Ah, the capital markets -- where sharks grow their teeth.
Case in point: the Chicago Daley machine (still going strong, after all these years) sold off Chicago's parking meters for the next 75 years to EU-based Allianz and a UAE-based sovereign wealth funds (hat tip to the SWF Institute for pointing this out):
"Abu Dhabi Shares Profits From Parking Meters"
Chicago got $600 million on the deal, and parking fees are sure to skyrocket. You could argue this isn't such a bad thing, give that higher fees are a disguised carbon tax, and will discourage auto use in a city which has a reasonably widespread system of mass transit.
Still, it says something about the profound decline of US civil society, that a major US metropolis does not have the administrative capacity to run a bunch of parking meters.
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