Land Use in Downtown Atlanta around the Streetcar

From the City of Atlanta, a map of land uses in the Downtown area

• Blue: institutional property (churches, state-owned stuff like GSU & the World Congress Center, gov't offices)
• Red: commercial property
• Yellow: residential

There's a lot of institutional property around Downtown Atlanta and the empty streetcar. I'm guessing that none of those blue areas are generating property taxes that would help offset the cost of operating the empty streetcar.

To my mind, the presence of all that blue means that the city needs for the red area to deliver a high density of non-institutional stuff with big-ass tax returns in order to strike a balance. 

That makes parking lots in the red areas a significant liability. They're squandering what little non-insitutional land we have among the walkable street grid and among the big presence of transit services -- and those transit lines are in turn squandered by the parking spaces that reduce ridership.

Map source:

http://geospatial.gatech.edu/StreetCarMapper/