>Instead, for the last (at least) 40 years, the parking scheme has been a way for NYPD officers to get paid. They'd sell their placards to tenants in the buildings on my street, effectively providing guaranteed on-street parking to the wealthy residents of my street.

Calling this a grift is doing a disservice, IMO. This is straight up corruption. And it's rampant.

I 100% agree. I see those placards on the most expensive vehicles (Lamborghini SUV, Porsche 911s, etc). Either the NYC police are very well paid, or they are selling their placards.

Manhattan should end street parking, paid or free. Cars are not compatible with a city of its nature and parking is probably the least effective use of that space.

We should end free overnight parking, and make street parking only for a few hours. If you want to have a car put it in a garage or live in a building that has parking.

And for the units which don't have parking, what are you going to do, remove them from the market? Honestly, this is the wrong direction. How about we remove the corruption??

Out of curiosity, why don't landlords want parking spaces? Does it cost more than what it adds to the property value?

Parking spaces rent for less than apartments do

That's not exactly it. Per sqft parking spaces would typically bring in more. The problem is that parking space pricing is more competitive, doesn't allow you to increase rents for capital improvements and doesn't give you the flexibility to cheat the tax code like housing does.

You may have seen on TV recently talk about Trump inflating the size and value of his real estate holdings in NYC but that's _EVERY_ NYC landlord. There's massive tax advantages (write down opportunities) for them to do so.

And NYC gets to pretend that they have more tax money coming in than they really do to justify those billion dollar budgets that they always have a shortfall for.

100% - it does feel like a massive grift. Also, there are so many useless blocks in this city, especially outside of manhattan where there might be a dense population that has cars, but they're limited to parallel parking, when in fact there's plenty of room to have angled parking if you allow the cars to park halfway on the sidewalk. This is how it's done in many European cities, and even with their sidewalks that are actually 2x narrower than ours, there's plenty of room for cars and for pedestrians. NYC should zone a bunch of these useless extra wide sidewalks that no one needs for angled parking and just solve the problem over night.

European cities typically don't have the same level of crime as NYC's outer boroughs...historically. Angled parking presents a problem when people want to lie in wait to rob you. It's also difficult for street-level cameras to track people.

Guaranteed NYC will never do this.

I lived there for thirty years. The idea that slanted parking would lead to a wave of mugging is simply silly.

In reality, crime in New York City is at record lows: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm

> It's also difficult for street-level cameras to track people.

And that's another good thing.

I'm certain they will never do it, but one can dream. I mean, they already do it for police precincts. I have not considered the crime element that you're describing either, but this doesn't need to be a citywide initiative, they can take it block per block.

I must be missing something obvious... what about angled parking makes it especially friendly to robbers?

It's extremely easy to hide, invisibly, between cars with angled parking. Angled parking also shortens the gap between your front and back tires perpendicular to the street. Less light passing through means less opportunity to see shadows that shouldn't be there.