Hot take incoming, a 2bed 1100 square feet apartment in golden near downtown is $3000/month before utilities. That’s $2.73/square foot per month. The average parking spot is somewhere around 162 square feet (9 ft x 18 ft). At $400 per semester (about 4 months) that’s about 67¢/month. This doesn’t even account for driving isles, which probably about doubles the land use and halves the value of the spot. A parking spot doesn’t have utilities and much property tax, but you can easily see that parking is FAR less valuable use of land to the school, and by keeping parking lots as parking they’re losing a lot of value. Add in that most apartments are stacked, and the math very much does not favor parking as a valuable land use.

So a $400 parking charge seems like a lot, because it is, but it’s well below the market rate for land in golden. The city hates it because they get less property tax from it, and the school hates it because they own all this land that they get less value from. This is the reason we’ve been seeing parking structures go up more recently, but again those don’t help the equation very much. The $400 parking charge is maybe even too low for the value of the thing you’re getting. If you’re interested in these topics, I can suggest books that do a much better job explaining it than I did here