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"A report by Bloomberg Business said CPM stood to earn about 10 times what it paid over the life of the contract." Umm, is that really that much over a 75 yr c
by mattmaroon 3y ago
"A report by Bloomberg Business said CPM stood to earn about 10 times what it paid over the life of the contract."
Umm, is that really that much over a 75 yr contract? $1 invested in the stock market 75 years ago would be worth $172 today and that's adjusted for inflation, which I don't think the 10x figure is. To get to where we end up with 11x after 75 years in nominal dollars we're looking at just north of 3.2% interest.
So basically Chicago got a 75 yr loan at just over 3.2%. Currently 30 yr muni bonds average almost 4%. They'd have been lower back then, and I'm not even aware of 75 yr bonds existing, but what works out to a 3.2% interest rate on a 75 year loan is far from a disaster.
This article was not written by someone who understands finance, so I may be taking too much from that one quote. But if all they're getting over 75 yrs is a 10x return, it's hardly abusive! The investors would have been much better off just buying ETFs.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe thing that sticks people’s craw is that it has more or less solidified the current allocation of street space to parking, and any attempt to change it (bus lanes, bike lanes, a COVID outdoor eating area, etc.) now cost the city substantial amounts of money. At least with a normal loan if your priorities change you can shuffle your budget accordingly.
- projectazorian 3y agoAlso, normally when you pay for street parking the blow is softened by the belief that - at least in theory - the money might go to infrastructure maintenance or some other publicly beneficial cause. Not so in Chicago, it's just going to line the pockets of rent seekers.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoStreet parking in the US is almost universally, and massively, subsidized. The money doesn't "go toward" anything except an infinitesimal reduction in that subsidization. To see this in action, stroll into a popular part of town, check the rate for parking on the street for a few hours, then check the rate for doing the same in a private lot on the same block. Metering is purely in the interests of the business owners on the block, who don't want people parking for more than a few hours - ie anyone except their customers.
- mattmaroon 3y agoThat's fine though. If building roads and paying for them with meters, even if not fully, helps cities generate significant economic activity, that could easily be worth it from the taxes and other benefits generated. There's a reason every city does it. There's so much propaganda on all sides when it comes to automobiles in the US that it's hard to tease out reality, but I'd wager anything states and cities have hard numbers behind what they do. When it comes to things like that, where solid data isn't public I just assume the world is not run by idiots who don't know more about their area of expertise than me. I feel reasonably certain that urban parking subsidization is done at least to a large extent because it makes money.
- rtkwe 3y agoCities are soft locked into car dependence in many areas so businesses need cheap street parking to remain viable meaning cities are massively incentivized to continue providing it even if it is a bad local maxima.
- willdr 3y agoThe problem is, obviously, the expertise of one field ("maximise car parking to deliver revenue") clashes with the expertise of another ("if we don't work to minimise car parking and dependence thereon, we'll all be breathing sulfur-infused atmosphere and praying we don't break through the wet bulb temperature").
- thghtihadanacct 3y agoAs a biker on the central west coast I just had the 'opportunity' to revisit the midwest and can tell you we are screwed.
- mattnewton 3y ago> There's so much propaganda on all sides when it comes to automobiles in the US that it's hard to tease out reality, but I'd wager anything states and cities have hard numbers behind what they do. I would take the opposite side of that bet for most cities in the US. The smaller ones I have been involved in are shockingly captured by a minority of random business owners and retirees that bother to show up to meetings and demand their lifestyles be protected. I think parking subsidization is done largely because it's a visible cost to car owners who will oppose it strongly.
- smsm42 3y agoWell, "the money" already went to the city, and has been spent. Whether it has been on "publicly beneficial cause" or not is for Chicago voters to decide, but the investors already put the money in, and Chicago already spent it. What the parking meters doing now is returning what Chicago has borrowed to the investors. While I'd argue that the model of borrowing massive amounts of money for long terms and hoping the next guy will deal with it is not exactly the healthy financial strategy, it is pretty common for various governments (including the US Federal Government as the most prolific offender) and it's not the investors' fault that Chicago city government chose to do so.
- taylodl 3y agoRight? People are "forgetting" that Chicago got $1.16 billion dollars up-front and worked out a scheme where they don't have to pay any interest on it unless they choose to do so. Now they're boo-hooing that they can't cut CPM's income opportunity without making them whole. The fact Chicago already blew that $1.16 billion dollars and apparently has nothing to show for it is neither here nor there.
- smsm42 3y agoI think the genius in this scheme is that it doesn't show up as debt anywhere in the papers, and they can whine that evil capitalists are gouging the poor citizens while enjoying the money that seemingly came out of nowhere. And simultaneously look for ways to maybe get out of it by some trick and then re-sell the same thing again. If they just borrowed it the usual way, the headlines would be "Chicago city is getting deeper and deeper in debt", but now it's "Chicago city has to deal with unmitigated greed of capitalists, aided by heartless courts".
- mjevans 3y agoLiability, including contractual liability, really ethically SHOULD show up among 'debts' (which are just monetary liability). Maybe accounting laws are too focused on money and not enough on value.
- taylodl 3y agoChicago is free to do whatever they want. Their only obligation is to make CPM whole, i.e. pay the interest on their $1.16 billion loan. That's the deal - either allow CPM to earn the interest on the loan, or pay them the interest outright. That's completely reasonable. Blaming CPM for Chicago's inability to manage their finances is unreasonable, and no, I'm not a CPM investor.
- bobthepanda 3y agoWell, one can certainly blame the Daley administration, which shoved this deal through during its last term, and then coincidentally Daley became employed at the legal firm that wrote the deal. Chicago unfortunately lacks a recall mechanism, and voters were unable to punish Daley for this plan that had not been part of his campaign, because he declined to run after his approval rating sank to record lows.
- mindslight 3y agoInstead of tidily blaming a specific politician and then moving on as if nothing can be done, this type of principle agent problem should be eliminated. Simply put, mayors and city councils should not have an unrestricted authority to legally bind cities. I'd say that any contract longer than around 3 years (and/or larger than a certain dollar amount) should require direct approval by voters, or it shouldn't be considered as having been duly executed. Furthermore any terms of a contract that restrict/require a municipality to enact certain laws/ordinances (including through financial incentives) should be straight up illegal and thus unenforceable.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe problem is systemic. How would you enact such a change? Neither Chicago nor Illinois have mechanisms for citizen initiatives amending laws or the relevant charters and constitutions, so you'd need a three-fifths supermajority of politicians to agree to hobble themselves.
- 3y ago
- dh2022 3y agoI wonder if the CPM can be bought out of the deal if bus/bikes lanes are so precious. And today's environment may be more conducive to such deals. Maybe CPM has some payments due in other parts of it business and City of Chicago could take advantage of this. Just speculating.
- jlmorton 3y agoThat's not a very good financial analysis. This investment pays dividends. The original investment has already been paid back in cash, plus $500 million. There is an opportunity cost to money.
- mattmaroon 3y agoI'm not sure if you mean mine or theirs. Theirs is definitely bad. Mine was not an analysis, just pointing out how bad theirs is. The original investment was in 2008. $1 billion invested in an S&P500 ETF would have returned the original investment plus a couple billion more. Even still where they are at in 15 year does not work out to a really high interest rate. It's still sub 4%.
- projectazorian 3y agoAs I posted upthread, the 2022 nominal return was more like 12%, 6-7% when inflation adjusted. Assuming parking demand doesn't collapse, which seems unlikely given ongoing gentrification and decreasing transit usage, that sub-4% rate is about to go up by quite a bit.
- bilbo0s 3y agoSlightly off topic, but Math. Data. They need to be explained. Even then, people have to understand their fundamentals to understand the explanation. You can't make a soundbite out of math. "Chicago got suckered!!!" There, you see. No explanations necessary. You can fit it into a 20 second political commercial. You can plaster it on Social Media. Doesn't matter whether or not it's factually correct. You math and data guys are just doomed to lose every argument if you insist on employing only well reasoned and data backed introspection in public discourse. That's just not how the average US citizen works. (Nor even the average HN User to be honest. Look at the comments on this thread.) Best to try to find someway to put the analysis into a soundbite. I don't claim to know what that would look like, but it would work better in public discourse. Summarize all of what you just said, and then add in the cost of the city running the program fully on its own. (Seventy five years worth of utilities, maintenance, salaries, pensions, sick leave etc.) That way people compare cost to opportunity cost right away, and see the point you're making.
- mattmaroon 3y agoRight. "They're making 10x!" is a great soundbite for anyone who never took a finance class in college, which is probably most people. This is one of the few places where I'd post something mathematical publically and assume that the vast majority of the people who read it would understand it. The people on this site might not all undertand finance very well (hell I'm intermediate level at best) but they could at least understand time value of money and opportunity cost and probably have intuited those concepts even if they'd never heard of them. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of whoever wrote the article.
- fredgrott 3y agoNote it is in line with other similar schemes such as toll road leases...Indiana did the same scheme with their toll road leases..75 years and the firm that won got the same 10 times returns.
- bobthepanda 3y agoToll roads are also panned in the United States for much the same reasons.
- smsm42 3y agoSelling of leases is a traditional way to pad budgets short-term, and then whoever did it retired and it becomes somebody else's problem. If you budget is leaking and you urgently need $BIG_BUCKS to plug it, just sell a 75-year lease and move on. Of course, if you eventually run out of leases to sell, it may be a bit of a problem, but it will be then, and now is now.
- zoomablemind 3y agoHere's more detailed breakdown of the original concession deal https://reason.org/commentary/setting-the-record-straight-on-1/ https://reason.org/commentary/setting-the-record-straight-on... The deal is lot more complex than just a lump sum in exchange for 75yr lease. By the stated face-value, the $1.16b for 75 years splits to some $16m/yr. Previously, the city was reported to be making some $19m/yr from the parking fees. However, it seems that in present value terms such revenue stream should have been compounded to a larger present amount. Reasonably, Chicago could choose to just raise the parking fees at any future point (with some political repercussions). This also would have changed the deal calculations. The fact that CPM raised the prices and the residents have no choice but pay them only proves this. The deal is quite involved with some limit terms, infra expenditures, and other provisions. Each piece was likely evaluated in dollars to present it to both sides as fair value. Is it really a fair deal to city residents? It seems that the popular sentiment is that it is not, even after so many years since it was signed. I guess, no one has reasonably presented to the public an alternative to not having the deal. Or perhaps, other municipal fees like more speed cameras, zoning, and good old property tax increases have further muddied the fairness outlook.
- mattmaroon 3y agoHere’s the question: how much would you pay for an annuity that gave you whatever CPM is going to get out of this? If it’s more than $1.16b then you could say the city got a bad deal, but I just don’t think it is. I think it’s likely less, though that’s basing it on this article which is not well-written. 75 years is a long enough time horizon that you could consider the stock market “risk free”. It has never not performed way better than this annuity in that time period, and if it did, it would probably mean something so terrible happened that the money doesn’t matter (or maybe doesn’t exist) anymore. Add to that the fact that Chicago very wall may go bankrupt and default on this. The city already got their billion. There’s a lot less risk the stock market (or take your pick of many alternative places to park a billion) goes to 0 and again if it does, we’re probably talking America having collapsed so the money doesn’t matter anymore anyway. I just don’t see any reasonable set of mathematics where this wasn’t a good deal for the city. And yeah, people don’t like it because it’s costing them more at the meter and 95% of people don’t understand finance or math and they’re really mad that their city is going a poor job of fiscal management. If it weren’t this problem, the city would have had to do something else to raise or save a billion and they’d be mad about that instead.
- projectazorian 3y agoThe cited 3% annual return should be seen as a floor, not a ceiling. Both nominal and real returns have crept upward significantly over the life of the contract. The 2022 nominal rate of return was 12%, probably a 6-7% real rate of return, I'm not doing a precise calculation right now. Numbers are here, 2022 revenue was $140.4 million: https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2023/6/11/23755615/chicago-parking-meters-annual-audit-record-revenue https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2023/6/11/23755615/ch...
- snake_plissken 3y agoHow do you consider this a loan by the city? They sold the management concessions for a (potentially) fixed fee and in 75 years they'll get the rights back but nothing more. Or you're saying, this concession is equivalent to $1.16 billion lent over 75 years not adjusted for inflation at a rate of 3.2% rate today? Also, a rough calculation, but I came out with a 13% nominal return per year for the management company assuming they hit that 10x: 1,160,000,000.00 * 10 = 11,600,000,000.00 -> total earned 11,600,000,000.00 / 75 = 154,666,666.00 -> earnings per year 154,666,666.00 / 1,160,000,000.00 = 13% -> annual return Which does seem like a very, very nice deal for the concessionaire.
- qsantos 3y agoCompound interest: >>> 11**(1/75) 1.0324885301426248
- mattmaroon 3y agoRight, it's basically an annuity.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]