quarter fed into a parking meter seemed to be going direct to Wall Street. Some suburbanites wrote to the Chicago Press,

explaining that they would be avoiding the city at all costs. Personally, I'm in full boycott mode, wrote one, I'll stand on my head to spare myself a visit if street parking is involved, to hell with Chicago. Another correspondent explained that she was being treated for breast cancer in a city hospital. Before the privatization, she might have to wait a while to find a spot, but then she'd put in a few quarters and head in for her radiotherapy. Now however, she put in her first quarter and realised it would only by seven minutes. Seven. I start thinking, I'm there early and I'll be

there for a while, they might run late, so we need to build some cushion time in. So I calculate all that, realise I don't have eight pounds of quarters with me. Screw you, daily! pounds of quarters with me, screw you, daily. One of Mayor Daly's public relations advisors, Marilyn Katz, put it even more bluntly. It's one thing to give away and sell your airports, she said. But the parking meters were an insult every day that said, F you, every time you parked your car. And six months after the deal had been signed, the city's Inspector General released a report explaining that, in effect, when the city of Chicago had signed that deal with Morgan Stanley,

the city had had its face ripped off. The Inspector General reckoned the fair price of the deal was two or three times what the city had been paid. Morgan Stanley itself told investors, and I'm slightly oversimplifying here, but only slightly, that they wouldn't have to wait 75 years to make their money back. They might well make their money back inside the first decade. Ouch. It was just as Olderman Scott Wagger's pack had predicted. But then came something he hadn't predicted.

In February 2009, barely weeks after he'd voted in vain against the deal, Wagger's pack was informed that across his neighborhood in Chicago's north side, CPM would start charging to park on Sundays. Sundays had previously been a day of worship, rest, and free parking. This was not going to go down well with Waga's Pax constituents. He proposed keeping the old, shorter hours and the free Sunday parking on a few hundred of the meters. Like, could be done, explained city officials,

but under the terms of the deal with Morgan Stanley, the city would have to pay compensation for interfering with CPM's right to charge what it wanted when it wanted. How much compensation? Well, a few hundred thousand dollars a year, and that's for a small change to fewer than one percent of the city's meters. As the journalist Henry Grabar explains in his book, Paved Paradise, that was the moment the truth about the full implications of the deal dawned on Scott Waggerspack.

of the deal, dormed on Scott Wagas' pack. Chicago City Council hadn't just traded away parking revenue. They traded away the streets themselves. Corsary tales will be back after the break. business notifications getting out of hand buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages. Keep your edge with Thrive Small Business software and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business. Put simply, small businesses run better on Thrive. Get Command Center for free today at thrive.ca.

That's THR-YV.ca. Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. Protect our children from being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics. This is a story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be.

And an English teacher caught in the middle. I've worked on running in the whole thing. I think it was, it was, tears not out of sadness, not out of being mad. It's terrified. From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Chicago was starting to realize just how much control it had ceded to Wall Street. The Morgan Stanley deal was predicated on a particular number of meters in particular spots on Chicago's curb sides. When Ram Emmanuel succeeded Richard M. Daley as mayor, his team arrived with visions of a greener, more walkable city. Those visions soon made painful contact with the reality that Daly's team had negotiated. Those nice little pocket parklets, tiny urban OACs of seats and lush planters, each one squeezed into a former parking spot, that is going to cost you, said CPM.

Our parking spot, our meter, our lost revenue. But the city could rent back prime downtown spots for the low, low price of $1,000 each per month. What about the idea of an open streets festival, in which the streets would be closed temporarily to motorised traffic, allowing kids to play games or ride their bikes, neighbourhoods to hold block parties, that sort of thing. Don't even ask what that's going to cost. The scheme was abandoned. Every idea for greening Chicago streets had a serious price tag attached. Bike racks, drop-off zones for restaurants and stores, bands on

parking in rush hour to ease congestion, no parking zones near intersections to improve visibility and safety. All possible for a price. Congestion pricing to raise money and ease congestion? Forget it. Such a scheme was just impractical in the light of CPM's right to parking revenues. And whether you're in favor of congestion pricing or not, it does seem that to rule it out for 75 years, as a side effect of a deal over parking meters, well that's not how a democracy should really work. Bike lanes, bus lanes, don't make me laugh, do you know how much parking they eat up? Do you know how much money the city would have to pay over to Morgan Stanley's group?

Curbside seating for restaurants during the pandemic? Sure, of course, this is a global emergency. Oh, by the way, pay up. There were workarounds to be sure, if the city could find suitable alternative spots, they could install meters in those spots and hand over the meter rights to CPM as a form of compensation. But that was complicated and the alternative spots were soon all used up. Chicago's privatisation of parking meters is widely regarded as a fiasco, a quintessential cautionary tale. If they really needed money so badly back in 2008, they could have borrowed from the bond markets, in which countless bidders compete to lend money to cities. Instead,

they signed away their control over parking and over the streets themselves for 75 years to the winner of an auction in which there were only two bidders and they sold it cheap. Yet there is an irony here that Henry Grabar argues in paved paradise. Some of what CPM was doing on behalf of its international backers was actually good parking policy. One reason to have parking meters in the first place is to make sure that people who need to park can find a space, even if they have to pay. Chicago had long underpriced parking, which meant that there was too much demand for these cheap spaces and not enough spaces to go around. You can see that easily enough by looking at Chicago's parking revenue before the deal.

The city made 10 times as much from parking fines than from parking charges. Parking spaces were so cheap that, counterintuitively, people had to park illegally instead, because the cheap legal spaces were so often full. That changed after privatisation. There were almost always some free spaces, which meant that nobody needed to park illegally, and nobody clogged up the streets driving around in search of a space. Businesses started to notice that they made more money when street parking was priced high enough to free up spaces. In fact, some of them lobbied against the reintroduction of free Sunday parking. Other people switched to buses and trains and bikes, easing congestion and reducing pollution.

All of these benefits emerged once somebody took parking seriously and forced drivers to pay real money for a valuable service. If only the city of Chicago had had the courage to do that job itself, rather than handing over the responsibility and most of the financial gains to Morgan Stanley and friends. The deal had been signed at the end of 2008, when Morgan Stanley paid more than a billion dollars,

1,156 million. By the time Richard and Daily left office in 2011, three years later, only 76 million dollars was left. The other $1,080 million had been spent. By 2019, Morgan Stanley and partners had made back their initial investment. Chicago had spent the money, Morgan Stanley were in profit, and there were 64 years of the deal, still to run. Not to worry, that was a few years back. Now, there are only six decades left. This episode of Corsionary Tales was based with permission on the reporting of Henry Grubbar in his book Paved Paradise, and I strongly recommend you get a whole of a copy as

soon as you can. But Chicago's parking meter fiasco isn't the only cautionary tale in Henry's book, and so I present to you our first ever hybrid episode of cautionary tales, half traditional tale and half cautionary conversation with Henry Grubar. Henry, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We heard this story about two octogenarians beating each other up in an argument over a parking space and it's not the only such story you tell others in in your book. Why is it that people get so upset about parking? Well, I don't blame them for it actually. I think it's natural to be upset about access to parking when you live in a society where it has become impossible

to do even the most basic tasks, like buying a gallon of milk or taking your kids to school without using your car. So we have built for ourselves a place in which parking and finding parking has become a precondition of life itself. And so naturally people do tend to get upset when they don't find parking spaces.

And so I think the challenge here is not just to ask people to chill out about parking, but to focus on redesigning communities in a way where parking becomes less important. And by the way, even as the author of a book that argues that, while we made a lot of mistakes about parking, I am not immune from this. I mean, I don't like paying for parking

any more than anybody else does. I get parking tickets too, and I grew up in New York City, and I feel like the expectation that parking is going to be really challenging is so ingrained in the way I think about city life, that when I'm driving, my move is always to take the first parking spot I find, even if I'm six blocks away from my destination right because you have scars from from looking for parking in New York City for too many years.

Why did you want to write a book about parking? Well I'm a reporter by day and the stories that I write are about cities so I write about architecture and real estate and infrastructure, climate change, housing, stuff like this. And I began to find that in every single story that I started to work on, there was this hidden element that kept coming up that would change the way I understood what I was writing about. And that element, of course, was parking. And in the United States, parking is actually a fundamental concern of architecture and real estate.

It's the first thing that a developer considers when they decide what they can put on a lot. Because of that, it's an essential component of housing. It determines the cost of housing, the quantity of housing, the type of housing we get in terms of its design. And then finally, by becoming such a major component of the urban environment, it also changes the environment like capital E in terms of our relationship with rain, with heat, with pollution. I mean, this was perhaps the most shocking revelation to me of all, was when I went to Houston after Hurricane Harvey had devastated the city, flooded tens of

thousands of homes, and I began to look at the rainfall records in Houston over the years. And while it's true that storms have gotten more intense in Houston over the last few decades, what has grown much faster is the amount of runoff that's created. That rain hits the city of Houston, which is one of the most auto-dependent paved over cities in the United States. And it doesn't go anywhere. It just stays on that pavement, that asphalt, that concrete. And in this way, providing all this parking actually changes our landscape, right? It becomes a major component determining

whose house floods during a rain storm just because of all the land that's been converted into impervious surface. So that was a revelation for me. There was a very striking sentence early on in your book. You write, parking is a mutant strain of yeast in the dough of architecture, making our designs bigger, uglier, and further apart. If the Empire State Building had been built to the minimum parking requirements of a contemporary American city, for example, its surface parking lot

would cover 12 whole blocks. And that would be a legal requirement. You'd have to do it. Why do we have these laws and these rules? I think these rules often seem inexplicable when you read about them and you understand the way they stifle our ability to provide attractive architecture, walkable neighborhoods, affordable housing and all that. But I think if you put yourself in the shoes of the urban planners of the 1950s, they

begin to make more sense. Now in the 1950s, most cities in the United States had scarcely changed in terms of their urban form since the beginning of the 20th century. And so obviously, these big cities after the Second World War are overrun with cars and traffic. And planners think that the root of this problem is parking. And that the reason there's so much traffic is that everybody's looking for a parking space and there isn't anywhere for anyone to park. Which is not what they...

And so they... You're wrong, right? Shocking statistics in your book about how much time and how many miles people drive just looking for parking spots and what percentage of the traffic on the road is just drivers circling around looking for a free spot. So it's not an absurd thing for them to think. No, it's not an absurd thing for them to think at all. And suburbs are really on the rise at this point. Big new malls open with lots and lots of free parking.

And cities see this and they think we have to up our parking standards to compete with the suburbs. And this is a fatal mistake because cities are never going to be able to offer the easy ample parking for free that is so common and so expected at many suburban locations. It just can't work geometrically. Nevertheless, they gave it their best shot. And one of the ways they did so

was a kind of sneaky thing they did. They said, well, if we build all this parking, the city's gonna go bankrupt. So let's just give it to the private sector. Let's make private developers bear the cost of this transition. And the way we'll do that is we'll pass laws that say that every newer renovated building has to include extra

Y number of parking spaces and before long we will be competitive with the suburbs in terms of parking and I think it worked beyond their wildest dreams because there's a lot of American cities you can go to today where you go downtown and it's 30 40 50 percent parking But a town which is 30 40 50 percent parking is obnoxious in all kinds of ways. The environmental impact, the lack of storm drainage, it's horrible for pedestrians to walk around a city where there's so much parking because everything is so far apart. You've got your Empire State Building and it's sorted by 12 blocks of parking, or at least it would be. You also have a situation where it's just

completely impossible to build affordable homes. Because every time you want to build an apartment block, there's just these colossally expensive parking requirements. The rules deliver the parking, but they don't deliver liveable, walkable cities. Yeah, and I think the attitude over the last 10, 20 years in American cities has very much been to look at these rules and to look at this transition that took place in the 1950s and 60s and say, we got it wrong. And that's a big step because for many years, the conventional wisdom was, if you provide more parking, there will be less traffic. And in fact, it came to be that it was mostly the opposite. The more parking you provide, the more people

will drive, and the more parking you'll need, because the urban environment you create is so hostile to anybody who's not in a car. Over the last 10, 15 years, that has changed. We now have dozens, if not hundreds of cities, that have decided to repeal these laws, and to let builders, architects, developers, homeowners, et cetera, decide for themselves how much parking needs to accompany

every single apartment building, every single store, etc. and so you're beginning to see a revival of those traditional urban forms that were jettisoned over the course of the 20th century. But it's also true, of course, that parking doesn't exist in a vacuum. People say, well, nobody rides the bus or the street car or the train compared to how many people drive, so we can't make it harder to find parking because it is true in the United States that for most people, most of the time, we do not have a choice about whether we

want to use a car to get someplace. And so in that sense, parking is equivalent to access, and it's not really our fault that we get so up in arms every time our parking is challenged and we fight with our neighbors and we fight with the people trying to take our parking spot and so on. So that is a real issue. What are the points that you make in the book is that, as you say, parking is access but that is a rather superficial kind of access, and it papers over deeper inequalities. I think most fundamentally, the focus on free and easy parking

as a precondition of every landscape precludes us from building housing, right? Both because the requirement to provide parking brings up the cost of new housing and reduces its quantity. But also because in a society where everyone is so focused on having a parking space, neighbors often reject to the concept of new people entering the city based on their challenge to the parking status quo. This idea that new neighbors are going to come and take away your parking spot,

and this is a reason that we should oppose a new apartment building here, a new affordable complex there. Just straight up between parking and housing, I saw firsthand. I was in Austin, Texas, and I visited a housing complex for the formerly homeless. This place has been constructed according to the city's then parking minimums, with a giant two-story garage,

a top which were perched, a couple dozen new apartment units. Now the garage was almost almost empty, of course, because the people who had moved into this complex were homeless. They were not statistically very likely to own cars and drive cars every day. And yet, the building had been forced to dedicate half its square footage, and God knows how much money and construction costs to building this garage. And so yes, they had provided free parking and all the access that comes with that, but at the expense of creating new homes for people who are living on the streets.

We'll be back in a moment and when we return, we'll be diving back. Should that be driving back into the Chicago Parking Metas Fiasco. The Tech Art Children for being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics. This is a story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. And an English teacher caught in the middle. I broke down running in the whole day.

And I think it was, it was a big tear. It's not out of sadness, not out of being mad. It's a... Stereified. From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. This is cautionary tales, and I've been talking to Henry Gravarr, the author of paved paradise. Henry, surely the city of Chicago wasn't expecting a free lunch from Morgan Stanley, so what did they expect? What were they thinking? I do think they thought they had found themselves a pretty good deal, especially considering the moment in which they were making this deal, right? Property tax revenues are expected

to shore up Chicago's budget as the recession takes effect. And they saw in this deal an opportunity to put a bunch of money into city coffers following a model that had been pretty well established in the city at this time, and not always had these deals led to regrets, right? I think selling off, for example, the city on parking garages is regarded now in an era of remote work as not a terrible decision. I mean, I've told a number of people about this story, which is incredible, and the reaction very often is it must have been corruption. They can't have been that stupid, but what I'm hearing

is maybe they were that stupid. I think they were. I think they were. Moreover, it illustrates the process of doing business in Chicago politics, where it's not corruption itself, but it's this disdain for the public process, this lack of review, this sense of self-confidence, that the mayor and his advisors and his friends and associates in the business community know what's right for the city, and that to question them is somehow not conducive to city interest. One of the things that this deal underlines for me is that this is one way of managing city streets and the way that Morgan Stanley, or I should say CPM LLC now, is managing these streets is to maximize revenue. And on a lot of these blocks in Chicago, the parking is actually so expensive

that there's a lot of empty spaces. That's one problem that this is not very well managed. And then the other one is that, of course, it is really a catastrophe for the city of Chicago that all this money that people are putting into these parking meters is not going into public services. Street trees and park benches and cityscape improvements, drainage, all that stuff in the neighborhood that makes you feel like when you put that money in the meter, that money is going to something that you value. And that's an important political component of making people happy with these changes. And in Chicago to this day, people are very unhappy with this change.

And I think that's one reason why. I always promise our listeners that our cautionary tales will teach them something. They'll be a lesson to learn. What's the lesson you draw from this one? The lesson from the Chicago Parking Meter deal, I would argue, is not in fact that cities should never think about privatizing public services. I think there is a time and a place for that. But the mistake of the Chicago parking meter deal is much more specific. It's that if you're signing a novel privatization bid for an asset that has never before been privatized

by any American city, you need to spend more than 24 hours reading the 400-page contract. And perhaps even you should commission an independent consultant to review this deal, a public hearing in which experts testify in front of the city council, and so on. So it really is a case of not really thinking through the future consequences. And Chicago did what every other city has done, really, which is to not seriously think about the value of parking.

That is the real cautionary tale here. If you don't think at least a little about what all this parking might be worth, you wind up making big mistakes like this. We've been talking about cars and of course the auto industry, the experience of driving cars is being transformed by the appearance of electric vehicles, which have different requirements, I guess, to gasoline vehicles. So how are electric vehicles going to change the parking landscape and change the issues we've been talking about? Electric vehicles are going to have a massive effect on the way we think about parking.

The parking space is not just the place you store your car, but it's also the place you fuel your car. We're talking about electrifying and decarbonizing, at least in America, what is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, the transportation sector. So this is a vitally important decision that households are making to opt for an electric vehicle, and it is contingent on whether they have a place to charge that vehicle at home. Now two and three American households do have a private garage where they can more or less simply plug that vehicle into the wall.

But one in three American households don't. That's tens of millions of people who are not going to be able to make this transition to electric vehicles unless they can find a place to charge them. Now, some of them live in multifamily buildings that need to be adapted for electric charging. But I think the more challenging question is what we're going to do about street parking. Because if all those street parking spaces

are supposed to be available to people with electric vehicles where they can charge their cars right where they're parked, that's going to require either an infrastructural investment in electric chargers that is beyond our wildest imaginations, or it's gonna require a new way of thinking about parking, in which people are more cooperative, and they don't simply think of a parking spot as a place to leave their car for days at a time

until they need it next, but they begin to think of parking as a more fluid and cooperative system in which people move in and out of a select number of spaces that have become electrified. The stakes of this are really high, right? Because if we don't figure this out, we don't figure out a way to let all these households who parked the cars on the street have a way to charge them, then our densest population areas are going to be left out of the electric vehicle transition and are going to be left suffering from the consequences of the air pollution associated with gas-powered cars for decades

longer than people who live in the suburbs and have home garages. Henry, before we begin the interview, you mentioned that you're about to move from Paris to Boston. Is that going to raise any new parking headaches for you? Um, that is a funny question. It's going to raise an new parking headaches for you? Um, this is a funny question. It's going to raise an immediate parking headache for me. I have long been as a car-free resident of Paris, extolling the city's decisions around reducing the availability of parking and building green spaces and bus lanes and bike lanes and all that stuff,

which I use on a daily basis and very much appreciate. And now I have to rent a giant moving truck and drive it around the city. It is always an adventure to try and find a parking spot here. But then the other side of it is that I am excited in a perverse way to go back to the United States and once again experience the feeling of losing your car in a giant supermarket parking lot. Henry Grabbar, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Henry Grabbar is the author of Paved Paradise which is available now in the US and Canada from all good booksellers. This episode of cautionaryails was based with permission on a chapter of that book, and for a full list of our sources, as always, please see the show notes at timhalfa.com. Corsion Retails is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Alice Finds with support from Edith Husslo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. Sarah Nicks edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohn, Lytel Moulard, John Schnarrs, Carly Migliori and Eric Sandler. Corsan retails as a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardle Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us.

And if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus. On the show page in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. The Tech Art Children for being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics. This is a story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. And an English teacher caught in the middle. I've worked on running in the whole day. And I think it was, it was the fear.

Tears not out of sadness, not out of being mad. It's so terrifying. From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.