Chicago Doesn’t Own Its Own Streets | Climate Town

When I was chatting to Rollie about a possible collaboration video my only requirement was the Climate Town team build a brick wall behind a door for that one gag.

As a Chicagoan, this is the most embarrassing thing about my city. Fox News will make you think it's rampant violent crime. But it's actually parking.

The fact that making a deal like that is even legal is insane. Every person in that city govt will be dead when the deal is STILL in effect

I moved to Chicago in early 2009 just after this ridiculous deal. When I first heard about it back then, I was appalled. I don't drive, so the cost of parking doesn't seem to affect me directly, but as this video explains, it does affect my quality of life in other ways like limits on improvements of transit corridors and bike infrastructure. The fact that we can't pedestrianize streets that would be ideal for it is a major hit to quality of life. Seeing this insanely horrible deal dissected and analyzed like this makes it even more depressing than it already was.

There should be a federal investigation into how this deal occurred, and who were the players moving the pieces around the board to make it happen. This is criminal levels of corruption that needs to be regulated and aggressively enforced.

Kudos to those 5 counsellors who voted against the deal in 2008. They were probably the only ones who remotely understood what was actually going down.

I work in property management for the office of rail in ct. I'm effectively capped at a 5 year license for a .007 acre of turn around space for a car wash. There is no way this deal went through without people knowing how bad it would be for Chicago. That city was sold out.

Behold! The glory of privatization! How many times does this lesson need to be taught? Public goods have no business being held hostage by corporations.

As a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, I have to tip my hat to Chicago for showing us all how corruption is done in the Big League.

Cities shouldn't be able to sell large assets without a referendum to help prevent these types of scenarios. Crazy situation. Great video!

When Matt ended up at home and the hot dogs he was holding turned into fish and chips, I lost it. These videos are always hilarious, and it's those kinds of details that make them brilliant. The fact that Morgan Stanley is willing to pay one billion upfront for that alone tells you the deal is gonna make them way more profit than that. When Morgan Stanley happily offered 1 billion the city should just go, "Oh yeah? Then I want triple that". And when he left office, Richard M. Daley left for a firm...that was part of the talks for the parking meters. The worst part is that this deal ruins the possibility that Chicago could make its streets less car-centric, and more a city for people, bicycles, and transit. This actually reminds me of a small town in Michigan called Bay City which sold their two of their four drawbridges, the Liberty Bridge and Independence Bridge, to a private corporation called United Bridge Partners. They were once tied to a Florida bridge that collapsed, the FIU pedestrian bridge which collapsed in March 2018 and killed six. The FIU bridge was being built by FIGG Bridge Design, a partner with United Bridge Partners. They decided to charge non-resident drivers who cross the drawbridges, four dollars (now 5.50 as of 2023). With context, one of the longest bridges in the US, the Mackinac Bridge, has a toll of four dollars (as of 2023) to cross the 5-mile bridge as opposed to...700 feet.

Love the saying “tough beans, hard cheese, better luck next time” and will be incorporating that into my conversations somehow. There’s a phrase I saw on Tiktok “I’m a train girl forced to live in a car world” and I stand by that. Car centric infrastructure is the bane of my existence, parking lots are just a huge part of that. Imagining all the land we’d have for housing or food or community if we didn’t prioritize cars makes me wish for better city planning.

Imagine being a city and entering a 75 year deal with a private company on just about anything, with the private company having the power to do pretty much whatever they want and you not even having a realistic chance to read the contract. The circumstance that this is even allowed is absolutely insane.

Also, the fact a city can sign a billion dollar contract with two days to review is insane. This process usually takes years in pretty much all other forms of government.

I visited the US first time these past two weeks and stayed in Dallas/Fort Worth. I'm from Europe and as good or bad as it might be here I really don't get how people there actually survive. I mean I have seen your videos about how car centric the US is but to see it first hand is mind blowing. As far as deals with private companies go here too you often hear how companies will only invest in something if the government will absolutely guarantee them a certain revenue. That basically ends up in government deals becoming a zero risk investment. And no one but the government will do stupid deals like that.

Wow ! The city could have taken these same steps that Morgan Stanley did and used the profits for the city, and retained control. Why can’t people figure out businesses don’t enter into deals unless they see profits for themselves. Great video.

Something that wasn't mentioned by this video, but Daley's nephew worked for Morgan Stanley and brokered the deal. Naked corruption was the impetus for this deal, which is why the contract uses the scuffed discount rate and the long term.

I have a hard time believing this was an honest mistake. Some on the council were fooled, others were corrupt. The public deserve to know who was which, and see consequences come to the people who sold their city out.

Cool video! On calculating the discount rates: I believe in this case the inflation rate should not have been included. The value of the parking spaces is not going down as fees rise compensating (or overcompensating) the inflation rate.

Corruption on a massive scale