The City That Sold Itself To Wall Street
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cautionary Book Club: When Morgan Stanley offered to lease Chicago's parking meters for the princely sum of $1 billion, the City Council were convinced that they had struck gold. They hastily signed the deal. But they soon learnt that they hadn't just traded away parking revenue - they had traded away the streets themselves...
In this hybrid episode of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford first tells the story of the Chicago parking metres fiasco of 2008. In the second half, Tim is joined by Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise, to discuss the lessons we can glean from Chicago's deal with Wall Street, and why parking is such an emotive issue for so many.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Tim here. Before this episode, I wanted to let you know that there's a month of new content |
| 0:05.5 | coming from Pushkin that you can hear early and ad-free. Our team has exciting new shows and episodes, |
| 0:12.7 | for example, a new series from Malcolm Gladwell's revisionist history. Paul McCartney's new podcast |
| 0:19.2 | a life in lyrics, new content from The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos and a brand new series |
| 0:24.7 | of the podcast called The Dream, which dives into the truth behind life coaches and self-help. |
| 0:30.8 | You won't want to miss Pushkin's September launches, and if you want to binge shows early and |
| 0:36.1 | ad-free, you can hear all of Pushkin's content, including cautionary tales by becoming a Pushkin Plus |
| 0:42.4 | subscriber. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or by visiting pushkin.fm slash plus. |
| 1:01.7 | A winter's day in Chicago, early 2009, it's cold. Scott Wagger's pack, a newly-elected |
| 1:11.9 | alderman for the north side of town, is keen to impress. Despite the freezing temperatures, |
| 1:18.1 | he's pounding the streets, personally investigating complaint about some garbage blocking an alley. |
| 1:24.8 | As he surveys the scene, piles of paperwork everywhere. He realises that this is no ordinary pile |
| 1:32.4 | of trash. This paperwork is all about the recent controversial sale of Chicago's parking meters |
| 1:40.2 | to a consortium led by an investment bank, Morgan Stanley. The parking meters weren't the first |
| 1:47.6 | chunk of the city that Chicago's mayor had sold off. Mayor Richard M. Daley was famous for it. |
| 1:54.3 | It was more than in the air, said Daley's chief financial officer, Paul Volpe. |
| 1:59.5 | We were the leaders in it. You couldn't go anywhere without Mayor Daley's reputation for being |
| 2:04.5 | a leader in this industry being brought up to you. Daley had privatised the toll road that ran |
| 2:10.3 | between Chicago and Indiana. He privatised the Linguent Tax Collection, to sit his janitorial |
| 2:17.0 | services and was even working on a deal to privatise Midway Airport. So, when the idea came to |
| 2:23.9 | privatise Chicago's parking meters, a lot of people shrugged and said to themselves, |
| 2:29.4 | sure, why not? The idea had been raised in early 2008, a year before Scott Wagger's pack had |
... |
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