Free parking: An untapped urban resource

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Everyone who lives in a big city knows that renting space -- an apartment, a storefront, or even a table at a street festival -- is expensive.

What’s not so obvious is that the city and public institutions routinely give away the use of lots of valuable land for free. The beneficiaries of this space generally take their good fortune for granted while the community and its cash-strapped institutions lose out on a huge untapped source of revenue.