How public is your favorite public park?

Who owns your favorite park?

That might seem like a strange question. Many people assume that “we”—the public, the people—do. But from New York’s High Line to Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, parks in U.S. cities are increasingly managed, financed, and policed by private groups that have little accountability to the public. Just as many other services once seen as public goods—such as healthcare, schools, and water utilities—have increasingly become the property of corporations and wealthy financiers, public space, too, has been privatized.

Historians locate the origins of urban park privatization of the economic crisis of 1970s New York City. In 1980, the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation were founded to offset cuts to public funding for parks. Their benefactors weren’t looking to aid all parks—just those frequented by wealthy people and tourists.

By 1999, when Friends of the High Line was founded to rehabilitate a former railroad right-of-way on Manhattan’s West Side, such private efforts to start public parks had been normalized. The High Line, upon its 2009 opening, was praised as a transformative urban park, three stories above city sidewalks.

In response, other park developers copied its strange aesthetic mix of wild-looking plants and industrial relics—and its strategy of mobilizing public-private partnerships. Chicago leaned on the Trust for Public Land, which provides funds and organizational support for privatized park projects, to build the Bloomingdale Trail (aka The 606). In Houston, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership relied on private funds for 91% of initial funding for a linear postindustrial space along the city’s central waterway, including $30 million from ex-Enron billionaires Rich and Nancy Kinder.

The Kinders, emboldened by Buffalo Bayou’s success, have granted $70 million to the Memorial Park Conservancy. In New York, billionaire High Line donor Barry Diller has taken a similar tack, battling various opponents to develop a $250 million privately managed park, Little Island, in the Hudson River.

Visitors to such parks might ask: What’s so bad about a few architecturally brilliant parks being paid for with private dollars?

The problem is that such parks aggressively accelerate an unequal parks landscape. Budget cuts to public parks are advancing today, harming poorer communities, where local private resources to offset defunding don't exist to nearly the same degree. Private parks organizations deepen these inequalities when they wield their clout to direct public funds to underwrite privatized parks like the High Line, which received $144 million in public money.

Private managers like the Friends of the High Line also get to decide park rules. The gaze of private security frequently trains itself on the people of color and poor people.

More recently, private park boosters have proposed improvements to parks in communities of color. In Chicago, this has taken the form of developing similar parks in Pilsen (El Paseo) and the Far South Side (Big Marsh) in an effort to make park-building appear equitable. In New York, organizers have initiated plans for Queens’s answer to the High Line, QueensWay, a project billed as “a gateway and introduction to New York City’s most diverse communities.” In Houston, the Kinder Foundation gave $3 million to the Emancipation Park Conservancy, private keepers of a local symbol of Black freedom, and announced $100 million for an expnasion Buffalo Bayou Park into the historically Black neighborhoods east of downtown.

These developments might appear to offer a measure of racial equity, but, since few new park plans are tied to affordable housing, such new parks will drive up housing values, potentially displacing long-term residents.

The trend of investment in parks recalls the political strategies honed by 20th-century master planner Robert Moses, the force behind decades’ worth of bridges, highways, and public housing in and around New York City. Moses recognized that rallying the public to support park projects was easy, because of the social goods that they represented (never mind that his parks were usually concessions connected to disruptive infrastructural projects like highways). Biographer Robert Caro writes that, for Moses, “parks symbolized something good, and therefore anyone who fought for parks fought under the shield of the presumption that he was fighting for the right—and anyone who opposed him, for the wrong.”

This symbolism remains powerful. Wealthy benefactors use parks’ collective image as public, universal goods to push through plans that do not benefit the public, but rather serve real estate developers, corporations, and philanthropists invested in building the symbolic and cultural power of their cities.

Bio: Kevin Loughran is an assistant professor of sociology at Temple University and the author of "Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City" (Columbia University Press, 2022).

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: How public is your favorite public park?