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Pay Taxes to Park? Not in This Town

Posted on: Sunday, 9 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

JIM STINGL

Pay taxes to park? Not in this town

By JIM STINGL of the Journal Sentinel staff

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Insane news item: Parking spaces in Boston are selling for $160,000 and more.

That's for one space, not the whole parking ramp. It's heated, but still.

I want to publicly apologize to the garage out behind my house. I've been taking you for granted because, well, it seemed like you just sort of came with the house.

Can you imagine trying to sell the space between two painted lines for six figures to someone around here? If we had light rail, you'd be run out of town on it. We don't even like paying six bucks to park at Miller Park, even though it turns out the Brewers really, really need the money.

But it was reported the other day in this newspaper that an unremarkable brick edifice known as the Brimmer Street Garage in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood unloaded a spacious parking spot to some sucker for $160,000. They go even higher in New York.

"You could spend a quarter of your life looking for a parking spot," the garage manager told the Boston Globe. That could make a superbad city slogan.

The paper also pointed out that the owners of each of these spots pay $810 in property taxes on them every year.

Here in Milwaukee, City Assessor Mary Reavey said she's not aware of any parking spaces that are taxed as separate property.

If a parking ramp that now rents spaces by the hour or day started selling spots to people, it's possible each spot would have to be taxed individually, she said. Comparables would come into play.

"We'd look at the sales of other spots" to set your assessment.

Oh-oh, easy there. Just forget I brought it up.

We don't come close to Boston or New York, but some of the condos in or near downtown are selling parking spaces to go with them.

At 1522 On The Lake, the nearly sold-out tower on Prospect Ave., each unit comes with one parking space. An extra space was priced at $20,000, but they were going so fast that the price was adjusted upward to $30,000.

"I don't think I've seen anything higher than $30,000," said Kristin Noll, an agent with First Weber Group. She pointed to Courtyard Square, a condo development on N. Milwaukee St., where they throw in the whole condo for what you might pay for a parking space alone on Beacon Hill.

Fred George, an agent in the condo division at Ogden Realty, said parking spaces have been priced at $25,000 at River Renaissance, a 72-unit project planned for Erie and Water streets. But they're throwing them in free for the first 25 units sold.

He can't imagine having to look a customer in the eye and utter a number like $160,000 for parking.

"We're getting flak, if you can believe it, just at $25,000. The buying public in some cases thinks that's obscene," George said.

Oh, yeah, I believe it. I know people here who would sooner swallow their cars and cough them up every morning than take out a mortgage on a parking space. I'm probably one of them.

A high-end condo is about $200 a square foot in Milwaukee but 10 times that much in Manhattan, said Barry Mandel, president of Mandel Group, a residential developer here. So, strange as it sounds, a fashionable parking space in New York could be seen as a bargain if it drops below $200,000.

"We just live in a different world in Milwaukee. Our every dollar we earn here costs $10 somewhere else," Mandel said.

And we like it that way.

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or e-mail at jstingl@journalsentinel.com

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