Parking Garages Empty In NYC -- The Wall Street Journal -- August 30, 2020

 Re-posting:

Another Covid casualty: parking garages idle as car owners pull out of NYC. Former monthly customers are calling and canceling permanently saying they are leaving the city. Most interesting "thing" about this story: it's not in some ZeroHedge hyped article: this is in the conservative, well-trusted WSJ. Amazing.  

From the linked article:

Manhattan parking-garage operators say they have lost thousands of monthly customers as many residents packed up their cars and moved out of New York City during the new coronavirus pandemic. 

“People are calling and canceling permanently saying they are leaving the city,” said Rafael Llopiz, president of the Metropolitan Parking Association, whose members often charge upward of $500 a month for a spot.

Mr. Llopiz said almost all of the parking-association members’ monthly business is residential. Of the 82,000 monthly customers who usually patronize the trade group’s garages, Mr. Llopiz said only 33,000 spaces were filled by mid-August.

Look at the numbers:

Mr. Llopiz said monthly business is usually down about 5% in August. This August it is down 60%.

Many car owners drove out of the city after the pandemic struck New York in March to stay with family or at second or rented homes. Now, with many school parents opting for remote learning and employers delaying the return to the office until the new year, some residents have decided to remain out of the city.

But there's much more at the story. Buried in the story: mass transit is dead.

The pandemic has prompted some New Yorkers to buy a car for the first time.

Emiley Jellie bought a 2019 Volkswagen Golf Alltrack in May after a decade living in the city without a vehicle. She also found a garage that is a 10-minute walk from her apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The rate of $350 a month seemed so good that she paid for the year in advance.

Ms. Jellie, who is 32, used the car on weekends. She visited friends in the suburbs and drove to the countryside for hikes. She even took a road trip to Tennessee to see the Great Smoky Mountains.

Ms. Jellie assumed she would return to her office at a major bank before Labor Day. But in July, when it became clear that the return would be postponed, she got in her car and drove to her family’s second home in Bonita Springs, FL