The Parking Chair Thing

Snow this week has brought out the parking chair commentariat, from Chris B. (now creator of a Pittsburgh Parking Chair page on Wikipedia) to the Post-Gazette. They're talking chairs in Baltimore and Philadephia, too.

I understand the intuition that drives people to claim "their" parking spaces. I put "their" in quotation marks, of course, because there is nothing "their" about them - the parking spaces are on public streets. There is an interesting and increasingly lively debate among economists and property theorists about whether parking-chairs-in-cleared-parking-spots amount to a legitimate form of limited, customary, property right.

The argument goes something like this:

Pro-chair (and another essay that is especially pro-chair): I cleared the spot; therefore I own the spot. And if I didn't own the spot after I cleared it, then I wouldn't have an adequate incentive to clear the spot. Moreover, the community benefits from my clearing the spot, because that's one less spot that public authorities will have to clear. And long-time community acceptance of the tradition shows that it is welfare-promoting. The pro-chair argument is simple and straightforward.

Anti-chair (that's a small-ish Facebook group) (and chair-skeptic): The anti-chair argument is long and complicated. The idea that "I built it, therefore I own it" has a sophisticated but problematic pedigree in the philosophy of John Locke. For the most part, American property law rejects Locke as a justification for property rights schemes, even informal ones. (The fact that parking spaces occupy technically "public" property is relevant but not dispositive. I can't cut down a diseased tree in Schenley Park, put a fence around the clearing, and claim that the land inside is "mine." But I can't do the same thing on my neighbor's land, either.) No one needs the incentive of ownership here to clear out parking spots; mostly, people are clearing out their own cars, which they would do anyway. "Ownership" of the spot is a kind of cherry on top of the sundae - a bonus for doing your family duty. The community suffers from parking chair claims, because people who need places to park are foreclosed from a number of possible options. The strongest argument against the chairs is that enforcement of the parking chair regime is carried out mostly by self-help, which means various forms of vandalism. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that, whether or not the local community thinks that it's OK. The pro-chair folks tend to assume that it's the *other guy's* car that gets keyed, or loses its side-view mirror, or is covered with ice. Community acceptance of the tradition doesn't show that it's welfare-promoting; instead, it shows that the community is willing to internalize the benefits and externalize the costs of private enforcement.

There is no answer in this debate. The problem is that the parking chair phenomenon has been around for so long that no one is really sure what would happen if parking chairs *weren't* allowed. Maybe everyone would clear their spots anyway, and everyone would have places to park when they come back from work or running errands. Maybe no one would clear their spots, hoarding parking spaces out of fear that they wouldn't have a place to park after work or running errands. Maybe the population of the neighborhood would turn over rapidly enough that no one remembers that the place has to follow the same rules that were in effect decades ago.

Maybe the streets would be cleared, and everyone would take the bus.

Despite the fact that the parking chair phenomenon is not unique to Pittsburgh, I've always thought that it speaks an essential truth about the region: A lot of Pittsburghers would choose to dig a giant hole and sit in it over clearing a path of parking spaces that helps other people get moving again.