Where rent for a parking space can cost as much as that of an apartment
Excerpted from The Boston Guardian
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
Investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into your very own asphalt rectangle seems excessive, but Boston realtors are kicking themselves for not grabbing up parking spaces 20 years ago for less than $15,000. Today, the monthly mortgage on purchasing a private parking space in Back Bay, Beacon Hill or Downtown ranging from $150,000 to over $500,000 can be as much as rent on a single-bedroom apartment.
The steep price of private parking is a reflection of a city that’s broadly becoming less car-reliant while rising housing costs replace renters with condo purchasers willing or able to consider the price supplementary to the cost of home ownership. As the median cost of homes in Downtown has ballooned to around $1.5 million, parking space costs have similarly accelerated.
Year-to-year the availability of parking Downtown is in part regulated by the Air Pollution Control Commission, due to rules set by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1976.
Referred to as a “parking freeze,” the regulation set a cap on the number of commercially available parking spaces.