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 in 1970s New York City, when the city’s dire economic crisis spurred budget cutbacks of all kinds. These led to the establishment of the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, both founded in 1980 with the goal of using private wealth to offset cuts to public funding for parks. The benefactors behind these organizations weren’t looking to aid all parks suffering from declining budgets—just those frequented by wealthy white people and tourists.

Two decades later, when the Friends of the High Line was founded in 1999 to rehabilitate a former railroad right-of-way on Manhattan’s West Side, having a private organization play a key role in the development of a park was neither novel nor controversial. It had become normalized, expected, and celebrated that new parks would involve the private sector.

When the High Line’s first section opened in 2009, it was toasted by critics and the public as a transformative urban park: it featured a unique mix of built and natural materials, and was situated three stories above city sidewalks. But the political and economic bases that made the High Line possible were equally transformative. The park marked the culmination of three decades of neoliberal changes to urban park governance, cementing the outsized role of private groups in park development, financing, and organization. Just as the High Line’s strange aesthetic mix of wild-looking plants and industrial relics set among a linear walking path has been widely copied, urban boosters across the U.S. mimicked Friends of the High Line’s strategy of mobilizing public-private partnerships to produce architecturally acclaimed green spaces.

In Chicago, park developers leaned on the Trust for Public Land, a national group that provides private funds and organizational support for privatized park projects, to build the city’s answer to the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail (also known as The 606). In Houston, where private influence has long held sway in urban development projects, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership relied on private funds for 91% of the initial funding for a linear postindustrial space along the city’s central waterway, including $30 million from ex-Enron billionaires Rich and Nancy Kinder.

There are more to come. Emboldened by the success of Buffalo Bayou Park, the Kinders have since 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 these shiny new parks might ask: So what? What’s so bad about a few architecturally brilliant parks being paid for with private dollars?

The problem with the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/The 606, Buffalo Bayou Park, and other parks like them is that they aggressively accelerate an unequal parks landscape. The same cost-cutting of public parks funding that started in the 1970s advances today, and its effects most harm poorer communities and communities of color, where local private resources to offset defunding don’t exist to nearly the same degree. These inequalities deepen even further when we consider that private parks organizations wield their clout to direct public funds to underwrite upscale, privatized parks like the High Line, which received $144 million in public money for its construction. The racial and economic geography of private park investment keeps the spaces from being accessible to a broad public.

The parks’ privatized security deepens this inequality. Private managers like the Friends of the High Line and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership also get to decide park rules—rules that can and do differ from those of city-run parks. Focusing on the “quality of life” violations that viciously cleansed urban public spaces of homeless people in earlier decades, the gaze of private security frequently trains itself on the people of color and poor people who visit these spaces. Few of the tourists that the parks are designed to attract—able-bodied, middle-class, white—care or even know about this aspect.

Recently, private park boosters have moved forward with 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 have recently announced a $100 million offering to expand Buffalo Bayou Park into the historically Black neighborhoods east of downtown. These developments appear to offer some measure of racial equity into urban park landscapes, but given that few new park plans are tied to affordable housing, there is little question that these new parks will drive up local housing values, potentially leading to the displacement of long-term residents of communities long starved for park access.

The trend of investment in parks recalls the political strategies honed by 20th-century master planner Robert Moses, who was the force behind decades’ worth of bridges, highways, and public housing in New York City and its surrounding areas. 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.”

The symbolism of parks remains powerful today. Wealthy benefactors use parks’ collective image as public, universal goods to push through plans that do not benefit the public, but that serve the private coffers of real estate developers and corporations, and those—like the philanthropists themselves—who are invested in building the symbolic and cultural power of their respective city. As elites build new park spaces in their own image, they deepen inequality and shape cities’ public realms as consumerist and securitized, to be squeezed for every last drop of private profit.

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The most recent show (PRH’s 46th) featured the group Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, whose installations dealt with issues like police brutality and the importance of physical self-care. The visiting artists helped to organize a Houston chapter of their group while they were in residency.
 
The second lesson, then, is to consider and reflect the community that you’re in. Project Row Houses gives black artists a much needed platform in a historically black neighborhood. The art is physically very accessible to local residents, and the works at hand respond directly to the surroundings they were created in, providing a common point of reference no matter how esoteric the end product might be. The art now reaches beyond the homes, as well. This spring, Project Row Houses co-presented a performance and installation by Kevin Beasley in the Third Ward’s defunct Eldorado Ballroom, an iconic venue for jazz and blues from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Project Row Houses, an art space in Houston’s historically black Third Ward, where the “shotgun” style of home-building predominates. Courtesy of Flickr.

What tends to grab the attention of outsiders is the next step Project Row Houses took after securing the homes and infusing them with art: the establishment of the Young Mothers Residential Program. Eight of the renovated shotgun homes were subsequently designated as subsidized housing for single mothers between the ages of 18 and 26, and their children. To be eligible to live there, these low-income mothers must work and pursue higher education, and their children must be enrolled in daycare or school. The mothers are deeply integrated with the artists, and are encouraged to apply the creative process and artistic expression to their own lives. They also represent a crucial part of the audiences for the arts at Project Row Houses.
 
This program has been a springboard for PRH’s involvement in other issues in the Third Ward: There are tutoring nights for local schoolkids, an incubator and semi-annual community market for local small businesses, and a partnership with Rice University to design and build sustainable new housing options. That Rice partnership has created 72 rental units for low-income residents that are managed by sister organization Row House Community Development Corporation.
 
This leads to the third and trickiest lesson, but the one with the deepest potential: Social safety nets are part of an arts community, too. That doesn’t mean that any old arts organization should start a soup kitchen in its basement. Instead, each arts group must carefully observe and consider its community and its environment, and then make something that fits that context.
 
“You respond to what’s in front of you and you make something out of it,” Lowe said on Social Design Insights. Project Row Houses, he added, “positioned the community as art, the people as art, and everyone all the time working on their art, which is their life.” Nikil Saval, writing for T Magazine, called PRH “one of the most original and ambitious works of art of the past century.” In 2014, Lowe was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, which helps fund Project Row Houses.
 
Project Row Houses is part of a bigger story in Houston. Like so many neighborhoods where artists have made a concerted investment of time, creativity and resources, the Third Ward has seen substantial development over the past 15 or so years, including an upcoming $33 million renovation of nearby Emancipation Park, complete with a community center. Gentrification is now a real concern in the Third Ward, and PRH’s next move will be figuring out how to exist in an area where displacement, instead of disinvestment, is the driving community concern.

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Another story I tell is about how our many pickup truck and SUV drivers don’t exit the highway through the state-mandated ramps but dig their own convenient paths off the shoulder through gravel and vegetation.

A confession: neither of these stories is correct in the strict sense of the word.

I am sure that there was a sign of sorts at the lobby of my company but it was, in all probability, of the Per-regulation-blah-dash-blah-point-blah variety. And, despite the occasional off-roader, most Houstonian drivers behave as the rest of the nation and fume and curse in the traffic jam until we get to the proper exit.

But those corrections are just boring. No self-respecting Texan would ever tell a story without some embellishment.

Here in Texas, we’re nothing if not tellers of tall tales and harborers of larger-than-life characters. But, for this article, I will try to curb some of those excesses.

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Perhaps this is where I should tell you that I am not from Texas at all. I am an Iranian-born Jew who, as people in Houston like to say, “came here as quickly as I could.” (A bad, overused joke but, in the tradition of Dostoevsky’s underground man, I will keep it to punish myself for using it.) Most Houstonians seem to be from elsewhere and, often quite delightfully, bring the elsewhere with them.

A 15-minute drive west of downtown and you can be in “the largest Chinatown in the world” (probably true) where you are reduced to ordering your meal (still swimming in an aquarium) by hand gestures and guttural noises and using xièxiè a lot because it happens to be the only Chinese word you know.

A 15-minute drive north and you are in a Latin America so full of life and color that you feel like some sort of a pasty-faced Yankee invader straight from a Kerouac poem.

Slightly west, and you are in the Hillcroft Middle East and Indian subcontinent area—helpfully christened the Mahatma Gandhi District by our always-optimistic real estate sector. And a few miles further in the Katy corridor and there is the cacophony of engineers seemingly from every non-English speaking country in the world who have, somehow, gathered here to design the planet’s petrochemical plants and oil refineries.

Frankly, we all seem to delight in the heterogeneity of the place. We love the fact that the city does not have a majority, that we, all of us, are some sort of a minority, with Latinos being the largest, at just over 35 percent.

The diversity is not just ethnic. We have not only the largest mega-congregation in the world—I think—in Joel and Victoria Osteen’s Lakewood Church, which grew so big that they moved into our old basketball arena, but also a thriving non-believer scene. The annual convention of the Atheist Alliance of America was held in Houston during the same year (2011) that governor Rick “In times like these, our place is on our knees” Perry issued a Proclamation for Days of Prayer for Rain and held a 30,000-person supplication rally on the city’s Major League baseball field.

We elected our first female mayor in the 1980s—something L.A. has never done. And our first African-American mayor in the 1990s. And our first lesbian mayor a few years ago. I was not here for the first two elections but followed the 2010 election of Mayor Annise Parker closely. What I am most proud of is not that she was elected but that it was done with so little fanfare. I caught a bit of the mayoral debate on television, and it was exactly as it should have been: boring—all potholes and traffic lights and budget items and, God help us, light rail. No grandstanding on the status of Jerusalem. No discussion of which major international companies or foreign academics to boycott or whether to declare the city a nuclear-free zone. No discussion of her sexual orientation.

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We are, as a city in the “flyover country,” insecure enough to brag about ourselves. I believe there’s a law requiring all city documents to note that the first word spoken on the moon was “Houston.”

And all of us must regularly point out that our Chinatown is huge (see above).

And that the Sam Houston monument is the tallest statue of an American in the world. (Probably true.)

And that we have the largest number of oil moguls who believe J.R. Ewing was based on them. (I worked for one of them, a rotund man who came to work with his two German shepherds and, once, unhappy with the work of a senior subordinate, had the subordinate make a presentation to one of the dogs.)

And that we consume the largest number of meals in restaurants in the country. (Heck, just look at us. Of course true.)

And that we are blessed with one of the great medical centers in the world as well as several fine universities, a world-renowned symphony orchestra, and a literary scene supported by great writers and large readership.

And that we have amazing museums that include—aside from those dedicated to the fine arts—ones devoted to railroads, bicycles, funeral history, air travel, the military, art cars, firefighting, printing, maritime travel, war, police, the Black Madonna, health, Czechs, and the weather. Oh, and the Beer Can House.

What we don’t tell you is that we are a city of misdirection. We talk about the big this and big that and how we’re all cowboys here but won’t speak much about the simple stuff: that Houston is a great place to just live. It is a big city with a small-town sensibility.

If you are sitting with a visitor from Boston at an outdoor café trying to decide where to go for dinner, a total stranger passing by will overhear you and stop to give suggestions. A visiting Anglican minister is given a stranger’s cell phone so he can call his wife in the U.K. and let her know what he’s arrived safely. (Tall tales aside, both of these acts of hospitality actually happened.)

This is the large city where one makes eye contact with the total stranger.

This is, also, the city of truly great restaurants where you don’t have to book tables at six months in advance, of reasonably priced houses that neither take off to the moon in good times nor collapse when some bi-coastal bubble collapses, and of an educated and diverse workforce and relatively steady employment growth.

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At the same time, we hold onto the cowboy and wildcatter image. These are our creation myths—less about who we are and more about how we would like to see ourselves, perhaps a way of motivating ourselves as we find our way through the daily grind of life. Those of us who can afford to do it buy parcels of land an hour or two from the city. We like to call them ranches, visit them on weekends, and chop wood and clear brush and reroute brooks through the property, then come back to work on Monday in our suits and dresses, daydreaming about next weekend.

Our politicians also play at being ranchers and cowboys. Senators park their sensible cars out of sight and go to rallies in beaten pickup trucks, and representatives and other dignitaries march through downtown on horseback on the opening day of the Houston Rodeo. It’s the “largest rodeo in the world,” by the way.

You really don’t have to be originally from here to join the fun. I, for one, had not been long here—after living for 17 years in California, New York, and New Jersey—before I was y’all y’all-ing at everyone while holding onto my imaginary oversized belt buckle and moseying down the street wearing my alligator cowboy boots.

We play up the Texan even more when out of town. Even the vegetarians among us get our backs up when some Kansan or Carolinian claims—falsely, of course—that their barbeque is the best. Some years ago I stayed in a hotel in Kuwait City that has, of all things, a Texas steakhouse where the waitresses are Filipinas wearing boots and jeans and checkered shirts and neck scarves and cowboy hats. Being from Texas, I spent most of dinnertime teaching them the art of moseying and the proper pronunciation of key words (it’s not “oil” but “o’el” with two syllables) as well as some syntax (y’alls is the plural of y’all) and the rules of square dancing.

Never mind that I have square danced only once in my life, and that was in New Hampshire.

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What is wrong with Houston? Well, our public school system is underfunded and has very low graduation rates. There is poverty—much of it hidden out of sight on the east side of town—and the poor receive inadequate medical care. Our public transportation is not equal to what the fourth-largest city in the country needs.

We also don’t have hills or mountains. It’s flatter than Kansas here. A Houston joke: If you stand on a chair, you can see the entire city. That becomes a real problem when we get serious rain, as parts of the city end up as shallow lakes. My old neighborhood was flooded when Tropical Storm Allison came through in 2001. One friend who was canoeing from his home later told me he saw a snake swimming in the opposite direction.

The rain and greens sustain a robust wildlife—snakes and alligators, opossums (which look, from behind, disturbingly like cats with rattails) and armadillos—but insects take the prize: roaches, water bugs, fire ants, carpenter ants, a variety of bees and wasps, love bugs and stinkbugs and mosquitoes and spiders everywhere.

And last, of course, is what we politely refer to as our subtropical humid climate. A joke: Houston winters? Those two days in February.

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I confess to a certain discomfort over the discovery of Houston by the rest of the country. There are now regular features in outlets such as The New York Times and The Atlantic on how Houston is a great restaurant destination, or on how the city is the most powerful job engine in the country. Topping it all, Forbes has pronounced Houston the coolest city in America. (Forbes the arbiter of cool?)

Houston was built, like much of the New World, I suppose, on a lie. It was an uninhabitable swampland crawling with insects and reptiles that was made into the fourth-largest city in the country through will and greed and fear and desire, the usual motivators of our species. Our story is as old as the story of human migration itself, escaping the undesirable towards the imaginary and, then, trying to remake the reality of our new home into something better. And so we have created a global headquarters of the energy industry, a center of medical innovation and care, and a major port of commerce. In the process, the city has taken new migrants in waves large and small: from Vietnam and New Orleans, from Europe and Latin America, from the Middle East and the Northeast. And, somehow, they have all managed to find their place among others.

With all the new people moving in, there is a bumper sticker you see from time to time that says, “Welcome to Texas—Now Go Home.”

A confession: we really don’t mean the go-home part.

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