If you shovel out a parking spot, should you be able to “own” it by placing a lawn chair or other item in the space when you’re out shopping or at work? These questions and other illustrate the importance of economic principles and institutions in addressing everyday problems.
The New York Times recently ran a story on a perennial topic–the phenomenon of “space savers” in South Boston. The template of this story is simple:
1. A winter storm dumps so much snow on the streets that city crews can’t plow residential streets for days.
2. A resident shovels out his car and then leaves a “space saver” — a lawnchair, an orange cone, a bust of Elvis, what have you — to “save” the space.
3. Conflict ensues when Jack sees an empty spot with a space saver, tosses it aside, and benefits from the unpaid labor of someone else.
There are merits to various claims in the argument. On the one hand, a city street is a city street: You may have spent 3 hours shoveling out your car and clearing a spot for you to return, but you don’t legally own the space–regardless of how many lawn chairs you place there.
On the other hand, the person who takes another’s spot is a free-rider. Common decency suggests that you respect the hard work of someone else, even if he doesn’t have a formal property right to the space.
The city recognizes the property rights of those who shovel out parking spots, at least informally. A law on the books lets the city remove “space savers” from the streets 48 hours after the end of a snow emergency–but as the Times notes, of late it has been rarely enforced.
Would that more governments recognize the value of property rights–in a variety of settings.