The pandemic’s aftereffects continue to reverberate downtown. When employees were sent home with laptops and files in hand in 2020, not only the buildings and streets emptied out, but also the parking garages. In its first full Covid-era fiscal year, the Downtown Development Authority’s parking revenue was cut in half. “For FY21, we budgeted $24 million but took in only $12 million,” says DDA communications manager and interim director Maura Thomson. The authority now doesn’t expect revenue to reach $24 million until fiscal 2025—and estimates that total pandemic losses will top $48 million.
In the city’s 2021 fiscal year, from July 2020 through June 2021, parking revenue fell by half. It recovered to 70 percent of prepandemic levels last year, but has barely improved since: The authority expects to close out its current fiscal year in June at 73 percent of historic levels.
“Eighty percent of our revenues supported operations. The other twenty percent funded citywide improvements,” Thomson says. The shortfall “forced us to take a real aggressive approach to expenses, and we deferred noncritical maintenance and repairs—which we must catch up on now,” she says. And they’re “looking at the future with an analytical eye.”
Getting a monthly parking permit used to be a test of patience: In 2015, every one of the nine DDA lots and structures that accepts monthly parkers had a waiting list. Now only three do. Hourly parking was tight back then, too: A report that year declared the system “at full capacity in terms of accommodating any new growth in midday parking demand.” Consultants projected that unless more workers and residents switched to bikes and buses, the system could be short more than 800 spaces by 2019.
For anyone heading downtown on a Friday night, hourly parking can still be a challenge. “Evening activity has recovered much more than daytime and is getting back to pre-pandemic levels,” Thomson says. “I believe this is due to the evening economy versus the daytime economy. Evening activity—bars, restaurants, retail, entertainment—is back, and parking activity correlates.”
But it’s much easier now to find a space during the day, thanks to a shift in work patterns. While some businesses have called their staffs back to the office, other employees are working full-time from home or coming in only occasionally (see “The Office Glut Hits Home”). Landlords interviewed by the Observer don’t expect a full recovery anytime soon.
That could be true for the parking system, too. “We believe this could potentially be our new normal—but it may be too early to tell,” Thomson says. “We certainly have no plans to create more parking.”
