I go down the Jersey Shore yesterday (no, not the same place they film the TV show), and boardwalk-owned parking is $20 for the day. Of course, the lots were empty. The publicly owned parking lot across the street was $2.25 for the day, and meters were $5 for two hours. If you could grab a spot in front of a house, it was free. I couldn't help thinking about the economic side of this situation-- it was like an experiment on supply, demand and elasticity, with plenty of public/private tension built in. Especially considering that people had plenty of other beach options and they could just leave if they didn't want to pay.
The publicly owned parking lot was packed. All of the 200+ spots were taken, and packs of cars crept around the lot looking for spots. As people walked toward their cars to leave, hopeful parkers put their blinkers on and waited, sometimes five to ten minutes in advance. Somewhere in between $2.25 and $20, people lost their appetite for a parking spot. We drove around for something like twenty-five minutes, some on side streets and some in the public parking lot, before finding a meter and paying $10 for four hours of parking. A happy compromise.

I'll bet the boardwalk lost a ton of cash because of overpricing. When people went to a beach down the road, the boardwalk lost twice: first on the parking and then on the ice cream cones, beach umbrellas, and the $8 per person beach fee. They stopped people from even getting in the door, making their other marketing schemes ("CHEAP MOJITOS") dead on arrival.

Talk about an illustration of a monopolistic (or simply inefficient) private sector provision of necessary goods/services where only limited public intervention exists to make up the gap. (I know that the publicly-owned parking lot wasn't built for this purpose, but the effect is basically the same.) In this situation, the public provision is some combination of too cheap and too small a quantity to equal demand-- and so there's a huge difference between the going rate (but not "true" market rate), and what some people get through public services.

This is a really stylized example, but there is a "winner take all" effect like we see in programs such as Section 8 housing, where the government gives big checks to a few people and nothing to everyone else. There are wait lists well over ten years in places, indicating both unmet demand and the size of the payout. The housing market isn't monopolistic, and it's unlikely that housing prices are too high as a rule, but there is demand for a basic good (adequate housing) that goes unmet in a huge number of cases. Whether this is a lack of public intervention or lack of adequate market implementation is a matter of debate (and something I don't have a succinct answer for). But at the beach, I can say that everybody was losing from too little public intervention-- the pricing system was broken, and there was no check on it.