Sell the brownstone, buy a parking garage.
Concrete beach > literal beach.
Hello everyone.
Have you voted already? I was in the DMV this morning and observed a pair of Gen Z girls finishing up their makeup for passport photos (Kylie eyeshadow palette, is this a sleeper hit?). They were going back and forth between conversations about voting for Zohran and panicking about if they’d get their new passports in time for summer travel.
On a chilly night in the East Village in early March, I started reporting on the New York mayoral primary with Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert. We attended Zohran Mamdani’s Oscar-night fundraiser at Night Club 101 in Alphabet City. It’s been so electric to see what a successful campaign looks like in action and to observe effective organizing — I haven’t seen this much enthusiasm from my generation around a politician since Bernie (maybe Trump).
Today’s letter includes: Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert on parking (someone stopped me at the YMCA this week and asked if he works for the state), Glossier’s CEO steps down, The Athletic hires a Lakers reporter, and a media startup telling stories about motherhood that I want to read.
Sell the brownstone, buy a parking garage.
Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert is helping me build a modern Metro Section. In his last column, he wrote about the hell that is Newark Airport. The Anonymous Transit Expert has to stay anonymous because he has a Real Job in a Real Office, but you’ll be seeing more of him around here in his column, Stand Clear.
Depending on your tax bracket (or more predictively how old you are), your definition of “hot” real estate probably varies. To the 1% it may be the $135mm Aman New York condo sale that signalled the rebound of the City’s luxury penthouse appetite. For the rest of us it’s that elusive, possibly-mythical affordable unit which became, to zero fanfare, a little easier to realize in this year’s State budget (which also disincentivized professional investment in single-family rental housing). And to the renting public it might be wanting what we can’t have in Austin, TX, where asking rents have flagged for the better part of two years on the heels of “just build”.
But for institutional investors and asset managers? The hottest real estate isn’t a condo or a brownstone—it’s a parking space.
Why would a half-trillion-dollar private buyer want anything to do with unsexy parking real estate when they’re busy snapping up your favorite chain sandwich, the better of the two remaining chain pharmacies, or your website publisher? Whenever I read news of a take-private deal, I think of a quote from world’s-most-boring-alternatives-guy and Brookfield CEO, Bruce Flatt, early in the company’s 2023 investor day: “We deploy capital [to] generate inflation-protected, stable, predictable, growing cash flows.” In other words, parking isn’t real estate – it’s infrastructure, just like roads, ports, railroads, dams or telecom towers. Quietly consolidating American parking operators is a tacit admission: We cannot live comfortably without the ability to park the car. We’ll be paying more for the privilege — if we aren’t already. Asset managers are, anyhow, human and live among us (so I’m told).
In 2024, KKR picked up The Parking Spot, which runs airport lots. In 2025, Apollo bought Argo Infrastructure, parent of LAZ Parking, and in private markets if there’s two deals you see there’s twenty you don’t. If you’d like to find out what kind of infrastructure these competing behemoths hold in their portfolios without writing an eight-figure check or asking one of your buddies with a Bloomberg terminal, good luck deciphering one of their many opaque public disclosures as required by the SEC. In perhaps the most exploitative transaction in recent parking history, the City of Chicago, in the throes of the 2008 recession, sold all of its street parking meters to a private syndicate led by Morgan Stanley along with Allianz (the German insurer) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (UAE’s sovereign fund). The deal lasts 75 years. We’re only 15 in. The group continues to nickel-and-dime the city over curb space like landlords in a rent-stabilized building.
“ The hottest real estate isn’t a condo or a brownstone—it’s a parking space.”
Chicago’s one-time street parking selloff valued each space at just $425 per year. Do the same math in New York, which has nearly 3 million free parking spots, and you get a back-of-napkin valuation of $141 billion—roughly 15 months of the city’s budget. Would City Hall ever actually do that? Maybe not. But the only thing standing in the way is imagination. Between the rock of private consolidation and the hard place of brokered sales of public goods, the Times is right to ask if curbside parking is becoming endangered.
This bleak landscape leaves New Yorkers three options: pay through the nose for a garage, sit in your car moving it around for hours each week and try not to cry, or rack up parking tickets like it's a sport. The single time I had to venture my old SUV onto Manhattan to move out of summer housing, I slung it right up onto the curb and ate the $65 ticket, leaving probably two hours faster than I could’ve if I’d followed the rules and paid $40 for a garage far from the door or legally street parked further still. Even as an intern, my time was demonstrably worth more than $12.50 an hour.
Anybody with the means to do so may be excused for doing the same. Like fare evading or cutting the line at the bakery, weak disincentives beget more bad behavior corrosive to our already-strained social contract. Because the streets, in New York and across the country, are capital P Public Goods, what to do with them comes down to you.
There’s a wide gap between the Open Streets Program or Park(ing) Day and selling the meters to a Gulf state. But in a city where the battle over public goods (housing, transit, policing, parks) is increasingly brokered in corporate boardrooms rather than the ballot box, you’d be wise to pay attention.
Questions of what to do with the public goods kept in the public domain — public parks, parking (now housing), policing, and yes, the trains, are still as far as I know deliberated by periodic elections. If you’re a registered Democrat in New York City and haven’t voted in the primary yet, it’s election day for you and there’s still time to fix that. If you’re a New Yorker but not a Democrat, pay attention to a leading indicator for the direction of the national party. And if you’re neither of those things, pay attention, vote in the fall and get ready to hear all about a wild mayoral general whether you want to or not.
I, as always, wish you safe travels wherever you’re going and free parking when you get there.
This concludes Stand Clear by Anonymous Transit Expert.
📱 Have a some good gossip or a tip for Feed Me? Our hotline is open for (anonymous) texts: (646) 494-3916 📱
SKIMS is launching a collab with Roberto Cavalli. I’m trying not to say it but… this is one summer too late. It should’ve been Pucci.
Spread the Jelly, my new favorite motherhood platform, published a great interview with Ty Haney today. It’s really refreshing to see conversations with women about pregnancy and motherhood (other past interviews include
and Ilana Glazer) that allow women to talk about more than… just being moms. Ty talks about pitching investors the day after a C-section, and prioritizing hobbies for pleasure. Great work from the Spread the Jelly team!Glossier’s CEO is stepping down. Kyle Leahy’s had a great run. During the three years at Glossier, she oversaw the viral growth of Glossier’s fragrance, in addition to a Sephora launch. What nobody at Glossier could’ve expected was the Rhode wave that would hit the beauty world just a month after Leahy become CEO.
I lovvvveeeee these photos of the WAGS of men’s tennis. Big hair, big dogs.
Barbara Corcoran is doing the restaurant criticism I dream of. She had a great sense of humor about her $48 peanut butter (no jelly) sandwich at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Upstate New York is becoming Napa Valley. Or the Hamptons. Or Palm Beach. Depending on who you ask. I liked
’s deep-dive on the $3k/night hotels and booming real estate scene in Connecticut and the Hudson Valley. I’m not sure how long all these places will last — I’ve stayed at a few that have absolutely, 100% not delivered on their price tag. Some others have been ridiculously cozy getaways (Inness rocks, I also really enjoyed The Henson).Friends of the Letter Oliver Darcy and Dylan Byers had a great conversation about newsletters and the state of new media. I feel very grateful when Feed Me is included in these conversations.
The New York Times is doubling down on their Lakers coverage.
I’ll just post here to say I’d be happy if Zohran or Brad won. Thanks Emily for the early reporting— what a ride!
I have to give you a ton of credit for early reporting on the Zohran campaign when he was <10% on Polymarket to win the Democratic nomination. While his politics are an unmitigated socialist disaster on steroids, your nascent warning — my interpretation as I heard about his platform and real world inexperience — was prescient. Kudos.
It’s funny how people think that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will win the election. Wouldn’t be so sure about that… but if he does, sometimes it takes a city to hit rock bottom for its political inclinations to truly change.