Is "tragedy of the commons" the best term for the parking situation at my apartment complex?

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.

IANA economist, but I think what’s going on is that the first-floor apartment dwellers are overusing the common-pool resource of the public parking, while excluding other residents from using the private-parking spots that they leave empty.

That’s not exactly a classic “tragedy of the commons” but I suppose that’s the closest standard descriptor for it?

I’d call it inefficient resource allocation.

This is like the Tragedy of the Pizzas. Ok, I made that up, but I’ll explain:

Suppose you have a group of people ordering pizzas. Let’s say that 25% are vegetarian and will only eat veggie pizza. You poll the meat-eating 75% and they all prefer pepperoni over veggie. You then order 3 pepperoni pizzas and one veggie.

But the poll fails to recognize a third possibility: that some set of meat-eating pizza eaters will prefer one slice of pepperoni and one slice of veggie over two slices of either one.

So what happens is that these people will eat some fraction of the veggie pizza. But the vegetarians get screwed because they can only eat the veggie pizza. Of course it would have been better to just get more veggie pizza to start with, but given what was ordered, there would have been more total happiness if people just stuck to their first-order preferences: the people losing some variety aren’t impacted as much as those that are just going hungry.

Or to say “We’re ordering 3 meat and one veggie pizza, which means everyone must stick with their first choice.”

“The Asshole Inevitability”: the law that says whatever exists, some asshole(s) will be along shortly to muck it up.

This law is also responsible for pineapple on pizza.

In my experience it mostly ends up that nobody touches the veggie until the meat is all gone, and that the ones who are stuck with veggie are usually all people who voted for meat.

What does it mean that this is “official” guest parking? It sounds like regular street parking with no duration or permit display requirements. What makes it "official"Does that mean that anyone not connected with your apartment block can also use it?

If so I’m not sure any of the “tragedy” scenarios apply, and I’d argue that the apartment dwellers are using it for a legitimate purpose, just like any other city user. It’s a “your building’s management sucks” issue because they have effectively not provided any guest parking at all (apart from the super inconvenient option).

Agreed.

A guest parking scheme based on expecting people to forego a convenient & legal parking option (street) in favor of an inconvenient one (garage) is naive and bound to fail.

Solution would be to make it easier & cheaper to obtain guest passes to the garage. Could be done online 24/7.

This. Period, full stop, end of sentence.

Feel free to help yourself to a slice of the anchovie, otherwise I’ll have to take what’s left home with me.

Tragedy of the Commons means that individuals seek optimization of a scarce community resource for their own situation at the expense of the optimization of that resource for the community at large. I would say that your situation is a flavor of it because some individuals are wasting one resource (a garage space) to consume another (street parking), although street parking is not a community resource for *your *community.

Do all residents get a garage pass included in their rent, or is it extra? If included, how many spaces do you get? Could people simply have more cars than they have garage passes?

It seems to me that the solution is that the people who leave their garage space unused should offer it for $5 a day to people who want to allow visitors to park. Win-win.

(Something I use as an example of Tragedy of the Commons is the fast-casual restaurant. A party of two come in. There are only a couple of tables free so one person immediately saves a table while the other orders and waits for the food. This turns into many people, and tables all become filled. So now you have half the tables occupied by people who are just waiting for their orders, and other people carrying food walking around looking for a place to sit. If people waited until they had their food to sit down there would be no resource contention.)

The tragedy of the commons is named after some village practices of having a common grazing ground near the village - anyone’s cows or goats can graze there. If a farmer owns his own grazing, he would limit the use so as to not overgraze and kill the field. With an open field, those being prudent and not overgrazing lose, while others gain everything by taking it all now. Same idea with whaling in the 1800’s - take all the whales you can, because if you don’t. someone else will; to the point where American ships went deep into Antarctic waters and all through the Pacific since they pretty much exterminated north Atlantic resources. The point being, yes, there will eventually be no resources for anyone, but alternatively, you don’t gain - in fact you lose more - by being considerate.

This is not quite the same; yes, some ignorant(?) tenants take spots best used by guests, thus limiting guest use. It seems more about poor allocation of a scarce resource; because the ones allocating the resource - building owners, the city, the commercial spaces - don’t really give a hoot about the real customers. The ground-floor tenants are just being greedy and taking two spots instead of one. it doesn’t hurt them in the long run. What might happen is other tenants parking on the street and holding a spot for their guests, only moving to yield to the arriving guest.

BTW the logical arrangement I would see would be one where the city fixes the problem by, for example, banning parking on the street from 1AM to 5AM thus gaining revenue by discouraging long-term use of what is supposed to be short-term parking. Overnight guests would make arrangements to get parking passes; ground floor tenants would have the inconvenience of running out to move their cars at 11PM if they insist on parking close by. Lack of cars parked at 1AM discourages lurkers by making it easier for patrol cars to see who is on the sidewalks.

Or the city could declare the street parking NON-resident-only parking and ticket anyone parked on the street with a parking decal from the apartment building.

Mind you, a city actually doing that would prompt a band playing “The World Turn’d Upside-Down” :wink: If municipalities do anything with parking, it tends to be “residents only” restrictions.

I’d say it’s more of a “fuck you, got mine” situation ; whereas the tragedy of the commons is a “fuck y’all, got ours” type thing.

YEs and no. Resident-only parking usually is a result of crowded old neighbourhoods which did not allow for garages with houses. In areas with sufficient resident parking, the city’s goal is typically to discourage longer-term occupation of the streets, as it impedes street cleaning, snow plowing, garbage collection, and sometimes constricts a 2-lane street to one lane.

If everyone had a floor level apartment I could see it as Tragedy of the commons. It is in the global collectives best interest that spaces are left open so the guests can park since everyone eventually invites a guest over, but it is in an individuals best interest to grab a parking space. If he leaves it open for a guest, somebody else who lives in the apartment is just going to take it. So he might as well park there himself.

Your situation represents someone not generally represented in the classical model. Someone who suffers from the deterioration of the commons but receives no benefits from grazing on it.

Or you could achieve the same result by charging people $5 a day for not using their parking space. This would be over and above the charge included in your rent. People who are parking on the street because it’s more convenient are dis-incentivized from doing so, and fewer spaces are left unused, just like your plan. Renters wouldn’t like it, because they have to pay for something they already get for free - parking on the street. Guests would like it, because they would get free street parking.

I like your plan better, though.

Regards,
Shodan

So, I go on vacation (taking my car) and I have to pay for not using my space? My cars in the shop for repair and I pay for not using my space? I decide to sell my car, relying on public transit instead, and I pay for not using my space?

Then again I could buy a second car, a beater/daily driver, keep my better car in the garage and park the beater on the street.

And who monitors disuse of the garage space?

Parking garages seem to be rife with tragedy of the commons. I once paid for a space in my building. I had to pay an extra amount, say $10/month, because my car was not a compact car, although it was not very large. 1993 Infiniti J30.

However, in the parking garage there were a number of spaces that said, “Compact cars only.” There were no spaces that said “non-compact cars only.” So the compact cars could park anywhere they wanted, including the spaces that only I, who had paid extra for the privilege, could park in. But I could not park in the compact spaces.*

The large-car spaces had significant advantages. They were usually closer to the elevators and being larger, easier to get into and out of.

So I bitched. Really it seemed to me that, since I was paying extra, I ought to get first crack at the better spaces. The garage guy said, “Oh, just park in a compact space, it’s not like you’re going to get a ticket.” But it still didn’t seem fair.

*This also came up a couple of times when I was with a friend who had MS and who had a handicapped hang tag. The parking lot’s full, the only open spaces are handicapped, she has a tag. She says, “Well, I only use it when I need it, and I feel fine today.” But if she doesn’t use it, she’s taking up a place that anyone without a HC tag could park in, and they can’t park in a HC space but she can. Catch 22, if she didn’t feel fine she didn’t drive. She didn’t even go out.