2,000 spots at 100% occupancy at $20 a day for 365 days a year generates $15M a year of gross revenue, which does not account for any sort of maintenance of the lot or real-estate taxes. So I would argue that a $400M parking garage is a huge capital cost and subsidy. That's a 27 year pay back (and I'm not even doing any sort of discount cash-flow analysis which would make the payback even longer, and I'm not even considering the fact that the parking lot won't have 100% occupancy). This is a HUGE waste of taxpayer money to subsidize a really wasteful endeavor (a private spa). Every single Torontonian should be up in arms over this.
That's again assuming a $400 million cost - which is $200,000 a space. That's far and above my understanding of what a typical parking space costs.
Looking at the plans for the garage, there is about 967,000sf of space below grade for the parking garage once you exclude the below-grade spaces for the Science Centre.. which means at $195/sf as per the Altus cost guide for below grade parking.. that's $190 million in capital costs for the garage component of the project. That's about $90k a space - still high from my understanding, but closer to realistic. And much closer to being able to be financed on parking revenues.
Again - I'm not claiming that the parking is going completely unsubsidized here, just that it's not a $400 million subsidy. The reality is that we don't know the numbers.
As for why the province is building it and not Therme.. Therme is not the only tenant at Ontario Place that will be using the garage. Parking users will be using it to go to Live Nation, to the park spaces, to the Science Centre, to the Ex, to BMO Field, to etc.. It's very much a multi-use facility which will be used to service a wide variety of uses. It makes sense for the province, and not Therme, to build it, provided there are appropriate kick-backs in the lease to ensure that the province isn't left holding the bag.
And ultimately, not being privy to the lease agreement or the province's budgeting, we have no idea what the level of subsidy, if any, is occurring here. Certainly not a $400 million subsidy for the parking garage alone.
The storey here is to be more transparent on costs. A whole lot of real ugly, misleading numbers are being thrown around here and in the media because the province refuses to release even high level details on the financial terms of the deal.