I live in an apartment building in an urban area. It’s not a super-dense center-city neighborhood, but space is limited. The block it is on consists of the apartment complex, which is comprised of two separate buildings joined by a parking garage in the middle, the entire thing forming kind of an L shape, and a smaller building with a few retail establishments, which fits into the crook of the L.
The garage is gated; residents have a fob that lets us in and a parking decal. There is parking surrounding the retail establishments, but towing is enforced there. So, where are guests of apartment complex residents supposed to park? What if you want to have friends over? There are two options. One is that guest passes may be purchased from the leasing office. This is not that great of an option, because 1) they cost $10 per day, and 2) they must be purchased from the leasing office in person during its operating hours, which end at 6pm on weekdays, 4pm on Saturdays.
The other guest parking option is on-street parking along the side street that runs along the long side of the L. Management claims that this official is guest parking for the apartment building, but it’s on-street parking on a public road, so there’s no way to limit who parks there. So, unfortunately, these spaces are never open evenings/weekends.
The reason for this is that the apartments on the first floor, facing that street, on the long side of the L, rather than having a balcony like everyone else, have a porch, accessible from the sidewalk, through which they can enter their apartment. So residents of those apartments park on the street whenever they can, because it’s faster for them to do so, hop out of their car, and walk straight into their apartment through the porch door, than it is to drive down the street to the garage entrance, wait for the gate to open, drive through the garage until they find a spot, park, walk to the end of the garage, and walk down the hallway to their apartment door. So, these people are taking up the parking spaces which are the only spaces guests can use, while leaving open spaces in the garage, which guests can’t use. They’re basically not using their apartment parking privilege, while at the same time preventing there from being any guest parking.
Is there a name in economics for this type of phenomenon? I thought of “tragedy of the commons,” but that doesn’t seem quite right. I have the sense that in the tragedy of the commons, everyone is ruining the commons for everyone else, including themselves. But in this scenario, the situation is not ruined for the first-floor residents. What we have is one group of people using a resource for something other than its intended purpose, leaving open another option they have which isn’t as convenient to them personally, making the resource inaccessible to another group of people for whom it’s their only option.