• Hey! We're on Twitter!

  • Buy The Book!

  •  

     

    Click to Buy The Mug

    Buy The Book

Author’s note: this post is dedicated to D Sidhe, in the hopes that she will draw Stossel as the appropriate parasite.

This week John Stossel shows us how the private sector is Making Parks Decent Again (for decent people only).

Yes, Stossel says that the way to fix “badly maintained” public parks is simple: give them, as tax-free gifts, to “entrepreneurs” who will run them as for-profit enterprises. That way, the public doesn’t have to fund them anymore, they are available for use by concession sellers, special event planners, local businesses, and real estate owners who want to sell park-front property to rich people. And, best of all, only the homeless people who play by the rules get in.

Here’s Stossel!

America is filled with parks that are filthy, dangerous and badly maintained. The governments in charge plead: We can’t help it. Our budgets have been slashed. We don’t have enough money!

Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan, was once such an unsavory place. But now it’s nice. What changed? Dan Biederman essentially privatized the park.

With permission from frustrated officials who’d watch government repeatedly fail to clean up the park, Biederman raised private funds from “businesses around the park, real estate owners, concessions and events sponsorships. … (S)ince 1996, we have not asked the city government for a single dollar.”

Sounds good to me.

Of course it does. Stossel would think it sounded good to give the state of West Virginia to Donald Trump to use as a game preserve for rich guys who want to hunt the most dangerous game. (After all, many West Virginians are poor, and would probably welcome the chance to be hunted for money, if they had no better prospects. And anyway, the government hasn’t made a financial windfall off of the state, so it should be turned over to somebody who could make it a paying proposition.

But Shirley Kressel, a Boston journalist, doesn’t agree with the idea of giving Boston Common to Dan, the guy who now basically owns Bryant Park.

“(W)e don’t need … to teach our next generation of children that the only way they can get a public realm is as the charity ward of rich people and corporations,” she said. “We can afford our public realm. We’re entitled to it. We pay taxes, and that’s the government’s job.”

Silly journalist, haven’t you been paying attention to Stossel: NOTHING is the government’s job! Except to contract out for-profit wars and the American justice system! And anyway, you pay your taxes in order to allow corporations to make the world a better place for corporations, not to provide any personal benefit to you.

And when she objected that privatized parks won’t allow the homeless to use them, Dan said that this just isn’t so.

“The homeless people are welcomed into Bryant Park if they follow the rules. And those same 13 people are there almost every day. We know their names.”

And doesn’t sound that great! A park where 13 select homeless are allowed to visit, and everyone knows their names! And the rules are followed! And if they aren’t, well, Dan knows their names . . .

But let’s let Stossel give us the lesson to be learned from the shining example of Bryant Park:

Once again, the creative minds of the private sector invent solutions that never occur to government bureaucrats. If government would just get out of the way, entrepreneurship and innovation, stimulated by the profit motive, will make our lives better.

Yes, greedy bastards, stimulated by the profit motive, will make our lives better, if only we will welcome this brave new corporate world.

17 Responses to “Stossel Park is Melting in the Dark”

Dan Biederman essentially privatized the park.

He did a very nice job of it, too!

He replaced the winos with a much higher class of drunks when he installed THREE bars in the summer and FOUR in the winter (the ice rink, which is free).

He added three two restaurants, a sandwich place, an espresso shop, and a carousel.

It also contains an outdoor library and game room.

Yes, the city turned over the park to Biderman, but here’s the thing: the park is in the middle of midtown Manhattan in a heavily trafficked tourist area, and smack dab between the HBO, Verizon, and Bank of America global headquarters.

Who do you think gets to plaster the *public* park with ads?

Now, here’s the real question: once the recession hits hard, cuz we ain’t seen nothin’ yet, does he seriously think these companies are going to be able to face their shareholders for the TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN EARNINGS squandered?

I doubt it.

A park where 13 select homeless are allowed to visit, and everyone knows their names! And the rules are followed! And if they aren’t, well, Dan knows their names . . .

Suddenly Cheers seems like a much more sinister place.

I checked Bryant Park’s site for its rules. Prohibitions include:

* entering the park after the hours posted
* drug use
* alcohol use outside the Grill and Cafe
[[Get as sloshed as you want on $15 martinis inside, homeless folks!]]
* organized ballgames
[[Presumably, disorganized ballgames are fine.]]
* panhandling
[[Also, handling pans.]]
* sitting or standing on ballustrades
[[No, I don't know what a ballustrade is either.]]
* entering the fountain
[[Also, peeing into it.]]
* feeding pigeons
[[Also, eating them.]]
* rummaging in trash receptacles
[[Also, trashing in rummage receptacles]]
* amplified music that disturbs others
[[Yes, that's aimed at you, Yoko.]]
* performances, except by permit
* dogs on the lawn

Thank heavens you’re here! The internet is plastered with virulent hate for me, public spaces, homeless people, government, and free speech, in response to the Stossel blog! I was thinking the whole world has abandoned the concept of “public” altogether. I’ve been fighting privatization of the public realm for many years, and I see so few people resisting the take-over. And here, I find — people who get it!

You will notice that on the Stossel show website, the other three segments of the show I was on are posted — but not mine. And the producers edited out some of the things I said in the taping — like, the cities are not “cash-strapped” as the mayors whine. Both NYC and Boston ended FY 2010 with budget surpluses — even after giving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to the very corporations we have to thank for taking care of our parks.

My website has a lot of my writing on this subject, as does my South End News column (www.mysouthend.com/ “City Streets”).

Welcome to Disney (formerly Yellowstone) corporate park. Do you have a reservation?

I’m thinking a pubic louse with a porn stache….

There’s one of these “private” parks (Not to be confused w/ Private Partz, of Ft. Dix, NJ.) on what certainly appears to be part of the L.A. Central Library’s property, patrolled by private security guards, who weren’t too mean to me when I was homelessing it up there, other than a warning not to sleep anywhere on the property. The horror! Sleeping! Wonder how many housed & employed lunch hour nappers they rousted. Not many, I’d guess.

Not a good idea at all.

In Santa Monica, the Library Police won’t let you sleep in the library, but after they wake you up they’ll ask if you’re “OK,” if you seem especially groggy.

Yes, Stossel says that the way to fix “badly maintained” public parks is simple: give them, as tax-free gifts, to “entrepreneurs” who will run them as for-profit enterprises.

Both the Bryant Park Corp and the Bryant Park Management Corp are not-for-profit, FWIW. I wonder if Stossel knows this.

The “privatization” he describes seems more like similar efforts to rehabilitate downscale portions of cities with an infusion of places for yuppies to spend money, as has happened on, say, Hollywood Blvd.

Despite Stossel’s bullshit, the funding comes from a mixture of public and private funds, and Biederman’s proud (if dubious) claim that he hasn’t taken a dollar from the city since 1996 is interesting, since they started this in 1980.

They also just came off a bad year, according to their most recent finacial statement, which saw a drop of revenues to a third of the previous year’s level.

Businesses in the district continue to pay through a property tax assessment collected by the city, and some services are donated. And of course the NYPD is called in from time to time to chase off sidewalk vendors.

So all you need is a New York Public Library and Boutique Hotel adjacent site in a major metropolis, and enough big-money donors to kick in to improve the park.

I’m not saying that what they’ve done is necessarily a bad thing (I might change my mind if I looked at the resulting disneyfied mess), and I certainly appreciate the view of Shirley Kressel in this.

What I am saying is that Stossel doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

Jim/The Velvet Blog: Last I checked, there is no fucking lawn in Bryant Park. The dogs are permitted to ice skate with adult supervision, though.

The other thing is that it’s not really a park any more. It’s more like a commercialized urban plaza with some grass and trees.

* sitting or standing on ballustrades
[[No, I don't know what a ballustrade is either.]]

Think “railing”. The railings around the park and lawn are wide concrete.

Both NYC and Boston ended FY 2010 with budget surpluses — even after giving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to the very corporations we have to thank for taking care of our parks.

Shirley, it’s a bit unfair to say NYC ended with a surplus.

Technically, it did, but only because it’s forced to under the finance laws, and only after massive budget cuts, including to police and firehouses. Had it been able to, it would have run a $2 billion deficit.

I say this as someone who campaigned vigourously to get the Council to restore the oral health program.

Fucking Christine Quinn and her minions…

Well, seems to me they’d better be prepared to let in a lot more of the homeless than the 13 that are there–need more room for those made homeless by the “creative minds” of Wall Street.

Paul, the 13 that are in there are there only because they promise to create a living “Last Supper” tableau at Easter.

Oh, I get it, alright: Stossel’s a fucking whiny asshole.

Actor 212: Well if they let in ALL the homeless, they could re-create Jesus’ “feeding of the multitudes.”

“Someone left a ‘stache out in the rain….”

Well, Bryant Park does have some grass, though whether it’s enough to constitute a park is probably a personal decision (it ain’t much, either way).

Along with the forced transformation of Times Square into Disney’s NewYorkCityLand™, another sop to real estate magnates was to allow the building of taller (as in “out of code”) buildings IF the developer put in some “public” space at street level. So, we now have a bunch of mini-”parks” with security guards who tell you cannot sit, eat, play music, drink, etc. while you are in the “park”. Plus, any number them close (behind a locked gate) shortly after the end of business hours

To be fair to Mayor Mike, this started in the Koch administration in the ’80s — not that Billionaire Bloomberg has raised any objections to the practice that I am aware of.

Something to say?