excerpt from current reading: one

This is taken from The Revolution will not be Microwaved, in which I am currently engrossed.

In the 1990's Mayor Rudolph Guiliani implemented a wholesale transfer of hundreds of city-owned lots with gardens on them to the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), which arranged to put 112 of them up for auction at once in the spring of 1999. When asked why the city was auctioning the gardens, the mayor responded "This is a free-market economy; welcome to the era after communism." The idea that the city would encourage permanent community-based gardening on its unused land was regarded as absurd and contrary to the laws of the market. Privatization of all resources is the "free-market" creed. "We are trying to privatize as many city-owned properties as we can," confirmed an HPD official.

Bette Midler stepped in, in the eleventh hour, to purchase the gardens and preserve these green spaces, creating the now famous New York Restoration Project. The author of Revolution, Sandor Ellix Katz, asserts (and I agree) that private persons and industry should not be solely responsible for acquiring and maintaining spaces that are meant for the good of the public.