The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them).

It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.

In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!

When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.

I know this probably doesn't add a lot to the conversation but for me it articulated and cleared some inconsistencies I was failing to square up in my mind. So, nice, thanks. Do you have any books or articles that helped you in your analysis, I wonder?

You're welcome!

The topical book to recommend here is obviously The High Cost of Free Parking.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...

It's quite a big book. Henry Grabar's book, mentioned elsewhere, is apparently more approachable.

It’s big, but it’s very clearly written and you can likely understand the entire premise after a few chapters.

You're missing the trade-off between time and money (and how it differs based on wealth).

"Free for all" parking spaces allow you to trade your time (hunting a spot) for parking, the same way coupon-clipping trades time for a discount on food.

You can say "eliminate coupons, all food should be at market price", but coupons really are an effective way of helping people. They segment the market by being too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk.

Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.

Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.

If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.

> Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange?

Sounds almost exactly like the argument made here https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

> a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange

You've just described how rationing in Eastern Bloc countries worked.

You can trade your time for goods, but others might trade money for time. Something to think about maybe.

Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”

That's not why coupons exist, though, it's just a side effect. If coupons didn't exist and your goal was to help poor people eat, coupons would be a weird way to do it.

Why is it weird? It's a lot like the 10c can and bottle levy. Ostensibly for recycling, but also gives homeless people a job. Sneaks under the radar of regular-sized market forces, and gives them some agency in their lives.

It’s pretty badly targeted. Lots of poor people don’t have much time, and lots of better off people have lots of time and enjoy things like screwing around with coupons to get a discount. It also doesn’t do much for extreme poverty. If you have no money, it doesn’t matter if you can get a coupon for half off a loaf of bread or whatever, you still can’t afford it. So you end up giving more help to people who need it less.

If you want to help poor people buy food, give them money to buy food.

This is only true if you completely discount the very significant cost of owning a motor vehicle.

The closest option to truly free continues to exist and has always existed: walking

And, unlike with food so much of the time, in this case the cheaper option is also healthier.

> too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

What makes you think poor people have more free time than wealthy people?

That makes a lot of sense, but (mostly conservative) politicians still criticize many innovations because of their supposed effect on the (more or less) poor. Recent example: the 2023 reform of the Gebäudeenergiegesetz (Building Energy Law) in Germany, which sought to promote energy efficient ways of heating and decrease heating using fossil fuels, was met with furious opposition (including a lot of disinformation) from the conservative press and parties because of the poor poor building owners who can't afford a heat pump (which is more expensive to install, but already has much lower operating costs, which are likely to become comparatively even better in the future).

>If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor,

Why does it seem as though some people believe there is an infinite supply of rich people?

Income disparity is so great that the cost of parking is irrelevant to the mythical army of rich people waiting off to the side for parking prices to come down.

I'm not even in the 99%, I'm in the 97% and I don't give a fuck about parking. I'm driving downtown to buy a $600 Barbour jacket from Orvis. I don't care about $20 for parking and I'm not coming downtown more often if parking is $0.

>Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free.

If you are poor milk and bread should 100% be free.

Support for SNAP (food stamps) routinely and consistently polls at >70%.

People who assert what you just did are in the extreme minority.

SNAP doesn't make food free in the sense of free parking, it gives money to poor people to buy food. The equivalent for parking would be market-rate parking with means-tested parking vouchers, which would be a much, much better solution than what we have now.

Making milk and bread free for everyone != making milk and bread free for poor people by giving them SNAP.

The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!

Part of what it allows is more housing (something that places like San Fran fail miserably at) because it's not constrained by having to provide 1.5 spots per bedroom or whatever arbitrary number.

And more housing is what is needed to contain housing costs.

Most poor people don't own their house and often don't have a car – if you do own both you're middle class.

That's true but I'm not really worried about them. I'm worried about the people who are doing everything right and about to not be poor. Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. Public policy should strive to avoid doing stuff like that.

I'm of the opinion that when public goods are cheap enough to face shortages all the time the market economy steps up because better off people will spend more to save time/hassle.

The problem is when things are expensive enough to kick out a lot of people, but not enough people actually alleviate shortage, which is basically how it currently goes with parking.

The market economy has solved none of these problems, and I suggest looking up just how socioeconomically mobile people in the US really are (it's not great).

Price parking at the market rate. Demand for other forms of transportation increase substantially. Provide it. Poor people can now take cheap buses and trains instead of expensive cars.

If you're worried about the transition, subsidize other forms of transport and build that out first, but forcing poor people to own cars just to make it to work is not a good way to help them.

Price parking at the market rate. Political competitor criticizes you for being an "eco-dictator" and promises a return to free parking. You lose the next election.

Sorry for the cynicism, I'm actually for increasing the price of parking, but recent political events have robbed me of any illusions that environmentally friendly policies have a future. When they have a choice between the environment and paying less money (short-term), most people will choose paying less money.

> Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff.

No, it's the opposite. A city built around everyone having a car makes car ownership a cliff. Normalising not having a car (and a reliable bus service - like the kind you get by turning street parking spaces into bus lanes - helps with that) makes the ladder gentler. If people are late for work because they couldn't find a parking spot just as often as people are late because the bus was late or didn't show, maybe there will be fewer horror stories of people getting fired because their car broke and they couldn't afford to get it fixed.

> most poor people don't have a car

Outside of maybe a couple urban areas like NYC, that's patently untrue in the United States. It would not surprise me if the poor frankly had more and older/rougher cars than their more wealthy counterparts.

It benefits the poor by allocating resources as efficiently as possible. If there is someone who is poor enough that they need help from society/the government, it would be much more effective to transfer money directly to the, rather than very very poorly (probably regressively in fact) target that help by having the public subsidize parking on their block.

They would rather have the $100 in efficient redistribution rather than the government spend $100 so that they can benefit by $1.

You can't means-test a parking space. You could, in theory, set parking prices based on the value of the land its by.

You can means-test a parking permit. It's dumb, but some cities do.

Rather than implementing all these complex and weird rules, you can just ensure everyone has enough money to afford the essentials.

One of the ways it benefits them is by reducing traffic congestion so buses can get through. A significant amount of traffic in parking-contested areas is from cars looking for parking.