Houston was hit with the big oil crash in the mid-1980s. Many people walked away from their mortgages, and the entire state began a decade-long diversification of their economy away from exclusively oil.
This is probably why parking tickets were down. People got laid off and moved away from Houston.
See The 1980s Oil Bust Almost Broke Houston. Almost:
Excerpt:
“It started with the 1982 recession,” says Bill Gilmer, head of UH’s Bauer College of Business. “Houston thought we were the smartest people on the earth at that time and had everything figured out, and the rest of the country just didn’t know how to run their business. Then oil prices started to fall.”-PJ...It was brutal. Houston lost 211,000 jobs between February 1982 and March 1987. One out of eight Houstonians were unemployed because of the downturn. Tent cities became a part of the landscape. “Real estate collapsed because we had overbuilt,” says Gilmer. “All those people who’d moved down here from Michigan gave the banks the keys to their homes and moved back, because there was simply no work here.”
So many Houston banks were on the verge of collapse—they’d been lending money assuming that $35 oil prices in 1982 (a new high at that time) were the modern benchmark, but by 1986 oil was going for less than $10 a barrel—that the city lost its entire banking industry.
“This is probably why parking tickets were down. People got laid off and moved away from Houston.”
If the population was dropping why the need to increase the number of Meter Maids from four to 17?
I was there lived there during most of the 80s and never saw an excuse for why 4 white Meter maids became a huge number of 17 black women and why that resulted in less work being done.
Half the downtown office buildings were empty. I bet they still did not lay off any downtown meter maids.