by John Krinsky, Maud Simonet

2017 University of Chicago Press

It wasn’t the authors’ intended message, but one theme that becomes evident from reading “Who Cleans the Park?:” is that for decades the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) has not been allocated adequate resources. This lack of resources not only results in dirtier parks with more broken equipment, but also created serious dysfunction among employee ranks and the need to rely on private dollars and private governance to get parks cleaned and mowed. Privatization of public space has had a number of positive benefits to parks in New York City, beyond just better programmed and maintained parks, but private entities have also has proven to be somewhat unreliable partners and has raised serious issues of equity and fairness in the distribution of resources among parks in better and less well off neighborhoods.

It’s been something of a mystery to me why Mayor de Blasio, with his fervent commitment to equity in local government, hasn’t seen the Parks expense budget as central to his equity agenda and allocated to DPR increased operating resources (the Administration did provide capital dollars to smaller parks in under-served neighborhoods early on). Parks are the ultimate civic equalizer – open and providing important benefits to all. In the most recently concluded budget, there was some sign of a change in direction on the part of the Administration, with $43 million in increased parks funding (on a base operating budget of about $500 million). My rough guess is that an additional base operating budget of $200 million is required to “fully fund” Parks Department operations. By fully funded, I mean a budget with sufficient money to provide high quality maintenance and programing to every park and playground in every neighborhood in New York. And in a near $100 Billion City expense budget, there is no reason why a fully funded Parks department shouldn’t be a reasonable goal.

How did DPR get to be so grossly underfunded? Part of it is that it has not been a priority for recent Mayors. Mayor Bloomberg’s view was that there were philanthropic resources available sufficient to adequately fund public spaces in New York. I think it’s also true that unlike other areas of city government, parks are not the beneficiaries of any Federal matching fund programs – unlike transportation, housing and social services. City budget makers know that cutting a dollar from transportation spending, where Federal matches are generally ten to one, may mean a loss of as much as nine Federal matching dollars. Cutting a dollar from the Parks budget means only a loss of a dollar from the expense budget. In recent years other expense budgets of City functions have been generously supported by City Hall. The current budget for police is $5 Billion, Fire Department, $2 Billion, Homeless Services, $2 Billion, Education, $27 Billion. Parks never regained the money it lost when government contracted during the 70’s fiscal crisis.

As it is, with its current resources, the Parks Department is unable to pick up the trash and mow the lawns in its properties. In recent years that has been as true in Riverside Park in Manhattan as it has been in King Park in Jamaica. One of the most visible outcomes of this chronic under-funding was the creation of not-for-profit groups to provide additional funds for park operations in neighborhoods where raising such funds is possible – the brainchild of Koch Administration Parks Commissioner, Gordon Davis.

Krinksy and Simonet have published an ethnography of Parks Department workers. Their book is thoughtful, detailed and fair in its analysis. But when they more broadly analyze Parks Department and City government from the now fashionable lens of a critique of “neoliberalism,” “Who Cleans the Parks” becomes far less persuasive and strays from its strong suit of close observation of Parks’ operations. Neoliberalism has become a description of anything in the world of politics and economics that isn’t to current academic taste. In the book, the authors define it as the mobilization of social and political forces in opposition to collectivism (whatever that is). The Marxist and anti-neoliberal analysis in “Who Cleans the Parks,” forces the ethnographic data into a jacket that doesn’t fit very well, and doesn’t do very much to aid our understanding of how local government works.

In the sixties there was a political science literature centered around the idea that a bunch of rich and powerful people sit in a dark room smoking cigars deciding how things work (like in Sayre and Kauffman’s classic book about New York “Governing New York City” and Dahl’s “Who Governs” about New Haven). I’m pretty sure that in my near 30-year career in urban politics, I’ve been regularly in or near “the room where it happens,” and I’ve never seen stuff go down that way. Power in American cities is way too diffuse for a small group to be making the big decisions. For example, the recent strengthening of rent laws in Albany, despite a conference call between the Governor and a number of leaders of New York’s most highly visible real estate leaders, is evidence of this. Policy decisions in New York City are the result of the forces of many vectors. It is certainly true that leaders of City’s real estate industry have out of scale influence over public policy decisions being made, but it is equally true that there are many, many countervailing forces at work. The authors seem to also believe that there is a single intelligence behind government and private sector policy, working to increase the power and wealth of the powerful and wealthy. Such a view is incorrect, simplistic and naïve. There is much more randomness in local government decision making than Krinsky and Simonet acknowledge. My last year spent “in the belly of the beast” has confirmed this.

What Krinsky and Simonet describe well is the loss of full time Parks Department workers and their partial replacement with social service recipients in a number of programs (aspects of which have been severely diminished in the current Administration). Those programs have first, not provided adequate resources to maintain the city’s public spaces and second, not created a pathway to employment for their participants. Workers in these programs cannot be counted on as a reliable presence in the parks, as their social service requirements make other demands on their time. Because these programs were done “on the cheap,” while work requirements were attached to their receipt of public assistance, the services and support necessary to regularize the work habits of clients and assist their entry into the world of work were insufficient to enable the programs to have any long-term impact on their lives. In particular, the continuing cutback on Parks Department budgeted positions made full time employment with DPR for program participants, highly unlikely – materially decreasing program incentives and impact. Significantly, the authors highlight the value of assigning park workers to “fixed posts,” where they take ownership of the park their working in, as opposed to the mobile units (moving from park to park) characteristic of the welfare to work programs. There is no question that having park workers assigned to a specific area, while perhaps a less efficient use of staff, produces a higher quality result.

The failure to properly support social service recipient park workers was a significant missed opportunity. Much Parks Department labor requires no or low skills and can be an ideal introduction to the workplace for people with limited education. If Parks Department personnel lines had been expanded to incorporate successful participants in the welfare-to-work programs, that would have created an upward vortex of people being pulled into the job market and better park maintenance. Instead what was created was frustration (on the part of workers whose employment was temporary and essentially dead end) and an unreliable and insufficient labor force for DPR.

As for the debate about the Friends of Parks Groups and Conservancies, their contribution, as is noted in the text by former DPR Commissioner Adrian Benepe, is clear and practical. There is no question that they improved the quality of life for all New Yorks by making the City’s flagship parks (and some others) better. There is no evidence that anyone has ever been excluded form a park as a result of their efforts. In addition, the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Corporation have provided models that have been used elsewhere of innovative management structures and techniques – including zone gardeners and the use of concessions and event income to make park management self-sustaining. But would it be better for DPR to be fully funded and the work of various “friends” groups and conservancies be made largely superfluous. Definitely. For the most part, such groups were a means to an ends at a time without other alternatives (and that time shows no sign of coming to an end soon). There is considerable evidence that it is politically difficult for urban parks in dense neighborhoods to receive adequate funding given their heavy use and high requirements. Places like Bryant Park, Central Park and Madison Square Park require much more revenue per square foot for maintenance and programming than do neighborhood parks. Providing such increased resources produces the inevitable political objections about favoring downtown over the neighborhoods. That underlies a reasonable argument for the existence of not-for-profits to manage and support those places in midtown Manhattan. But, perhaps if neighborhood parks were fully funded and well-programmed, such objections would get no traction.

The authors speak at length with a number of knowledgeable people involved with public space management in New York, including, besides Commissioner Benepe, former Commissioners Gordon David, Henry Stern and Veronica White; former park administrators Betsy Barlow Rogers (Central Park) and Tupper Thomas (Prospect Park), as well as my savvy former Bryant Park colleague, Jerome Barth. These interviews are informative, illustrative and fairly presented.

There are also numerous quotes from interviews with park workers. These interviews are somewhat problematic, as is generally the case in ethnography, as their factual representations are presented at face value, with no attempt to confirm them. When general conclusions are drawn from these unverified claims, this increases the level of problem. The authors occasionally recognize that line level staff tend to complain about their bosses and gossip about their colleagues – but my sense is, based on considerable experience in managing line staff, that too much credence was put by Krinsky and Simonet into statements about supervisor favoritism and the prevalence of sexual exchanges between supervisors and employees by the authors. While what people say is interesting by virtue simply of the fact that they have said it, just because people say stuff (whether senior managers or line staff) doesn’t make the facts contained in those statements necessarily true. It would also have been valuable for Krinsky and Simonet to have spoken with Richard Schwartz, the author of the Giuliani Administration welfare to work plans. It would be interesting to know whether the implementation of the programs included all of the elements Schwartz sought – or whether he thought that providing essentially an unpaid, forced labor force for DPR was a good in itself, both for the participants and for the agency.

“Who Cleans the Park” is an important book because it provides a bottom up view of municipal service delivery from the front line workers point of view. It also includes an important typology and analysis of both the forms of alternative work forces deployed in parks and the various kinds of support groups that employ some of them – with critical insights about their limitations (and strengths). But most importantly, “Who Cleans the Park” makes the case that in New York City its Parks Department is grossly underfunded and as a result has had to scramble to patch together a range of programs to replace the lost dollars in order to do the bare minimum to maintain city parks. Some of those programs have provided benefits beyond financial resources for public space. Many, particularly essentially unpaid mobile alternative labor force programs, haven’t helped their participants and haven’t done much to provide basic services in public spaces. They are no substitute for a stationary, year round, full-time, staff.

My book, now entitled “Lessons from Bryant Park” is schedule for release by Rutgers University Press for March 2020.