Chicago Selling Its Parking Meters To Morgan Stanley Has Been A Disaster For The City

Despite what your crackpot uncle who thinks Fox News is too liberal will tell you, you won’t actually get shot the moment you step foot in Chicago. It has some rough areas, sure, but overall, it can be a great city to live in if you can handle the weather. Chicago is also one of the most affordable cities in the U.S. that has a somewhat functional public transportation system. It could definitely be better, but there’s one massive obstacle that continues to hold the city back — its parking meters.

As our friends at Climate Town explain in-depth in a recent video, Chicago doesn’t actually have any control over its parking meters. Why? Because back in 2008, the city sold control of those parking meters and parking spaces for the next 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a bundle of private investors, including Abu Dhabi, for $1.6 billion dollars. Like a lot of cities at the time, Chicago was short on cash, and forming a public-private partnership sounded like a great way to get that cash without raising taxes.

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