robzand.com

The struggle to pay for Brooklyn Bridge Park echoes similar problems around the country in creating urban parkland in a postindustrial age when open space must often be carved, at great cost, from derelict manufacturing zones, military installations or rail yards. Governments no longer have the fiscal or political muscle to finance the projects alone, and the involvement of private donors or commercial ventures has led to public battles.

…

In New York, the Bloomberg administration’s insistence that new developments include open space has fostered a boom in parks: the city has added more than 500 acres of parkland since 2002, with thousands more to come, including large-scale projects like Governors Island and Fresh Kills. But it is unclear who is to pay for all these new parks, many of which are on waterfront sites, making them much more expensive to maintain than those inland.