My modest proposal to the Baltimore Department of Transportation

Dear Sir:

As a Baltimore City resident, I work hard and dutifully to pay my property taxes each year. Being that we live in the United States, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, Baltimore City is a the sort of car-centric utopia with land uses that would make our Founding Fathers proud. This means a large minority of the public right of way is, rightly so, dedicated to the storage of idle motor vehicles in the form of on-street parking.

However, much to the dismay of the oil and auto industries, I have decided not to own a motor vehicle. This makes me a filthy communist. After all, why wouldn’t I want to spend a third of my monthly income destroying our city’s air quality, making the streets less safe for everyone else, and making sure my neighbors see my burgeoning masculinity by revving my loud engine? Preposterous, I know. But, being that I am in such a predicament, I have a modest request.

In my neighborhood of Hampden, on-street parking is free. Well, it’s not free, because nothing is free. But if you want to park your private property (car) on the street (public property), you can just… do it! Because of this, almost everyone puts their private property in the public right of way. However, being that I do not own an automobile, I do not use my apportioned 180 square feet of free public land.

I am writing you to ask if I may be permitted to place a small storage shed on the street outside my house. It will have the footprint of a Toyota Corolla—a modestly size vehicle dwarfed by the likes of other legally-parked automobiles like Ford F-250’s. This extra space will afford me the ability to store many of my prized possessions comfortably: My bicycles, tools, and other accoutrements.

If this modest proposal cannot be accepted, I am curious whether I might receive a property tax credit for the land I’m not using to park an automobile. Based on a quick analysis, the approximate land value for a parking space in Hampden is $35,000. At a modest annual rental rate of 6%, that comes out to around $2,000 per year. This seems like a fair tax credit to receive for not using my fair share of the public right-of-way to store my private property.

Thank you for reading my proposal and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Kind regards,

Teejay VanSlyke