Residents of the “Pravy Bereg” residential complex in Khimki are outraged that the developer deliberately filled the courtyard with old cars to occupy all the parking spaces. As an alternative, people are forced to buy spaces in the underground parking lot, with prices starting from 800K. How can this problem be solved under ancap?
Dmitry
What you described is a variation of the tragedy of the commons, where insufficiently clear property rights lead to a situation where it is profitable for everyone to exploit a shared resource as intensively as possible, leading to its rapid degradation.
As can be easily guessed from the introduction, the simplest remedy lies precisely in a clearer definition of property rights, for which ancap is quite well-suited. Let’s look at the details.
What do we have now? The developer obtains a permit from the municipality to build a house, reaches some agreement with the previous land owners, builds the house, sells apartments and underground parking, but has no right to take ownership of the land; the land under and around the house is the collective property of the residents because that is how the state decreed it.
How can residents who wish to park near the house and do not want to buy expensive underground parking spaces from the developer defend this right in the current situation? They would have to organize a homeowners association (HOA) and grant it the right to establish paid parking near the house, which must be voted for at a general meeting by a certain number of apartment owners holding at least half of the total residential square footage. After that, it would be costly for the developer to occupy the paid courtyard parking with his cars, and he would consider other ways to monetize his unsold property, for example, by renting out the spaces instead of selling them.
The scheme is not bad, but it is organizationally very complex, and as a result of its application, car owners will be forced to shell out for parking rent, which is clearly not what they would want, as it is much more pleasant to use a resource for free.
Under ancap, there is no external regulator requiring that the land under the house belong to the homeowners, and the developer will be interested in keeping it for himself, renting out both the apartments and all types of parking spaces to the residents. Or, as an option, selling the apartments and renting out the parking spaces. Or selling the apartments and the underground parking while renting out the above-ground ones. Or not creating one of the types of parking at all.
Fans of the HOA form would be able to either buy the land and build a house together by pooling funds, or buy apartments from the developer along with the land, should he be so inclined.
One way or another, in the absence of an external regulator acting as a force majeure, people will not have to perform strange and unnatural roundabout maneuvers when their interests can be stated and defended directly.
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