What I absolutely don't understand: Why are there no parking garages, why only surface parking lots? Isn't that prime real estate?

Why is there no incentive to stack the cars can stack in 10 layers on one lot instead of taking up 10 lots with surface parking?

Can’t say for certain but intuitive guess is it’s dirt (literally dirt in some cases) cheap to do a ground level parking slot?

Slap some paint on the ground, put up a booth and a sign, and you’re good?

Whereas an elevated garage is probably a years-long project?

I also think most of these parking lots are probably owned by small time chumps, not consolidated mega parking companies.

Yeah people I know in the parking industry have a saying that if you want to print money build a parking lot or garage. They're stupidly easy and result in tons of recurring revenue if they're in a good location. Even the little lots can produce thousands per month of revenue.

How come no investors are buying that real estate and building skyscrapers or parking garages?

Is there really no demand for new downtown developments?

They've already done so. They're just waiting for the economics to make sense before they convert the land. The parking lot is just how they're paying taxes and the mortgage on the land.

Land Value Tax would fix this.

But even without, it’s crazy that you can afford the mortgage with the parking fees.

I'm definitely on board with a land-value tax. It would be a significant boon to productivity, economic mobility and even growth.

Say you've got a lot with like 420 spaces a few blocks away from Minute Maid Field in Houston. You charge $25 for parking during the event and you're guaranteed to fill it up every game. 81 home baseball games a season. That's $850k in revenue a year, practically guaranteed, and just for the baseball games. How many other events will they host there?

Let's say on an average workday your lot is like 60% full. You charge like $8/day for normal workdays or something. 252 spaces * 8/day ~$10k/wk. Lets say 50 of these normal weeks in a year, that's $504k in parking for the normal workdays.

Normal workday and baseball games gives you ~$1.35M in revenue for something you need to repave every decade and paint every couple of years.

Maybe zoning.

In arglinton, Texas, often called one of the least walkable cities on Earth, there's a requirement that each building has a parking lot proportional to it's occupancy. So if you build a 200 person building, you need a parking lot to handle 200 people. I can't remember the exact ratio, I doubt it was 1:1 like that.

So the parking lots are there by force, not convenience or cost.

This is why: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/par...

Developers effectively can't 'outsource' parking. If you want to build anything, you get to build parking. For a long time, building a parking garage cost more than just buying a bigger plot to develop. Now that's not the case, but the rules haven't changed, so it would take a developer with deep pockets to build a parking garage, and it would have to be associated with a massive development project.

> Why are there no parking garages

As someone who lived in Houston for a long time, there are lots of parking garages.

https://downtownhouston.org/navigate/parking/garages

But there are still lots of incentives to have a surface level parking lot. $$ per spot, it is stupid cheap for a surface lot in construction costs. Why pay $25 to park in a garage for the day when the surface lot around the corner costs $5?