Why don’t we all just play.
October 12, 2014 10:27 AM   Subscribe

A Property Rights Dispute at a Playground in San Francisco “It’s 6:55 and the homies are playing. They [the permit guys] are waiting for the field at 7. It’s about to go down.” An interesting standoff between neighborhood kids with an ad hoc system for everyone to use the playground, and a team of folks in Dropbox jerseys who have obtained a permit for exclusive use of the space.
posted by ocherdraco (241 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Most of the ink spilled about this event characterizes the "neighborhood kids" as prelapsarian savages, sharing the field among themselves peacefully, and even willing to let the white colonizers participate, despite the yawning cultural divide. But the evil white colonizers insist on exclusive use, or so the narrative says, and are willing to destroy the harmonious but fragile culture of sharing in order to secure it.

So far so good, but isn't it a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison when you're dealing with public goods bought and paid for with municipal tax dollars rather than primary ownership? Many of the people who are siding with the "neighborhood kids" today are the same people who were demanding punitive taxes on tech companies' bus services yesterday. Allowing tech workers to spend $27 for an hour of using the field, or whatever, seems to be just the kind of rich-subsidizing-the-poor program that San Franciscans angry with the housing shortage etc. would get behind.
posted by anewnadir at 10:42 AM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


Dang, there is some really interesting reporting to do here. Who set up this permit system, and did provide real notice to the community. I'm sure someone posted a sign someplace asking for public comment, but those, frankly, are ineffective. If you really want to change the way the community operates you're going to need to to actually communicate with the community. Not just some pro-forma posting.

One thing I am very happy about the post is that they realize that what property rights are: "which is what property rights enforcement is, aggressive violence"

Personally, I don't think that goes far enough. Property rights themselves are a form of aggressive violence, as you only have the rights that you can enforce, and the enforcement comes from aggressive violence at root. This is one thing I wish more libertarians would get as the eliding of this fact (among other things) seems to really hurt their philosophy.

I bring this up because, based on the young techies I know, libertarianism still seems to be a common belief.
posted by bswinburn at 10:43 AM on October 12, 2014 [19 favorites]


It's obvious those guys would get stomped in a soccer game against these kids right quick. I don't blame them for wanting to push out the competition.
posted by Brocktoon at 10:54 AM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


"Who gives a shit? Who cares about the neighborhood?"

Oops! The neighborhood just took your piece of paper that said I PAID MONEYS SO DEFER TO ME, BRO and tore it up. Indeed, who should care?
posted by Spatch at 10:58 AM on October 12, 2014 [8 favorites]


Part of the problem, anewnadir, is that that space has already been paid for through taxes paid by the community. To all of a sudden allow people to put in more money and trump the existing contributions turns the area from a public space into a publicly-subsidized private space.
posted by truex at 10:58 AM on October 12, 2014 [107 favorites]


Allowing tech workers to spend $27 for an hour of using the field, or whatever, seems to be just the kind of rich-subsidizing-the-poor program that San Franciscans angry with the housing shortage etc. would get behind.

...If they were paying 27 dollars *per person* to use the field, they might be realistically subsidizing the park. Keeping a soccer field (artificial or otherwise) in good shape is expensive.

There's been a long standing pick-up soccer game that's been running for the past 20+ years that I play in - by and large everyone plays nicely with everyone else - and there's a system. Just as there was in college pick-up games, and high-school, and grade school before that. It's not that hard to understand how pick-up games work (in any sport), and if the folks from dropbox couldn't be bothered, they're the ones in the wrong, socially. (...also, what Brocktoon said)
posted by combinatorial explosion at 10:59 AM on October 12, 2014 [17 favorites]


Charging for access to a municipally-funded community resource as if it were a fucking country club is NOT the solution for the any of the residents, especially the children who more than likely come from working class families.
posted by mistersquid at 10:59 AM on October 12, 2014 [37 favorites]


There are a few comments on the story
Another strike against the permit system: there's no way that any notice of the schedule was displayed prominently that anyone besides the permit holder could have known about in advance. Otherwise we wouldn't need "Connor" to show up with the magic paper; the schedule would have been posted and known in advance by everyone.

Another pointing out the tech guys didn't make this system, the city did. And it seems like it isn't well thought out.

While it's not popular to side with the tech folk in the city, I'd like to point out they acted by following rules they didn't create and seemed to expect the rules to be followed. If you imagine this happening in suburbia with equally empowered groups you'd think the people who made plans and paid for a reservation would be in the right.

That said, it's a stupid system, but I love the "Why don't we all play" guy.
posted by cccorlew at 11:00 AM on October 12, 2014 [8 favorites]


What happens when the Dropbox guys go back to the city and request a refund of their $27? Doesn't the city just tell them, "We gave you the right to use it, it was up to you to press the issue"?
posted by cribcage at 11:00 AM on October 12, 2014


Allowing tech workers to $27 for an hour of using the field, or whatever, seems to be just the kind of rich-subsidizing-the-poor program

Does that $27 (or whatever) actually go to widening park services to all city denizens? Or does it go into a larger pot that pays for stuff that doesn't actually "subsidize the poor", but probably focuses benefits towards a few selected rich neighborhoods?
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:01 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


RESPECT MY PERMITAH
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:01 AM on October 12, 2014 [6 favorites]


anewnadir, your comment seems slightly misinformed. this isn't a rich-subsidizing-the-poor program, it's a rich-DISPLACING-the-poor program. if the rich were subsidizing the poor, the rich would pay and the poor would still be playing soccer.

also, those weren't "punitive taxes" on the tech buses, those were "fair share" taxes on buses that use public bus stops and occasionally clog the public bus line, muni.

on the plus side, i'm always up for a class warfare rumble.
posted by bruce at 11:01 AM on October 12, 2014 [31 favorites]


Well, I held out a good 20 minutes on a thread I swore I wasn't going to wade into.

are the same people who were demanding punitive taxes on tech companies' bus services yesterday

This is a category error, because the tech bus companies do not pay SF taxes to (among other things) fix the potholes their buses exacerbate. Not sure where you're getting "punitive," by the way, unless it's from internet comments.
posted by rhizome at 11:02 AM on October 12, 2014 [12 favorites]


As I opined elsewhere, Children's Playground in Golden Gate Park is children-only. Adults can't go inside the fence and slide the concrete slides and climb on the bars unless you're supervising a child (and even then...). Can I pay $27 for an hour of exclusive Children's Playground use for me and my cohort?
posted by rhizome at 11:06 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Saw this earlier today and was wondering if it would make it to the Blue.

Can someone tell me what happens at the end of the video? It sounds like the why-don't-we-all-play guy says "we can either all play 7 on 7 or we can have this stand-off for the next 30 minutes," and then one of the tech bros says "we'll take the stand-off" and then the neighborhood kids say "alright, thank you very much" and leave the field. Which doesn't really make sense. Did I hear it wrong?
posted by eugenen at 11:07 AM on October 12, 2014


You wait your turn. If it's so crowded you don't want to wait, you don't get to play. I've played pickup basketball for years. I wish somebody would show up to the court with a permit talking about how only them and their friends get to play. They'd get laughed at. It's disrespectful not to wait your turn. If there is some bogus system where waiting your turn doesn't actually result in you getting to play, that's one thing. But otherwise, one of the things that makes pickup sports in public areas great, is that you show up, and you are in line, and you get to play. I've noted previously that it's one of the very few voluntary things in the U.S. where people of all different backgrounds, ages, genders, show up voluntarily and interact with one another. It's actually one of the greatest things about the country, to me. And clearly these guys don't get it.
posted by cashman at 11:11 AM on October 12, 2014 [47 favorites]


truex: from what I've read, the city limits the amount of time the park can be "rented", and the system trumpeted by innumerable anarchist blogs prevails the rest of the time.

I live in a city with a great deal of park space, so there's never really any issue about using space. But whether you're dealing with a situation where there is a surplus of space or a system where there is a deficit, the same result obtains for free-to-use public spaces: a small minority enjoys a greater benefit because they are using it more than the people who pay the exact same amount of tax.

The growing consensus on both the left and the right is that the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use. My only contention is that it's wholly inconsistent to demand that silicon valley companies pay a greater share of tax for road maintenance / public housing but then cry foul when a situation crops up in which this greater contribution comes at the expense of the poor instead of inuring to their benefit.
posted by anewnadir at 11:11 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


While it's not popular to side with the tech folk in the city, I'd like to point out they acted by following rules they didn't create and seemed to expect the rules to be followed. If you imagine this happening in suburbia with equally empowered groups you'd think the people who made plans and paid for a reservation would be in the right.

If you imagined this happening in suburbia with equally empowered groups, you'd be woolgathering about a fictional situation rather than addressing the matter at hand. Power relations aren't something you can bracket off like that, because this is a conversation about power relations. Answers to questions about an ideal abstract spherical-cow-on-frictionless-plane version of the discussion don't yield anything like an approximation of an answer to the real problem. In fact, they have no bearing whatsoever on the actual questions in play.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:14 AM on October 12, 2014 [17 favorites]


anewnadir, a system for allocating use of a soccer field developed through every day local community interactions is the opposite of anarchy.
posted by bruce at 11:15 AM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use.

Yes, let's make sure that childless people pay less in school taxes, as they benefit less.
posted by jeather at 11:15 AM on October 12, 2014 [11 favorites]


Arguably, resource allocation negotiated by and from within local community without any pro forma structure is the very definition of anarchy.
posted by absalom at 11:17 AM on October 12, 2014 [16 favorites]


The growing consensus on both the left and the right is that the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use.

Which is why the rich should subsidize playgrounds, because they benefit by the dirty riff-raff working off the energy that would otherwise be spent on stringing them up.

Sarcasm aside, you have an amusing way of substituting reductio ad absurdum for succinctness.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:19 AM on October 12, 2014 [33 favorites]


anewnadir: The growing consensus on both the left and the right is that the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use.

This really annoys me because all of that pricing, dealing with payments, and enforcement costs a lot of extra money, creates loads of unnecessary bureaucracy, and excludes people, and it could all be eliminated if people could just deal with the idea that their tax dollars might occasionally benefit someone other than themselves. The US has some sort of weird accountability fetish that ultimately costs us way more than just providing things like parks or health care for everyone.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:20 AM on October 12, 2014 [41 favorites]


the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use

There is a consensus on both the left and the right on this idea? I call BS.
posted by maxwelton at 11:21 AM on October 12, 2014 [25 favorites]


It's disrespectful not to wait your turn.

Sure, it's disrespectful to just randomly show up at some neighborhood park and demand that people get out of your way. I'm not sure that has much to do with this discussion, though. If your city's website has a "Reserve This Park" feature and you use it, then no, it is not disrespectful to show up at the scheduled time and expect to use the park.

I'm surprised how many people view this situation and see wrong on either side. From my perspective, this is a simple failure of city government. The city owns the property; and via two different mechanisms—permitting and convention—it gave identical, conflicting rights to two different groups. Neither group is wrong. They're both right. It's the city that screwed up.
posted by cribcage at 11:22 AM on October 12, 2014 [69 favorites]


The growing consensus on both the left and the right is that the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use.

Assuming facts not in evidence.
posted by rhizome at 11:22 AM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use

but . . . the commons is to be maintained by and for everybody. That's why it's called the commons. Am I wrong?
posted by Think_Long at 11:23 AM on October 12, 2014 [30 favorites]


Smart rich people re-writing rules in their favor? That's never happened before...
posted by Halogenhat at 11:24 AM on October 12, 2014


That's why it's called the commons. Am I wrong?

Not to mention that it's the entire point of taxes in the first place.
posted by rhizome at 11:25 AM on October 12, 2014 [8 favorites]


The city owns the property; and via two different mechanisms—permitting and convention—it gave identical, conflicting rights to two different groups. Neither group is wrong. They're both right. It's the city that screwed up.

However, the Dropbox nitwits are also most definitely in the wrong, for not immediately backing down upon discovering that the way they thought things were done is in fact not the way things are done.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:26 AM on October 12, 2014 [15 favorites]


Who set up this permit system, and did provide real notice to the community. I'm sure someone posted a sign someplace asking for public comment, but those, frankly, are ineffective.

FWIW, here's the sign posted at the soccer field. Note that there's a phone number you can call to reserve a field, and that permit holders have priority at all times.

And some more context to the situation... demand for soccer fields in SF (and in the Bay Area in general) far outstrips supply at this point. There's been a plan to redevelop the fields in Golden Gate Park by the Beach Chalet for some years (currently, they're grass and not lighted, and thus can only be used sparingly). Opponents of the project recently lost a lawsuit to block it, and have responded by putting a proposition on the November ballot.
posted by asterix at 11:28 AM on October 12, 2014 [6 favorites]


asterix: I love that background information. I will always be fascinated by the politics of the Bay Area, hopefully always from a distance.
posted by anewnadir at 11:32 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


For background, here's a 2012 local blog article about the city's decision to "experiment" with pay-to-play rentals (and rent to a private company that uses an app to schedule time) on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

And here's that same blog's follow-up article yesterday, where the parks department defends its policies.

I think the older guys with the permit behaved horribly when confronted with the situation but it's worth pointing out that the field is still open-play on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
posted by mediareport at 11:32 AM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


Also FWIW, this is not unique to San Francisco nor it is it a new phenomenon. Vancouver has been charging for reserved field and court use for years.
posted by Zedcaster at 11:36 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Typically when liberals talk about the wealthy paying more for their access to a resource, it's because they disproportionately profit from the exploitation of that resource and we all know that having access to play basketball is not at all analogous to paying more for roads for example when you directly profit and disproportionately damage the roads in their use. But yes let's make basketball court access analogous to capital gains. We already did it with labor.
posted by aydeejones at 11:37 AM on October 12, 2014 [4 favorites]


And while we're doing it, lets make sure all the signs indicating the changes are only in English.
posted by rhizome at 11:38 AM on October 12, 2014 [4 favorites]


Of course the better example involves exploitation and pollution of resources like air and water. There's no equivalency one can drag from a place of "pay more because you make us all pay to clean up your shit and we die prematurely and shit breathing your shit so you can sell shit to people halfway around the world with no stake" and access to recreational facilities
posted by aydeejones at 11:41 AM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


Allowing tech workers to spend $27 for an hour of using the field, or whatever, seems to be just the kind of rich-subsidizing-the-poor program that San Franciscans angry with the housing shortage etc. would get behind.

Interesting I did not know that public parks were in need of subsidization. It's almost like a public park is already subsidized for the benefit of everyone, otherwise they wouldn't be public.

This discussion of property rights is interesting but the real issue here is that people in the bay area are getting sick of every social interaction being mediated by an app. You do not need an app to play pick up soccer, you wait in line like civilized people do all over the world at parks and talk to the person next to you until it's your turn. This is not a social convention in need of 'disruption'. It doesn't matter if the city rolled this out properly or notified the neighborhood, you don't show up and scream at kids to get off your the city's lawn because you happened to have mashed your fingers against glass a few times. You just shut up and play.

Just like you don't show up to a dive bar after midnight with a video camera strapped to your face. This is common sense, normal urban human interaction stuff that seems to often explode in a certain kind of dudebros face when the world of apps and algorithm collides with the real world.
posted by bradbane at 11:44 AM on October 12, 2014 [29 favorites]


For background, here's a 2012 local blog article about the city's decision to "experiment" with pay-to-play rentals (and rent to a private company that uses an app to schedule time) on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

Worth noting that there are other organizations that do this all over the city and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have issues. (These guys have been going for years and do exactly the same thing as SF Pickup Soccer.) The decision to make the Mission Playground one of the fields available for that use was a particularly poor one on the part of the city, but they also revoked SF Pickup Soccer's permit pretty quickly.
posted by asterix at 11:45 AM on October 12, 2014


It doesn't matter if the city rolled this out properly or notified the neighborhood, you don't show up and scream at kids to get off your the city's lawn because you happened to have mashed your fingers against glass a few times.

Do you object to the notion of park permitting in general? Should sports leagues be allowed to reserve fields in public parks?
posted by asterix at 11:48 AM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


The thing about the commons is that it benefits everyone directly or indirectly. Those who use it least should pay the most for it, because they are neglecting the public good.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:48 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Tech industry douchebros have this knack for mistaking written rules for actual reality. I know this word is most often used as part of parodies of 1970s through 1990s style deconstructionism rather than in earnest, but nevertheless I think the term that best describes their mindset is "phallogocentrism."

I guess the tl;dr definition of phallogocentrism is something like "the way these words on my piece of paper say things are is the way things really are, and you should just accept that cause of my great big swinging dick."
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:48 AM on October 12, 2014 [9 favorites]


I love how companies push their mandatory volunteering and forced fun crap on employees, slapping their logo on everybody and everything; but when something goes awry suddenly it's all about "a couple" individuals and oh how "disappointing" they were.
posted by Esteemed Offendi at 11:49 AM on October 12, 2014 [15 favorites]


Man, that sign is terrible.

The first mention of a permit system is down in the smaller-text bullets at the bottom, an area generally reserved for "information you can disregard."

Then, confusingly there's something about how permits are only issued during open play hours for special events, which gives the impression that permit use is rare, and only during special events. (Of course, what it presumably means is that team permits are issued more frequently during non-open-play hours, but it takes some effort to parse that, and I imagine you'd never come to that conclusion at all if the park is de facto used for pickup games at all hours). I don't know if the video'd interaction happened during official open play hours or not.

On top of that, the information about how someone might go about acquiring a permit happens in the very last bullet, but happens under the rubric of team practice and game reservations -- which you're not going to think applies to you if you're not a member of a formal team and are used to playing pickup.

The park system really needs to do a better job of making the rules clear.

(And for what it's worth, this is the reading of somebody who is, demographically, one of the dropbox guys -- I moved to the Bay Area in the past few years and work for a tech company).
posted by pocketfullofrye at 11:52 AM on October 12, 2014 [10 favorites]


well at least they moved the sign out of that room in the cellar with "BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD" on the door.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:54 AM on October 12, 2014 [19 favorites]


Esteemed Offendi: I love how companies push their mandatory volunteering and forced fun crap on employees, slapping their logo on everybody and everything; but when something goes awry suddenly it's all about "a couple" individuals and oh how "disappointing" they were.

Hah, yeah. I can imagine a dystopian future where only corporations have the money and political power to reserve parks, so the only people who get to play at them are disinterested, exhausted workers who wish they didn't have to and could just go home.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:56 AM on October 12, 2014 [12 favorites]


Man, that sign is terrible.

The city's reservations website is kind of a disaster, too. You'd think there'd be an easy way to tell if a given field was reserved or not, but no.
posted by asterix at 11:57 AM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


I've had to deal with this crap before, at a friend's birthday party for her son in Golden Gate Park. A couple of dudebros showed up and demanded that we move, waving a permit in our faces. Thing is, the spot we were in was defined by the park itself as "first come, first serve" and they obviously had the wrong spot . We ended up having to take it over to the park & rec building to sort it out and even then, they were grumbling and angry. This is IN SPITE of offers from our group to share the space.

I am so fucking tired of these assholes.
posted by echolalia67 at 12:01 PM on October 12, 2014 [19 favorites]


However, the Dropbox nitwits are also most definitely in the wrong, for not immediately backing down upon discovering that the way they thought things were done is in fact not the way things are done.

I wish I could agree, because my sympathies are all with the community, but I can't. The community needs to take it up with the city and not with the users who are following codified rules put in place by a duly constituted government.
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:01 PM on October 12, 2014 [9 favorites]


This is a category error, because the tech bus companies do not pay SF taxes to (among other things) fix the potholes their buses exacerbate. Not sure where you're getting "punitive," by the way, unless it's from internet comments.--rhizome

Do any bus companies pay taxes? Well, they all do through gas taxes. So where does the tax money come from? From residents. Well, tech workers live in the city, and they pay taxes. And they are riding the buses. I supposed they could all drive their personal cars instead.
posted by eye of newt at 12:02 PM on October 12, 2014 [4 favorites]


In other words, you don't solve this problem by pushing back at users following the new rules and saying this is our turf and this is the way it's always been done. You go to the city and say "you fucked up and this is misgovernance."
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:02 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


I wish I could agree, because my sympathies are all with the community, but I can't. The community needs to take it up with the city and not with the users who are following codified rules put in place by a duly constituted government.

In this case, the rules put in place by a duly constituted government are incoherent and (at the very least) badly promulgated, and must yield to the actual established practice that actually governs the use of the field.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:03 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


An imbalance of privilege between the two parties is but one factor that must be considered; taking everything together I think the Dropbox guys were in the right, although they certainly could have been more generous in pressing for those rights. And given the widely-publicized issues of gentrification and class division in the SF area, the one employee's "who cares about the neighborhood?" was just absurdly, completely tone-deaf.

Those foolish words are (or should be) magnified by the fact that he said them while wearing Dropbox-branded apparel. That the company seems only to have reprimanded and extracted a public apology from him seems rather generous on their part.

The growing consensus on both the left and the right is that the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use.

No. No. No. No. No.

Fuck that.

The obvious effect of any such system -- so obvious I think that a child could see it -- would be to crystalize the stratification of our country, to snuff out entirely the flickering flame of the American dream. I refuse to resign myself to a society in which the idea that "some [people] are more equal than others" is not only tolerated, but codified.
posted by The Confessor at 12:06 PM on October 12, 2014 [10 favorites]


I read somewhere that the city will be posting parks employees during the reserved times to prevent this type of inanity in the future.
posted by jpe at 12:10 PM on October 12, 2014


It's Dropbox ... Can't they just play in the cloud?
posted by chavenet at 12:14 PM on October 12, 2014 [37 favorites]


The community needs to take it up with the city and not with the users who are following codified rules put in place by a duly constituted government.

I dunno, in this case "the community" was kids and "the users following codified rules" was adults. There's a reason the end of the 2nd link in the post notes both Dropbox and the employees involved have apologized: the employees handled this in a distinctly shitty manner.
posted by mediareport at 12:15 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


Do you object to the notion of park permitting in general? Should sports leagues be allowed to reserve fields in public parks?

I don't object to permitting in general. My point was this is a common urban experience: we all have to share these public spaces, and the rules are incoherent or poorly managed or not spelled out well. You show up somewhere and it's not what you expect. The subway car is full, your neighborhood bar is full of some idiot's bachelor party, the elevator is broken, dudes are smoking weed outside your window at 2am, your reserved soccer field already has half the neighborhood playing in it. The solution to these everyday occurrences is to act like a human, not throw a temper tantrum because you're white guy! with a piece of paper! who reserved this on his smartphone!

Just shut up and play soccer.
posted by bradbane at 12:15 PM on October 12, 2014 [19 favorites]


The growing consensus on both the left and the right is that the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use.

lol

let the retired fund social security! let the indigent fund medicaid! let the fish maintain their precious marine protected areas!
posted by Existential Dread at 12:26 PM on October 12, 2014 [61 favorites]


the culture of sharing

Like I said before, the city's decision to allow reservations at this particular park was a poor one. But I have something of an issue with this, as a) a tech worker b) a white dude and c) a not-terribly-good soccer player. I'm all for pickup, but IME "pickup" usually works out to "you don't actually get to play". (At least I have the advantage of being a dude! It'd be even worse if I were a woman; the level of exclusion in most pickup games I've seen -- no matter the race or class of the players -- has been shocking.) What exactly am I supposed to do in a situation like that?
posted by asterix at 12:29 PM on October 12, 2014 [6 favorites]


Lol those Dropbox guys are such assholes. "Connor" and the whole "waaah you're being disastrously weird and awkward." "How you doing, bruh." Snort.

Dropbox Douchebags. They all look like lame jerks.
posted by discopolo at 12:30 PM on October 12, 2014


I read somewhere that the city will be posting parks employees during the reserved times to prevent this type of inanity in the future.

Ah nice, then we can look forward to future videos where the police get involved in enforcement.
posted by rhizome at 12:33 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


What a load of bullshit. There's a fucking permit system in effect some of the time and these guys reserved a spot. The sign clearly indicates that open play is not 24/7. So there was a dispute because the people already on the field didn't want to leave.

"But they work for a tech startup!" "But the sign is in English, the language of the colonial oppressor!" "But they're asshole dudebros bro!" It's nice that people can project their issues onto any incident. "I wasn't watching where I was going, and I bumped into a suit-wearing Wall Street guy and he glared at me -- it was just like the financial crisis all over again! Grar!"
posted by leopard at 12:36 PM on October 12, 2014 [32 favorites]


This is a trend I think. There's a small park nearby (right on the border of WeHo and LA) where I go with my wife to do some jogging - there's a track, a softball/soccer/kickball playing field, basketball courts (indoor and outdoor) and some exercise machines - those are free, and then there are tennis courts you can rent by the hour. Tons of families and elderly come to play and exercise, especially on the weekends. Last summer a new trend started - on the weekends all those free areas are rented out for various money-making events by private companies selling tickets to "food fests" and such. What that involves is closing free access to the public and charging entry tickets and then you get to walk among the dozens of food trucks, there's usually a stage or screen with music or videos blaring and everyone is making money. They are all-day events. Afterward the place is absolutely trashed. It started with just a few weekends and now is accelerated and I expect soon every weekend will be taken up and then it'll bleed into Friday, and the rest of the week if possible. Families, the elderly and ordinary taxpayers will have to find some other place.

I don't have the energy to investigate how much of a cut the city is getting or the park specifically, or what the financial arrangements are, I just know that the predominantly Latino families will now not have access during the times when they can realistically find time to relax just a little: the weekends. The elderly who can't afford health clubs will be out of luck, and those who work long hours during the week and want to spend some time on the weekends in a park will get to watch from a distance and listen to blaring music that carries on for blocks.

Wave of the future folks, public spaces need to be monetized, and those at the bottom of the socio-economic stack will - oddly enough - not benefit.
posted by VikingSword at 12:37 PM on October 12, 2014 [20 favorites]


It's worth noting that (according to the text) everyone eventually got to play. I'm disappointed that the "I Gotta Permit" team didn't play the "We Don't Need No Stinking Permit" team.

It you read the interaction closely, you'll see that the dropbox guys had affable condescension going for them for a while, and it was working until the one guy asked to see their badges. I mean, permit. There's always one guy, though. Both sides should be credited with trying to keep the flames down. The one dropbox guy, though, was a bit pissy. Neighborhood cred was brought up, but not explored.

The city is guilty of nitwittery. It may be tempting to equate the playground permit with, say, a camping permit, but a little thought reveals that they are quite different. Users of playgrounds have a proprietary relationship with them. They are where social binding among the residents are created and reinforced. A block party might be viewed in a similar way--these require a more formal participation by the residents (permits, you see), but they are for the whole area. City regs ought to encourage community gatherings, not engender situations such as this one.

Pickup soccer is one thing, league play is another. For example, if the neighborhood has a bunch of good players who do well together, maybe intra-city leagues (each representing a playground) could reserve their fields for invitational games. This way the dropbox guys (who claim to live in the neighborhood) could play with the other guys from the neighborhood.

On the positive side, if the cultural divide isn't too much of a chasm for these folks, the dropbox guys might take this event as a learning experience on how to fit into the neighborhood in a better--let's say, more organic--way, besides invoking the might of the city bureaucracy to clear the playground of rabble so they can do whatever.

I agree that the dropbox team had permits. I assume they were in order. This is a case where the permit conflicted neighborhood policy. In terms of assholery, the dropbox guys win. They had no idea what they were walking into that day. They didn't care even a little bit about what the guys on the field were trying to tell them, because their $27 dollar permit trumped everything else. It wouldn't have taken any clear thinking on their part to figure out what to do, just an extra measure of the affable condescension they were spreading around.
posted by mule98J at 12:37 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


Maybe the Dropbox douchebags should Fresh Prince it and move in with their aunties and uncles in Bel Air hahahaha.
posted by discopolo at 12:37 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yeah, putting a reservation system in place part of the time is fine, but it should be free as a tax-supported public good, like everything else about the park. Kids playing in the park should not have to scrape together 27 bucks for game in order to compete for the same public good.
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:39 PM on October 12, 2014 [9 favorites]


Wave of the future folks, public spaces need to be monetized, and those at the bottom of the socio-economic stack will - oddly enough - not benefit.

Google gets me 1529
posted by bukvich at 12:42 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


Wave of the future folks, public spaces need to be monetized

Wave of the present, you mean.
posted by rhizome at 12:48 PM on October 12, 2014


In fact it'd be brilliant to start an indigogo campaign or similar to collect a fund so neighborhood kids can afford to reserve a playing field for their games in the park that used to be free. Hopefully it would have the side effect of shaming the fuckers who put the price tag on this thing.
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:48 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


The level of animosity here ("douchebags", "douchebros", claims that they're "screaming", implicit assumptions that they are not a part of "the community" that should be going to the town to get this ridiculousness sorted out, etc.) is disappointing. They're just guys who were told by the government that the rules are that if they pay $27, they get their turn for an hour. They paid their $27, and they waited for their turn (contrary to the opinion that they were "disrespectful" because they supposedly didn't wait their turn), but when it came time to get their turn, they were unilaterally denied by people who had been playing there for who knows how long, contrary to the rules that they were told were in place and which they dutifully followed. In the process, they were dismissively treated as outsiders ("How long have you lived here for", "About a year", "Oh, ha ha ha, a year!") and accused of bigotry which they did not demonstrate ("Where's the paper", "Here's the paper", "It doesn't matter if there's a paper", "Just read it", "I can read", "I didn't say you couldn't", "I'm an educated person", "I'm not suggesting you're not").

I say this as someone who thinks, hey, why not just play against the kids. It sure seems to me like they could've reacted better. But I think it's quite reasonable to think that neither the kids nor the adults were in the wrong here; the town is in the wrong by making an unworkable system. Metafilter's "LOL@DOUCHEBROS" reaction seems kneejerk and disappointing to me.
posted by Flunkie at 12:49 PM on October 12, 2014 [40 favorites]


Flunkie, please stop confusing some folks' reaction in a thread that's obviously got lots of diverse opinions with "Metafilter's reaction."
posted by mediareport at 12:54 PM on October 12, 2014


Oh, please, I'm not saying that Metafilter is in 100% unanimity on this.
posted by Flunkie at 12:55 PM on October 12, 2014 [15 favorites]


the town is in the wrong by making an unworkable system.

I guess I don't understand how the system is unworkable.

I mean, let's take the city completely out of it. It's always possible for a group to monopolize a basketball court or whatever causing other people to wait around forever for a chance to play. Typically people work out some sort of reasonable system, like losers out and winners stay on. But people don't *have* to be reasonable. I mean, even if there's a permit system with a clear sign that maps out how things should play out in case of a conflict, people can refuse to give up the field and plenty of commenters on Metafilter will apparently support them.

This is just the nature of public parks.

Flunkie, please stop confusing some folks' reaction in a thread that's obviously got lots of diverse opinions with "Metafilter's reaction."

#notallmefites
posted by leopard at 12:57 PM on October 12, 2014 [11 favorites]


I suppose the Dropbox guys were technically in the right but for some reason Douglas Adams and the Zogons are dancing in my head.
posted by JKevinKing at 12:58 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Wave of the present, you mean.

Where exactly does the $27 go? It seems improbable that it goes towards maintaining or even expanding parks services that are already paid for by taxpayers.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:59 PM on October 12, 2014


Oh, please, I'm not saying that Metafilter is in 100% unanimity on this.

Oh, ok. You wrote "Metafilter's reaction" and that seemed a bit unfair.
posted by mediareport at 1:00 PM on October 12, 2014


It's nice that people can project their issues onto any incident. "I wasn't watching where I was going, and I bumped into a suit-wearing Wall Street guy and he glared at me -- it was just like the financial crisis all over again! Grar!"

This brings up a deep, fraught, and fascinating debate about what we are actually doing when we argue about the news. One school of thought is that we should look at this incident and try our best to decide which group in this particular incident was right, as if we were municipal court judges in San Francisco. But it so happens that we are not municipal court judges in San Francisco; in fact most of us live thousands of miles away and on average spend very very little time thinking about playground right-of-use systems even in our own towns. People on an online thread like this are simply not called upon to actually decide who was right in this case, and so there is no particular reason to expect that that's what anyone is trying to do.

Therefore, if you're going to pay attention to this story at all, the only motivation that makes any sense is the prospect of advancing your side in some broad abstract cultural or philosophical dispute that extends beyond this one park in this one city. But does doing that actually help anything? Does having abstract arguments about culture make the world better, or should we all just tend our gardens? The tension in that question is what keeps many of us coming back to these kinds of threads, I think.
posted by officer_fred at 1:09 PM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


the town is in the wrong by making an unworkable system

Hey, let's leave Oakland out of this.
posted by spork at 1:10 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


I wish I could agree, because my sympathies are all with the community, but I can't. The community needs to take it up with the city and not with the users who are following codified rules put in place by a duly constituted government.

I'm trying to figure out what principle would compel the pick-up advocates to fight this dispute by giving up the natural advantages to their side. Is this the age-old, everyone, rich and poor, has equal right to go to fundraising dinners with lobby city government to turn "citizen" into "user," a "consumer" of city services. The city doesn't own the park, the citizens of SF own the park.
posted by ennui.bz at 1:24 PM on October 12, 2014


"You'd think there'd be an easy way to tell if a given field was reserved or not, but no."

We have similar free/reserve park facilities where I live; every one of them has a small chalkboard outside them and the guys in the golf carts who go around emptying trash cans first thing in the morning also chalk up the reservations for the day. So it'd say something like "3-4 p.m.: Youth Camp soccer / 6 p.m.-6:30 p.m. Dropbox reservation / 6:30-7:30 p.m.: Ellis party."

For a field that's SOMETIMES free play but SOMETIMES reserved, I don't think there's any other decent way to do it, especially if it's a neighborhood facility in frequent use by people within walking distance. If the pick-up kids had known they were going to have to shift their play elsewhere at a certain time because that specific time for that specific day was posted, there probably would have been no problem.

I don't think (even if they clean up their app/website) it's enough to post it on the web; you've got to post it AT THE PARK so people can see it.

Around here it's popular basketball and tennis courts where the rotating pick-up games sometimes have to give way to reservations and people are disappointed, but they can clearly see when they arrive that there is a reservation-holder from 4 to 5 and they can plan their play to wrap up at 4 and go get ice cream.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:28 PM on October 12, 2014 [16 favorites]


I say this as someone who thinks, hey, why not just play against the kids.

I kind of hope that's what the Dropbox guys got out of this in retrospect. In the 90's in the Navy (Alameda, CA, before that closed,) my division used to like to take 1/2 day off once in a while to go play roller hockey together as an optional team-building thing. Same issue: the place convenient to us was a schoolyard with local kids and a convention for how the space was used.

We shrugged and went with the local thing. It turned out to be win all around. We got to play, make new friends, and strengthen our (initially not great) relationship with the community. Some of those kids were good, too and it made us better players once we started to integrate teams on the fly instead of playing strictly "us vs. them."

Heartwarming conclusion: a mixed team of 6-foot Navy guys and ten-year-olds from the neighborhood once won a statewide roller hockey tournament in Sacramento.
posted by ctmf at 1:30 PM on October 12, 2014 [45 favorites]


I wish I could agree, because my sympathies are all with the community, but I can't. The community needs to take it up with the city and not with the users who are following codified rules put in place by a duly constituted government.

What the locals did was very effective. Whoever filmed the video knew there was going to be a confrontation. They recorded and saw that it got posted. I doubt that there will be a bunch of guys in Dropbox t-shirts reserving the field next week. No lengthy meeting with bureaucrats, no pleading with their elected officials.

In contrast, the Dropbox guys were incredibly short sighted. The best play for them was to prove that they had a "right" to field and then play a mixed game. Maybe get to know their neighbors and let them know that sometimes on X day they'll reserve the field.
posted by rdr at 1:36 PM on October 12, 2014 [6 favorites]


rdr: In contrast, the Dropbox guys were incredibly short sighted. The best play for them was to prove that they had a "right" to field and then play a mixed game. Maybe get to know their neighbors and let them know that sometimes on X day they'll reserve the field.

I dunno. The Dropbox guys would have probably gotten hilariously slaughtered by people who play all the time. Even splitting up the teams would only be a partial solution (playing with a bunch of people way better than you sucks). Plus, if someone from outside the company got injured, they might have tried to sue.

Probably the best alternative would have just been to shove off to avoid creating a PR disaster, which again shows why you shouldn't try to mix work and recreation. When you do, you have to focus on image, etc. and can never actually relax.
posted by Mitrovarr at 1:50 PM on October 12, 2014


Metafilter's "LOL@DOUCHEBROS" reaction seems kneejerk and disappointing to me.

Saying things like "who gives a shit about the neighborhood" and "you're being disastrously weird" seems pretty douche-y to me.
posted by AceRock at 1:51 PM on October 12, 2014 [14 favorites]


What the locals did was very effective. Whoever filmed the video knew there was going to be a confrontation. They recorded and saw that it got posted. I doubt that there will be a bunch of guys in Dropbox t-shirts reserving the field next week. No lengthy meeting with bureaucrats, no pleading with their elected officials.

I thought it was douchey of the Dropbox guys to try (and fail massively) to intimidate the guy recording into not recording. That was an inkling that they knew they were being assholes with their $27 permit. I'm glad the guy recording didn't give a fuck.

Mid thirties guys trying to kick a group off the field that has kids/teens in it along with adults. C'mon. It's got a lot of entitled douchery to it. The standing around and wasting everybody's time instead of playing with the group that was there. Real nice adulting there.
posted by discopolo at 1:54 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


That was an inkling that they knew they were being assholes with their $27 permit.

Someone pays money for X, feels entitled to X. Christ, what an asshole.

Has anyone ever heard of this thing where you want to play basketball or soccer or football with a specific group of people, and not with whoever is already at the park? I think Facebook invented it. Or maybe it was Zynga.
posted by leopard at 2:09 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


It's obvious those guys would get stomped in a soccer game against these kids right quick. I don't blame them for wanting to push out the competition.

That was actually kind of the point. The neighborhood system is awesome and should totally continue, but people who aren't such great soccer players should have a way to enjoy the use of a city field too. Certainly not every field and certainly not all the time, but some options should be open to those of different skill levels and styles of play.
posted by zachlipton at 2:31 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


I lived near a nice green field perfect for ultimate frisbee for a number of years. Problem was, it was part of an elementary school and usually gate-locked after hours. So players would climb the fence and have a game. No permits, no fees, nothing but do-you-have-the-balls-to-climb-the-fence. Interestingly, the most regular players seemed to be women.
posted by telstar at 2:38 PM on October 12, 2014


cribcage is right. This is a failure of government (perhaps reveals a failure of governance?) and a stomach-sickening lurch towards the commodification of everything.

At the risk of disappointing officer_fred, what are the USSF doing about local 5- or 7-a-side leagues?

Also, on a probably facile level: anybody else fascinated by the 20-year-old guys PSG Academy top? First, because if he played for the PSG Academy must be a great player. How did anyone from SF get to a Paris football academy? Second, because PSG are a club notorious for the class and racial divisions within their own supporters.

Finally, as someone who is crap at confrontation at every level, what advice is there for all of us so that the obvious (immediate, short-term) best result of a mixed 7-a-side actually happens?

Finally, finally, who plays a kick-about in team-branded sportswear?
posted by stanf at 2:43 PM on October 12, 2014


I doubt that there will be a bunch of guys in Dropbox t-shirts reserving the field next week.

Or voting for an increase in the parks budget, or against turning the parks into shopping centers. Why bother having or paying for parks if you're not even allowed to use them?
posted by Hatashran at 2:44 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


Why aren't these people who want to use a field commercially for their private league just renting time in an astroturf filled warehouse with lines and nets? I mean... If you're into the whole "Bread-head" thing, then isn't "Hey, let's open up a company to provide services to us!" part-and-parcel with it?
posted by mikelieman at 2:47 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


Why bother having or paying for parks if you're not even allowed to use them?

what

They can play like everyone else. The important part being "like everyone else." What they can't do is pay money to be special.
posted by ctmf at 2:48 PM on October 12, 2014 [8 favorites]


<whinyAnecdote>
i'm wrestling with a somewhat related situation at my public library. they have a 'free reserve-able meeting space' that is reserved 3-4 months out, seven days a week. reserved by HOA boards, businesses, for-profit organizations, private schools, and ultra-religious home-schooling groups.

and there *seems* to be some strange inside-track to the reservation system, because as soon as the next time block opens, it's instantly re-filled with all these guys.

i mentioned to the reservations person that it seems like these organizations ought to be able to rent their own meeting space with their profits, so the rest of us could have a shot at the space. i just got the look-a-libral-eyeroll.

it's weird. my small group wants part of a public good that on close examination, seems tailored to benefit private entities.

i'm kind of at an impasse; the more questions i ask, the less access i have to reservation staff. s'pose i could try to get all legal. like a lot of small, broke groups, we'll probably just balk and try to work out of somebody's basement or something.
</whinyAnecdote>

(admittedly, this could be some weird misunderstanding. but it *seems* to fit a certain narrative.)
posted by j_curiouser at 3:20 PM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


The growing consensus on both the left and the right is that the cost of maintaining the commons should be shifted to those who benefit most from its use.

Assuming for a moment that this statement isn't just made up bullshit, I'm going to have to assume that, by "both the left and the right" you mean, "both the rabid right wing in mainstream politics and the milquetoast center-right in mainstream politics that ineffectually semi-oppose them when it doesn't seem like too much effort or they can stop falling over themselves to agree because they don't want to look weak or something".
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 3:22 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


Or voting for an increase in the parks budget, or against turning the parks into shopping centers.

If they don't care about the neighborhood they're probably not going to vote, period.
posted by Spatch at 3:31 PM on October 12, 2014


> Assuming for a moment that this statement isn't just made up bullshit,

It's basically an extreme generalization from selective examples resulting in a false equivalence. You could get there by smooshing these together, for example:

The left believe that commercial trucking imposes a major road construction and maintenance burden on the public, and bicycles do not, so trucks are taxed more heavily than cars and bicycles are not taxed at all.

The right believe that the rich don't benefit from public schools because they send their own kids to private schools and therefore they should not be taxed for them.

The conflation of these two radically different ideas -- the for-profit movement of commercial goods on public roads vs. a guaranteed primary education for the whole American polity irrespective of accident of birth -- is one of the sillier things I've seen in a while.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:41 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


cf. Noblesse oblige
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:56 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


That was an inkling that they knew they were being assholes with their $27 permit.

Someone pays money for X, feels entitled to X. Christ, what an asshole.

Has anyone ever heard of this thing where you want to play basketball or soccer or football with a specific group of people, and not with whoever is already at the park?


You know what a person with character would do? See that there are a bunch of people playing in an established fashion and that there are little kids and young people from the neighborhood playing happily and eat the $27 bucks and say God bless.

Because you're an adult and part of society. You don't tell kids to scram off a fucking park field. You play with and model good behavior.

Yeah I know; you never said you were a role model. But who is so selfish that they think it's right to shoo a bunch of kids off a field?

I bet one of the douchey guys probably suggested calling the cops. Kinda heartless. They can go use their smartphone apps and reserve a private place to display their mediocre soccer skills.
posted by discopolo at 3:59 PM on October 12, 2014 [11 favorites]


That was actually kind of the point. The neighborhood system is awesome and should totally continue, but people who aren't such great soccer players should have a way to enjoy the use of a city field too.

This is most certainly not the point. But, if pickup soccer is anything like pickup basketball, folks of all skill levels are welcome to play as long as they've waited their turn, called "next", or whatever the house rules happen to be. I have played plenty of games where scrubs end up on my team, and, everything being relative, I've been the scrub plenty of times. Incidentally, it is almost always "bros" who want to exclude people from their teams -- showing up with 4 of their frat brothers or their rec league team and wanting to all play together.
posted by AceRock at 4:07 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Okay so these kids have been doing pickup games for a long time. The setup is groups of N play, and people wait their turn and get cycled in. It's a pretty equitable setup, and everyone gets to play.

I'm not going to get into the reservation system, but if the exchange hadn't been all or nothing, the whole group could've played together. But instead it turned into a thing.

I've lived here for a 4 years. And I think that the kids playing is more important than the wealthier tech folk having their game.

Or everyone could've played together.
posted by Lord_Pall at 4:11 PM on October 12, 2014


But, if pickup soccer is anything like pickup basketball, folks of all skill levels are welcome to play as long as they've waited their turn, called "next", or whatever the house rules happen to be. I have played plenty of games where scrubs end up on my team, and, everything being relative, I've been the scrub plenty of times.

IME "welcome to play" usually means "welcome to stand on the field at the same as everyone else". Miss a touch? Give up a turnover? Good luck ever seeing the ball again. And controlling a soccer ball is so much harder than catching a basketball you're far more likely to misplay the ball if it does come your way in the first place.
posted by asterix at 4:30 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


This is most certainly not the point. But, if pickup soccer is anything like pickup basketball, folks of all skill levels are welcome to play as long as they've waited their turn, called "next", or whatever the house rules happen to be.

Apparently, the house rules here are that the first team to have a point scored on them is out. While that's a fine system for keeping the pickup game going, some people of meager or plain average skill might want to kick the ball around for an hour. It doesn't have to be at this field and certainly not every hour of the day, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that people want to use the field in different ways, and we should try to accommodate different types of users.

Incidentally, it is almost always "bros" who want to exclude people from their teams -- showing up with 4 of their frat brothers or their rec league team and wanting to all play together.

Yes, how terrible that a group of friends might want to all play together sometime. If only there were some kind of process by which a group could, um, reserve the field for a period of time.

Members of this group were certainly tone-deaf and said some pretty stupid things about the neighborhood and community. That doesn't mean that the goal of allowing people to use the field in a different way is an inherently stupid one.
posted by zachlipton at 4:39 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


If only there were some kind of process by which a group could, um, reserve the field [all to themselves] for a period of time.

That's not what 'public' means.
posted by ctmf at 4:47 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


(Not that they are bad people for wanting that. Just, everyone wants that, and everyone can't have it. That's why these sharing conventions have arisen.)
posted by ctmf at 4:49 PM on October 12, 2014


The $27 fee looks like a rationing mechanism to me: it will probably return less than the collection cost, never mind the cost of the inevitable enforcement. I don't object to rationing in principle, but in this case it's a solution for a non-existent problem: the pickup-game system was apparently working. So it's effectively a $27 fee for the right to disrupt an effective and traditional system. I don't think that disruption is desirable, and the fee is ridiculously small: the cost of renting a private facility would be many times higher.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:59 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


It sure is a lot easier to just make shit up to fit a preferred narrative about these douchey dude-bros. And y'all have got to develop some better pejoratives when referring to white guys with good jobs because the ones deployed in this thread are really tired.

Funny, I know white guys with good jobs who wouldn't act like the douchebags in that video. They guys at Dropbox involved in this---their douchery is a special kind; douchery nonetheless, but they don't know how to communicate with the kids and teens on the field other than to be dicks. And that's a special brand of douchery that has nothing to do with being white or having a good job---it has everything to do with the inability to get along with people outside their little clique and, you know, actually participate in a community and be able to communicate nicely with people outside their little group.

You know, basically, figure out how to get along with your neighbors without being an asshole. It's not hard, and it doesn't require print outs. It does require being a mature adult with communication skills.
posted by discopolo at 5:01 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


I don't object to rationing in principle, but in this case it's a solution for a non-existent problem

This has been tickling the back of my brain. I bet it was just a case that when they renovated the field, it was a fait accompli that some kind of charging-money-really-anything-at-all-is-fine-OK-how-about-27-dollars would be a part of the project, because, well, because it's the wave of the present. Someone had those English-only signs printed, someone set up the reservation mechanism, someone didn't really tell anybody who was actually using the field, and some other people got periodic reports about how far along all of this was in the process.
posted by rhizome at 5:11 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


I would guess the $27 is less a tool to raise funds than an incentive not to simply block off time that you may or may not use.
posted by dsfan at 5:14 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


I don't object to rationing in principle, but in this case it's a solution for a non-existent problem

What? No. Scarcity of soccer fields in SF (and in the Bay Area in general) is absolutely not a non-existent problem. Every field I know of is constantly in use; artificial turf fields (like the one at Mission Playground) are even more in demand because you can use them no matter what the weather's like (whereas you can't play on grass if it's raining or if it's recently rained), and because you don't have to worry about breaking an ankle in a gopher hole.
posted by asterix at 5:24 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


O my god, the reaction to this has been such hand-wringing bullshit. Reserving public sports facilities is an utterly common thing, even in San Francisco. It's how leagues work, and if you've spent literally any time on a public court or field, you understand it's a possibility, whether or not you're gonna act like a good citizen about it... Clearly the techbros are kind of clueless, albeit in a totally non-aggressive way (you will surely see if you take off your ideology goggles), but those kids are just acting like bratty little shits about giving up the field for a measly hour. And of course they've mastered the Sf'an art of not losing any opportunity to have dick measuring contest about authenticity.
posted by batfish at 5:37 PM on October 12, 2014 [22 favorites]


Scarcity of soccer fields in SF (and in the Bay Area in general) is absolutely not a non-existent problem.

The $27 fee does not purport to solve that problem and it couldn't possibly be sufficient. The problem it's aimed at is rationing (i.e., who gets to use the field, and when). There is already a solution to that: wait your turn. If people generally paid the fee then the payments would represent a queue, but the evidence is that payment is a rare and unexpected event. All that the fee accomplishes is to let people jump the existing queue, which weakens the existing system and creates resentment.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:45 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


The permit system allows people who want to have some kind of "event" at the park to pull it off (e.g., summer camps and amateur leagues). The fee makes sure that the people making the reservation have some skin in the game, so that people only reserve things when they mean it. The open play hours grant complete unfettered access to the park at predictable hours. This is the existing system and it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Now if I'm playing on a basketball court and someone shows up saying that the court is reserved for the next hour, and they show me the permit and point to the sign and everything looks legit, well I do what any ordinary citizen who isn't an entitled douchebag would do, and that's get off the court for the next hour. On the other hand, I'm not a Magical Tree Person who has lived in my Special Community for thousands of years, completely unfamiliar with your modern technologies of Permits and Signs and Written Language, and whose innocent and primal connection to the soccer field is so heart-warming that anyone with a soul would gladly forfeit the money they spent on a permit, so there's that.
posted by leopard at 6:01 PM on October 12, 2014 [20 favorites]


Joe in Australia: There is already a solution to that: wait your turn.

That is an utterly unworkable solution when trying to get together a bunch of adults with careers, kids, and families. Getting openings in enough people's schedules is already difficult; getting a big fat hole that allows for tons of time sitting around waiting is impossible.
posted by Mitrovarr at 6:09 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


Metafilter's "LOL@DOUCHEBROS" reaction seems kneejerk and disappointing to me.

They said "who gives a shit about the neighborhood" on camera while wearing Dropbox hoodies. In San Francisco this is like announcing that you like to drown puppies for fun. The only way you would not know that this is a socially unacceptable, tone deaf thing to say out loud is if you lived in a giant bubble... which is of course exactly the problem that people have with the stereotypical tech dudebro.
posted by bradbane at 6:26 PM on October 12, 2014 [19 favorites]


I guess they just want to save money.
Rental Rates
Non-Member Small Field
Per 1/2 Hour: $80
Per Hour: $160
posted by mikelieman at 6:30 PM on October 12, 2014


They said "who gives a shit about the neighborhood" on camera while wearing Dropbox hoodies.
By "they", you mean one person. He said something somewhat like you quote him as saying directly in exasperated response to one of his friends being loudly and pointedly questioned "How long have you been in the neighborhood, bro", as if the fact that he'd been there only a year means his permit is invalid. And he was basically ignored by all involved.

I'm not saying that wasn't a jerky thing to say, but it seems weird to me that this one somewhat jerky throwaway line from one exasperated person has become "they", and moreover "their" central defining feature.
posted by Flunkie at 6:44 PM on October 12, 2014 [8 favorites]


I guess they just want to save money.

Dude. That's in San Jose. It's 55 miles from Dropbox's offices and would take hours in weekday traffic. That's not an option for anyone working in SF.
posted by asterix at 7:04 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


On the other hand, I'm not a Magical Tree Person who has lived in my Special Community for thousands of years, completely unfamiliar with your modern technologies of Permits and Signs and Written Language, and whose innocent and primal connection to the soccer field is so heart-warming that anyone with a soul would gladly forfeit the money they spent on a permit, so there's that.

Despite being on the other side of this debate it would be dishonest to deny that I enjoyed reading that.
posted by George_Spiggott at 7:15 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


Ctrl+F "enclosure"

Phrase not found
.

Really?
posted by benito.strauss at 7:35 PM on October 12, 2014


At least I have the advantage of being a dude! It'd be even worse if I were a woman; the level of exclusion in most pickup games I've seen -- no matter the race or class of the players -- has been shocking.

This is spot on. I played for a women's sports team in SF. We had a permit for every single one of our practices, even though getting permits was a giant pain in the ass - no app back then! - because if we hadn't, we rarely would have been able to practice at all. Even with permits, it was common to have to argue with a bunch of dudes before we got to use the space - and this was in regularly permitted spaces we'd been using on a weekly basis, not spaces with some other regular convention.

I'm not defending these particular guys. But permitting systems are sometimes necessary, especially in places like SF where there's not nearly enough open space for everyone to use without rationing.
posted by heisenberg at 7:40 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


Now that I have objectively watched and carefully listened to the full exchange about 10 times, I really don't see any evidence whatsoever that these guys behaved badly.

Except that the people they were trying to kick off the field were upset, angry, and indignant. That's evidence, and it should probably count for something.

This is the existing system and it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

It's not the existing system, exactly. Its a new system, imposed on top of an actual long-existing system that has been working for decades by outsiders.
posted by AceRock at 7:58 PM on October 12, 2014


the people... were upset, angry, and indignant. That's evidence, and it should probably count for something.

Of course whenever people are upset, angry, and indignant, it should count for something. I have a pretty simple formula:

-Do the angry people work for a tech startup? Then they are entitled out-of-touch assholes, and their anger reveals just how entitled and out-of-touch they are.

-Are the angry people mad at tech startup workers? Then they are noble saints whose proud and ancient traditions are being trampled on by brutish outsiders, and their anger reveals the righteousness of their cause.

Its a new system, imposed on top of an actual long-existing system that has been working for decades by outsiders.

So when was this system created? Who *imposed* it? Is this really the first time in decades that there was some sort of dispute about whose turn it was to play on a public field?
posted by leopard at 8:09 PM on October 12, 2014 [4 favorites]


http://missionlocal.org/2012/10/petitioner-fights-pay-to-play-in-mission-soccer/

This has been linked to above but apparently a lot of people on here haven't read it. The policy began 2 years ago after the field was renovated and asphalt was replaced with turf. The field is for public play except for Tuesday and Thursday evenings when the field can be reserved.
posted by I-baLL at 8:14 PM on October 12, 2014


Re the current thinking on Governing the Commons. The actual current Nobel-winning thinking is that all of the people interested in the resource need to be involved in creating the regulatory framework, not a centralized entity with no particular interest or experience. Hey, what do you know, this story fits that perfectly. The permit holders were technically right, but the reservation system was in conflict with local control. The solution is to get anyone interested in using the field in a room together to design a system that works for everyone. I don't think it's a big deal that some groups might want to use the field for their own use sometimes. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for that - pick up games really can be discriminatory. So all the groups who use the field need to come up with a system that is acceptable for all... Hours of use, how the reservation system works, how the notification system works, how to deal if there's a game in progress and a reservation is coming up. There are plenty of civilized solutions to this problem.

The approach displayed in the video was not one of them.
posted by one_bean at 8:14 PM on October 12, 2014 [6 favorites]


Are the angry people mad at tech startup workers? Then they are noble saints whose proud and ancient traditions are being trampled on by brutish outsiders, and their anger reveals the righteousness of their cause.

That's some condescending shit, man. But yeah, actually, that's pretty much it. Because it matters that the field is in their neighborhood, and that they have agree upon rules and customs for how sharing that field works. So if you're not from the neighborhood -- and yes, it fucking matters whether or not you grew up there or if you just moved in "over a year" ago -- its on you to navigate those rules and customs. It just is. You're basically a guest in someone else's place.

This is a serious question. Where does it not work this way? I've only really lived in New York City and Chicago, places where neighborhoods mean a whole lot, and its a big deal if you're an outsider coming in acting like you own the place.
posted by AceRock at 8:23 PM on October 12, 2014 [6 favorites]


How we go from that to dragging these guys through the pejorative mud I just don't know.

I don't know man, I can't speak for anyone else, but I found myself immediately identifying with the local kids and getting pretty worked up about how the tech startup guys were acting. I can't even really pinpoint why or what it is. Their entitlement, probably. And this is partly my own axe to grind. I mentioned up-thread that the tech startup guys reminded me a lot of bros (yes, usually white, rich dudes) I've had to deal with on the basketball court. Same sense of entitlement, same assumption that their wish to play together, to the exclusion of others, trumps the established customs of the court, that every one else follows. And its not like everyone is happy with the house rules all the time. And so it just feels disrespectful for outsiders to show up and think that the rules, that everyone else has to live with, don't apply to them.
posted by AceRock at 8:30 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


its a big deal if you're an outsider coming in acting like you own the place.

Oh come on. I grew up in New York, we didn't have dick-measuring contests about who *really* owned the public space. There wasn't some bullshit pecking order where you had to have paid your dues and lived there for 20 years to have a say in something. We were all fucking New Yorkers.

But I guess that's because I grew up mostly with immigrants and so I find this "outsiders are inauthentic" nonsense actually a bit offensive.

And so it just feels disrespectful for outsiders to show up and think that the rules, that everyone else has to live with, don't apply to them.

The rules for this space were set up 2 years ago. It's odd that these people who live and breathe on this field only figured it out when the Dropbox guys showed up. And if rules are so important, then why aren't the actual rules, the ones laid out by the city, the ones that explicitly grant priority to permit holders, being followed? It seems so very disrespectful, wouldn't you say?
posted by leopard at 8:40 PM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


And if rules are so important, then why aren't the actual rules, the ones laid out by the city, the ones that explicitly grant priority to permit holders, being followed? It seems so very disrespectful, wouldn't you say?

Seriously, why are the rules laid out by some city bureaucrat the "actual rules" and not the implicit, agree-upon customs that actually govern and manage the small daily disputes and conflicts that no doubt go on all the time?

And the rules weren't set up 2 years ago. They were changed 2 years ago, apparently without being clearly explained to anyone. As the guy in the video said, the field has been a pickup field for like 20 years.

I'm not trying to start an authenticity dick measuring contest, all I'm saying is, I completely get why the local people are upset (and I thought it might be because SF is like NY in some ways).
posted by AceRock at 8:49 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


aren't the actual rules, the ones laid out by the city, the ones that explicitly grant priority to permit holders, being followed?

I mean, that's the point, innt? It's a discussion over whether the usage of the park, under rules developed by the park users over time, are actually more actual than a set of rules imposed thoughtlessly by the city, and posted badly.

I can't think of any reason1 to position the unclear and sort of slapdash-seeming written rules superior to the rules developed through actual practice, especially as the rules developed through practice more closely adhere to the mission of the playground than the slapdash written ones.

1: I mean, any reason that's not totally disingenuous — like, "will of the people" arguments clearly don't apply here, since before this fight, clearly no one outside the rec and park department had thought hard about this set of rules, and apparently no one anywhere had thought about they could be lawyered/used against their purpose. Once we've had an actual public sphere debate about these rules, then perhaps we can appeal to the democratic will argument.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:51 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


The onus is on DB to grasp the optics, if not the practical ethics, of this, and back the fuck off. Sure, the city is the entity who messed up, but the DB people acting injured should--no, do--know better.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 9:01 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm kind of disappointed to see so many people defend the dude who dismisses an argument by basically saying "I've been here for twenty years, and you haven't." That's pure xenophobia, and it's completely disgusting.

As plenty of people have pointed out upthread, informal conventions of social order tend to have a way of systematically excluding people that aren't part of in-groups, especially when they're administered by bratty and confrontational young men

The idea that we should be giving rule-making power to a group whose idea of equal treatment is "I grew up here so I get to tell you how it's going to work" is, frankly, ludicrous
posted by rishabguha at 9:08 PM on October 12, 2014 [15 favorites]


We were all fucking New Yorkers.

I lived in NYC before SF, and what I miss the most about the east coast is that attitude. These types of confrontations are every day urban interactions, it's a very basic part of what urban life is about. You show up, the situation is not what you expect, you are forced to interact and share public space with someone totally outside of your social circle or class, and you both come out better for the interaction. Maybe you even pick up a clue or two about the urban glue that keeps the city running, like the informal street rules that have run public soccer fields. This is what makes city life so amazing.

Unfortunately the only time you can get different classes of San Franciscans to interact is when they look up from their phones for 2 seconds to confirm that the real world is not what they expected.
posted by bradbane at 9:15 PM on October 12, 2014


especially as the rules developed through practice more closely adhere to the mission of the playground than the slapdash written ones.

For a certain group of users, perhaps. The playground is just a space; it, as an inanimate plot of land, doesn't have a "mission."

Some people like using the field according to the house rules. But that system excludes many classes of users, such as a youth team that needs practice space, a youth league hosting a game, an adult league hosting a game, and yes, group of colleagues who want to kick a ball around together. These are all reasonable enough uses of a soccer field. While we might want to prioritize somewhat (so that, say, youth games can happen while kids are out of school and before it gets dark), the pickup game culture is really just as valid a use of the space as any other.

Since all those groups live here, contribute through their taxes to the upkeep of the field, and have an interest in using it, trying to accommodate them is more conducive to the "mission of the playground" than insisting the casual rules should be good enough for everybody. Since the space is finite, that means some people are going to have to go to a different field (the supply of which is sadly limited) or not use the field during certain hours.

I will agree the city's rules were communicated badly and should have been imposed with more community consultation. But the intent was pretty reasonable and similar to most other spaces managed by Rec & Park: space should be generally available for casual users, while allowing reservations to accommodate other user types. It's the same system that lets me go have a picnic in Golden Gate Park this weekend because I feel like it, while ensuring there's a space saved for your kid's birthday party at those tables over there.
posted by zachlipton at 9:18 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


leopard: " And if rules are so important, then why aren't the actual rules, the ones laid out by the city, the ones that explicitly grant priority to permit holders, being followed? It seems so very disrespectful, wouldn't you say?"

Because we live in a common law country which literally means that when local custom acceptably and fairly copes with an issue, we do not turn to governmental rule-making. Governmental rule-making is for when local custom fails.

Seriously, be more American.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:28 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


one_bean, I guess I appreciate your spirit of can't-we-all-get-along-ism, but that is really a cartoon of over-theorizing to avoid breaking progressive do-gooder script. The system in place already maximally allocates the field to the "community" pickup game. Like, 2 evenings a week the site is reservable, which is to say 5 days+ it's controlled by whoever controls that pickup game. You seem to imagine the bureaucratic therapy process you endorse as a kind of magic, like: here's a hat into which we shall put many meetings, and now presto we pull out the result that everyone is more satisfied and agreeable than in the status quo. But do you have any idea what an "everyone is happier" solution might concretely look like? Some people seem to think there is a problem about the absence of giant spanish language signs at the field, so maybe that's part of it...? In any event it really is slightly fucking daffy to characterize as "uncivilized" the getting of a permit to use a soccer field from the freaking parks and recreation department!!, and then attempting to use that field. Uncivilized...are you fucking kidding me?
posted by batfish at 9:32 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


The law matters more than community custom. Community custom is and should be trumped by the law. Ignorance of the law is sadly no excuse; if the law of the land says that a group who paid money for the field gets to use it, then it is theirs. Following the law is more important than getting to play a game.

But laws ought to be just; and this one clearly isn't. $27 is a lot of money - particularly for a field. It should not cost that much money for people to use public property, and doing so should not require an "app." It should be possible for everyone in the neighborhood to reserve the space with equal ease, and in this case it pretty plainly is not possible. Moreover, any parks and recreation department should foresee this sort of obvious dispute and prepare for it: if someone reserves a field, it should be clearly posted, and the field might even be blocked off a few hours in advance. This just makes sense in an urban environment where different groups of people are sharing the property hold in common.

In this case, the Dropbox guys should win, and should have been allowed to take the field. But the law itself is fundamentally flawed and should be changed.
posted by koeselitz at 9:40 PM on October 12, 2014 [5 favorites]


It should not cost that much money for people to use public property, and doing so should not require an "app."

Reserving the field doesn't require the use of any apps. The app was just SF Pickup Soccer, which lost its permit for the field two years ago.
posted by asterix at 9:44 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


You show up, the situation is not what you expect, you are forced to interact and share public space with someone totally outside of your social circle or class, and you both come out better for the interaction. Maybe you even pick up a clue or two about the urban glue that keeps the city running, like the informal street rules that have run public soccer fields. This is what makes city life so amazing.

This is right on, and, in fact, in an environment not so exhaustively media-tized, this is probably just such an interaction...
posted by batfish at 9:49 PM on October 12, 2014


I'm really torn about this because I totally understand rule of law and providing equal access for all comers.

There is an irrational part of me that sees how municipal laws are crafted to disenfranchise the already disenfranchised. The US has a long history of depriving people of the use of land by dint of writing laws. To my mind, this is the real ideological travesty, the one enshrined in the foundational concept of Manifest Destiny.

However, as a number of people pointed out, the reservation system is available only Tuesdays and Thursdays, which on the face of it seems reasonable.

I think the failure of this confrontation lies with the administrators in charge of this space. If the park is going to be reserved, then an hour or so before the reservation starts, users of the field should be notified and asked to leave in an orderly fashion.

People with reservations should not have to interrupt an existing game and my sense is that had the neighborhood children been aware of the upcoming reservation rather than being told to scram with the authority of a printout, they would have relinquished the field.

I hope this social media flareup will encourage SF Parks and Recreation to devote additional resources to help everyone understand the rules and/or fashion new ones with input from all interested community members.
posted by mistersquid at 9:54 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


If the park is going to be reserved, then an hour or so before the reservation starts, users of the field should be notified and asked to leave in an orderly fashion.

This seems like a lot of work and expense. From everything I've heard, the users of the field are experts at conducting themselves in the park, with decades if not centuries of hard-earned experience in navigating tricky social situations. Surely these master negotiators can figure out that the field may be reserved 2 days a week, and that if you're playing on one of these days it's possible that someone with a permit may show up and kick you off? Do you really need to get "officially" kicked off a full *hour* before the reservation starts?
posted by leopard at 10:00 PM on October 12, 2014


Well, judging from the situation, the answer to your question is "yes."
posted by elwoodwiles at 10:03 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


From everything I've heard, the users of the field are experts at conducting themselves in the park, with decades if not centuries of hard-earned experience in navigating tricky social situations.

This. The dual aspect theory of the pickup game seems to be: (1) repository of organically wise and sophisticated folkways alone capable of harmoniously integrating contingencies of use as they come up, (2) guileless community of innocents hopelessly overmatched by sneaky imperialist permit-getters. The avatar analogy is spot on. It's so patronizing, it's sickening.
posted by batfish at 10:17 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


What I find sickening is people who see a real life confrontation that is the partial result of poorly-communicated information construe suggestions about improving the system as unnecessary and too expensive and then mockingly characterize a group of working class children as bearers of unassailable folk wisdom.

Rules have to be well-communicated to mean anything and enforcement would have helped this situation.

Your most recent contributions to this discussion, leopard and batfish, are shameful.
posted by mistersquid at 10:25 PM on October 12, 2014 [8 favorites]


leopard: "This seems like a lot of work and expense... Do you really need to get 'officially' kicked off a full *hour* before the reservation starts?"

The current expense is $27. If you pay me $27 per hour, I will kick people off of fields all day. I've argued above that there should be no expense, but it's not that hard to have a more extensive advance notice system in place.

The current system clearly isn't working - so either we implement something more workable or we can be unsurprised when nothing changes.
posted by koeselitz at 10:42 PM on October 12, 2014


If you run around the city in a group of people all wearing your corporate shirts; you are representing the company.

While I'm divided about this use of resources (and the city employee certainly knows how the resource is a scarce one), it's clear to me that none of these DropBox employees were thinking clearly about their brand they were tarnishing with this confrontation. Both the corporate apology and the employee apology feel like they were scripted by a junior person at PR firm - it's like weren't even trying at sincerity. And what I assume was a forced apology that the employee issued outed his identity to anyone that wanted to harass him regarding his behavior.

While the permit system and the apparent city rules may have made the DropBox employees technically 'in the right', it will be very difficult to change the impression (among a lot of people) that DropBox is kicking out local kids from their park for a corporate morale building exercise.

In summary, my advise to corporations is quit giving your employees all this branded gear unless you want every stupid thing they do to reflect on you as an organization. And for goodness sake, don't ever encourage them to go out in a big group with your corporate gear on, unless it's your PR team going on an outing.
posted by el io at 11:04 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Rules have to be well-communicated to mean anything and enforcement would have helped this situation.

Before calling my comments here "shameful," you may want to bother to read the comments I'm responding to. You know, the ones extolling the virtues of unwritten rules whose authority is enforced by appeals to tradition. Do those rules "mean" anything to you, or is your perspective on rules actually determined by the "sort" of people who are making them?

As a matter of park etiquette this isn't really that complicated. Someone didn't know about the permit system, oh look here's a permit, there's the sign, OK that sucks I guess we'll go somewhere else or come back in an hour.

But of course this isn't actually about park etiquette. If the Dropbox guys had a recurring soccer game on some field during "all play" hours, and some working-class kids came along and intruded and were given the "scram, this is the way it is because we've been doing this for a while, I don't care what the sign says" treatment, no one would be here extolling the virtues of tradition and how dare these entitled newcomer kids come in like they own the place and if the kids wanted to play the city would need to actually send someone to enforce these horribly unclear rules.

That's because it's not really about the rules. It's about the fact that some people are prospering greatly even as most of us are enduring very challenging economic conditions, and there's a lot of resentment. Everything else is just bullshit.
posted by leopard at 11:14 PM on October 12, 2014 [9 favorites]


one_bean, I guess I appreciate your spirit of can't-we-all-get-along-ism, but that is really a cartoon of over-theorizing to avoid breaking progressive do-gooder script. The system in place already maximally allocates the field to the "community" pickup game. Like, 2 evenings a week the site is reservable, which is to say 5 days+ it's controlled by whoever controls that pickup game. You seem to imagine the bureaucratic therapy process you endorse as a kind of magic, like: here's a hat into which we shall put many meetings, and now presto we pull out the result that everyone is more satisfied and agreeable than in the status quo. But do you have any idea what an "everyone is happier" solution might concretely look like? Some people seem to think there is a problem about the absence of giant spanish language signs at the field, so maybe that's part of it...? In any event it really is slightly fucking daffy to characterize as "uncivilized" the getting of a permit to use a soccer field from the freaking parks and recreation department!!, and then attempting to use that field. Uncivilized...are you fucking kidding me?

Yeah, if everyone who lives in the neighborhood and uses the field had agreed on the regulations for assigning reserved time, this group wouldn't have been surprised/pissed to find out they had to stop playing mid game. They might have even allowed for more reservable time each week, I don't know. Or the reservation system could allow for one final goal before the next group takes over or something. I've never used the field, so there is no way for me to come up with a reasonable plan, or even say that the one that exists is unreasonable. That's the whole point. It's not theorizing. The available evidence on community management of shared resources is overwhelming. When the people with an interest actually participate in the rule making process, the outcomes are fairer and, more importantly, sustainable. Getting the permit wasn't uncivilized, the way they acted when they got there was.
posted by one_bean at 11:50 PM on October 12, 2014


and then mockingly characterize a group of working class children as bearers of unassailable folk wisdom.

I think you may be missing the point. At any rate, I don't think the incident demands a rethinking of how parks permits are administered. There's not a crisis of parks permits. Just some kids acting like punks, as kids will do. And I've been there too, so I don't even blame them particularly. Rather, it's problematic how ideologically interested bystanders stage their favorite fables on top of incidents like this, or, that's to say, on top of the cosmetics of incidents like this. But the incident itself really means far less than all that. In your previous comment, you initially reflected that a major guiding impulse in thinking about the situation was your revulsion for the doctrine and legacy of manifest destiny. I think that is the kind of thing that people need to be climbing way the fuck down from before they do anything else.

one_bean: Yeah, if everyone who lives in the neighborhood and uses the field had agreed on the regulations for assigning reserved time, this group wouldn't have been surprised/pissed to find out they had to stop playing mid game.

This is almost the tautology that if all interested parties had a prior agreement then they wouldn't have a disagreement now. And suppose there's a way in which the field has already been captured by a subset of possible users to the exclusion of other possible users. You need to refine the bureaucratic therapy process to pick up everyone who might want to use the resource but has been discouraged, all legitimate potentially concerned parties etc. And, y'know, I guess in principle that is sort of an ideal way to do it. But it's such a very very long way to go to avoid the conclusion that it's already a basically adequate and transparent system and the bratty kids were acting like jerks about an hour of use.
posted by batfish at 12:52 AM on October 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


I think it's time to corner the market on Soccer-Field Permit Futures. *Buys up every slot from now till 2050; starts selling Soccer-Field Permit Default Swaps*
posted by vicx at 1:42 AM on October 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


Oh come on. I grew up in New York, we didn't have dick-measuring contests about who *really* owned the public space. There wasn't some bullshit pecking order where you had to have paid your dues and lived there for 20 years to have a say in something. We were all fucking New Yorkers.

But I guess that's because I grew up mostly with immigrants and so I find this "outsiders are inauthentic" nonsense actually a bit offensive.


But I wonder how it would go down there if one group (of any ethnicity, but more money) insisted the others leave so that they can play privately because they paid to use the public court? Maybe it does work that way? I have no idea.

Anyway, the NYC basketball comparison is also used by an opponent of the privatization / monetization of SF public spaces, in this article from a couple of years ago:
When Elias first came to San Francisco, he was amazed at the quality of the sport. “I was like, ‘Wow!’ This is like New York street basketball,” he recalls.

Back then at Mission Playground, the soccer area was a field in name only. The ground was asphalt. If a player fell, he would hurt himself badly. Elias says people came out anyway, in part because there wasn’t an abundance of green soccer fields in San Francisco, and in part because Mission Playground is where the best players were.

When the park reopened some three months ago, Elias says there was more interest in it because “They made it beautiful.” And that’s when people began to exercise their right to rent out the soccer field on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.

...

On Tuesdays, when SF Pickup Soccer rents the space and charges people to join teams, Elias says his friends typically do what he did: leave. They opt to go to Jose Coronado Playground, at 21st and Folsom, which Elias describes as “malísima,” or terrible.

Jose Coronado Playground resembles the old, unimproved Mission Playground in some ways. But Elias says his friends have few options now except to move their game there. “These guys can’t afford to pay to play soccer,” he says.
This article from 2011 in SFBG discusses the issue in an article entitled Parks Inc.:
an update of the Recreation and Open Space Element (ROSE) of the General Plan seeks to make [revenue-generating initiatives] official city policy...

"The city should seek out new opportunities, including corporate sponsorships where appropriate, and where such sponsorship is in keeping with the mission of the open space itself," the document says.

Yet that approach is anathema to how many San Franciscans see their parks and open spaces — as vital public assets that should be maintained with general tax revenue rather than being dependent on volunteers and wealthy donors, subject to entry fees, or leased to private organizations.
So this has been an item of contention for a while now, as has been the longstanding battle over the drive to install artificial turf and lighting in public parks throughout the city (see news about the upcoming vote on Prop H and Prop I).

I'm trying to figure out the influence of the City Fields Foundation, the private organization headed by Gap Inc. founders' sons (Bill , Bob, and John Fisher) that is partially (or mostly?) financing the improvements, and if the "pay to play" thing is their initiative, and also if they are making money via investments, etc. in the construction of the synthetic turf etc. upgrades (or downgrades, depending on your point of view).

It seems like this Dropbox dudes vs Neighborhood guys is a microdrama playing out against the backdrop of a much bigger story, and I'm curious to hear more about all this from our SF members.
posted by taz at 3:35 AM on October 13, 2014 [4 favorites]



Dude. That's in San Jose. It's 55 miles from Dropbox's offices and would take hours in weekday traffic. That's not an option for anyone working in SF.


I'm certain there are closer venues than the one I randomly picked off of a 1 second Google, should distance be a concern.
posted by mikelieman at 3:48 AM on October 13, 2014


I had some words i started to write about how this was like, the platonic ideal of some kind of stupid google bus touchstone thing to argue over and how it was totally going to get blown out of proportion. Affluent white guys kicking out brown kids! tech companies in the bay! You literally could not engineer better outrage fodder.

But, in watching the video, the instant the guy said "who gives a shit about the neighborhood" i instantly lost 100% of any sympathy i could have had for him, or anyone who showed up with him who didn't make a point of telling him to shut up and apologizing for their idiot friend.

I think a lot of people are defending them simply because they see some asymmetrical outpouring of hatred, and think they're being called douches out of some sort of laziness for a phrase to grab for. But i mean, that sort of statement, i don't even really know if i could come up with a better example of douchiness.
posted by emptythought at 4:07 AM on October 13, 2014 [3 favorites]


emptythought, you're taking one line out of several minutes of conversation, said by one person out of many, which was basically ignored by everyone else on both sides of the conversation. You're then misquoting it, and you're taking it out of context, and you're taking the worst possible out-of-context interpretation of its misquote. The result is that you're using that to condone the ridiculous level of animosity heaped that has been heaped upon a bunch of people in this thread.
posted by Flunkie at 4:48 AM on October 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


On the contrary, my dear Flunkie. Heaped animosity is the only way out of the neo-liberal trap. We must not only condone animosity; we must heap it higher. We must heap our animosity skyward to Victory.
posted by vicx at 5:44 AM on October 13, 2014 [4 favorites]


As a matter of park etiquette this isn't really that complicated. Someone didn't know about the permit system, oh look here's a permit, there's the sign, OK that sucks I guess we'll go somewhere else or come back in an hour.
...
That's because it's not really about the rules. It's about the fact that some people are prospering greatly even as most of us are enduring very challenging economic conditions, and there's a lot of resentment. Everything else is just bullshit.


No dude. If you're from NYC, as you say, and if you've spent any time at all on a public basketball court, as you also suggest you have, you should know damn well that that is most definitely not how park etiquette works in practice.

There may be some people "projecting" issues on top of this incident, but others (including the TFA) have made the very valid point that the pick-up system is ubiquitous on public courts/fields because it effectively and efficiently manages the use and time spent of the court/field in the most fair and inclusive way possible. Those rules aren't arbitrary and they are given preference not because the people informally enforcing them have brown skin, but because they are fair.

Watch the video again -- one of the first things the "chief negotiator" of the neighborhood says is that the tech guys are more welcome to play within the that pickup system. It is the tech guys who want exclusive access, who are trying to kick people off the field. And it is their immediate reaction and dismissal of the pick-up system rules ("who cares about the neighborhood") that is drawing ire.

Is it really that hard for you to empathize with people who get angry at other people trying to circumvent the system? Do you not get mad at people who cut in line?

And there is no xenophobia to this. The pickup system is ubiquitous, especially in the US, and these American tech guys are no doubt familiar with it. They just attempted to bypass it, in yeah kind of a douche-y way, and were prevented from doing so.
posted by AceRock at 5:45 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


If you're from NYC, as you say, and if you've spent any time at all on a public basketball court, as you also suggest you have, you should know damn well that that is most definitely not how park etiquette works in practice.

WTF are you talking about? In NYC, if an organized league gets a permit to reserve a court, that trumps the usual pickup game rules. There is none of this "pickup rules are the highest law in the land" bullshit.

Is it really that hard for you to empathize with people who get angry at other people trying to circumvent the system? Do you not get mad at people who cut in line?

Yes, I have a lot of empathy for the people who planned an event, made a reservation, paid a reservation fee, showed up and were told that their permit was invalid because they hadn't lived in the neighborhood for long enough. Don't you?

Listen, if you think people who work at tech startups are evil douchebags who deserve to die in a fire, just say so. There's no need to act as if this is just a deep concern with rule-following when the rules are perfectly clear and it was the tech startup guys who were following them. This is getting ridiculous.
posted by leopard at 6:23 AM on October 13, 2014 [8 favorites]


So this has been an item of contention for a while now, as has been the longstanding battle over the drive to install artificial turf and lighting in public parks throughout the city (see news about the upcoming vote on Prop H and Prop I).

Just to note, that link is problematic in at least two different ways:

First, the mention of "toxics-containing artificial turf". There have been concerns about the safety of artificial turf (it's made in part from recycled tires), but from what I've read there's no actual evidence at this point that it's actually dangerous. That link certainly doesn't provide any.

Second, the references to "top -notch, natural grass field[s]" are, well, bullshit. Yeah, as the link says professional players prefer real grass; it also requires massive amounts of maintenance, at levels that the city will never be able to provide. Not to mention that doing it right requires rotating fields out of use regularly to let them recover, meaning that the capacity is lower than it would be with artificial turf.
posted by asterix at 7:12 AM on October 13, 2014


Sure, it's disrespectful to just randomly show up at some neighborhood park and demand that people get out of your way

You know, if this was space they had reserved for, say, a wedding, and some scrappy kids were refusing to get out of the way, I don't think we'd be all on the scrappy kids' side. People only care because of their romantic idea that everyone can play together and it will be great. But it won't be great. The tech guys have no interest in playing with scrappy kids. That is why they went ahead and got a permit for the field.
posted by corb at 7:33 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Mod note: This conversation needs to avoid the "fuck you"/"go to hell" line of argumentation. Thank you.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 8:23 AM on October 13, 2014


But I wonder how it would go down there if one group (of any ethnicity, but more money) insisted the others leave so that they can play privately because they paid to use the public court? Maybe it does work that way? I have no idea.

Here's the permits page for the NYC Parks Department.

It's so funny how we keep re-enacting this weird ancient dispute over whether words or practice governs the world.

It's also funny when somebody gets dragged into court and defends himself to the judge with profound commentary like, "What is the law anyway? From where does it derive its legitimacy? If no one enforces a law, does it truly exist? Is the law really what's written down in these books -- instead, isn't it merely what the executors of the law decide what it is? And if that's the case, then isn't *any* decision you arrive at lawful and just? And if that's true, shouldn't you just decide what I want you to decide?" And then the judge stands up and claps and the entire government dissolves into a philosophical sea and it turns out everything was just a dream.
posted by leopard at 8:25 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


leopard: “Listen, if you think people who work at tech startups are evil douchebags who deserve to die in a fire, just say so. There's no need to act as if this is just a deep concern with rule-following when the rules are perfectly clear and it was the tech startup guys who were following them. This is getting ridiculous.”

As someone who works in tech, yeah, a lot of us are socially maladjusted. That doesn't necessarily make us bad people; it's just the reality of our demographic. Yes, we are the type of people who use an app to reserve a field and really, really don't want any kind of confrontation when we get there, because we will handle it badly.

In this case, yeah, the tech guys handled it pretty poorly. Isn't that obvious? They are in the right in this case, but they still handled it poorly.

“ And then the judge stands up and claps and the entire government dissolves into a philosophical sea and it turns out everything was just a dream.”

Easy now. You're reducing a complicated conflict to a flat dispute between law and anarchy. That's not what this is. I agree with you that people are wrong when they say that custom is more important than law, but in this case the law is clearly unjust, and even though it's important to keep following the law until it can be fixed, there is an urgent need to fix it. That's more complicated than the nightmare scenario you're painting where everyone seems to be lawless. taz posted some great links above about this being a long-brewing conflict. We have to help the law here by fixing it and making it more just.
posted by koeselitz at 8:29 AM on October 13, 2014


in this case the law is clearly unjust

Look at the NYC permits page in my last comment. This is truly unjust? Or is this the way things work in a city with millions of people and limited park space?

The city has a system that makes it possible to make reservations and also ensures that there are times when reservations cannot be made and the park is open to everyone. Why on earth is this unjust?
posted by leopard at 8:34 AM on October 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


leopard: “Why on earth is this unjust?”

Even if nothing else, it is unjust because it leaves people who paid to use a facility to fend for themselves, without any apparent notice to the people on the field and without any support as far as making the changeover smooth.
posted by koeselitz at 8:46 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


(I mean, I have already read through the NYC permits that you linked, and they seem far superior. They're required to be posted for all to see, for example, at the facilities in question. They require the fields to be available for reservation by all. I can't find the fee schedule for fields specifically, but I wonder if the fees are more fair. I'm not sure. But it's already clearly superior to the SF system.)
posted by koeselitz at 8:47 AM on October 13, 2014


Glad it got taped to discuss. Cheap technology definitely gave the neighborhood power to share their concerns, where they otherwise may have been easily ignored. If there is a meeting called to discuss how to include everyone in the use of this park, I would suggest recording it as well.
posted by Emor at 8:49 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


I did not want only to call you—leopard and batfish—out. Just the part of your comments I thought were edging on dissing the children in the video. Much of what you (and others) have written above is good food for thought.

leopard: That's because it's not really about the rules. It's about the fact that some people are prospering greatly even as most of us are enduring very challenging economic conditions, and there's a lot of resentment. Everything else is just bullshit.

I think this conflict—the conflict of class and race—drives much of the anger expressed in this thread.

For my part (and I think others are trying to do this, too), I am trying to separate out those feelings from the need for a fair and equitable solution to how disparate groups of people with different cultural values can share a limited community resource.

In other words, I believe neighborhood kids can be brought to understand and respect the boundaries of a reservation system so wealthy technology workers can on occasion use the space in ways they prefer.

I am not so cynical that I would scoff at the idea of devoting additional and thoughtfully applied resources to helping achieve this goal.

As for the reduction of this conflict to plebes vs. aristocrats and calling all else "bullshit", I believe such calls invite us to nurse our prejudices and stoke our anger rather than encouraging us to figure out how these conflicting cultures can peaceably share this space.

batfish: You need to refine the bureaucratic therapy process to pick up everyone who might want to use the resource but has been discouraged, all legitimate potentially concerned parties etc. And, y'know, I guess in principle that is sort of an ideal way to do it. But it's such a very very long way to go to avoid the conclusion that it's already a basically adequate and transparent system and the bratty kids were acting like jerks about an hour of use.

I don't judge this as a confrontation between "bratty kids" and "douchebros"* and I think your remarks, batfish, before the last sentence l quoted, are right on.

It's discouraging to see a system designed for use by different groups of people result in a civic confrontation that gets virally communicated on social networks and, it's understandable when people retreat into epithets that express and defend class entrenchment (not specifically, you, batfish. Many of us had done so, above).


But that's not the way forward. The way forward is for SF's administrators to figure out what went wrong and to put procedures in place to reduce the likelihood of such confrontations happening in the future.

* I loathe the use of the string "douche" as a way to imply something is not worth regarding fairly, as a shorthand for "repulsive", "irredeemable", "distasteful", "narcissistic", etc. For starters, it's rooted in misogyny. It will not be soon enough if everyone stopped using "douche" as an easy diss.
posted by mistersquid at 8:57 AM on October 13, 2014


koeselitz, NYC fees can be found here. It costs $16/hour for a soccer field.

But it didn't seem like the kids in SF were complaining that the $27 was too expensive. Rather, they were questioning the very legitimacy of a permit system.

The NYC webpage, with its seemingly hundreds of pages of rules and regulations about permits and park use, seems to take said legitimacy for granted.
posted by leopard at 9:10 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


leopard: “The NYC webpage, with its seemingly hundreds of pages of rules and regulations about permits and park use, seems to take said legitimacy for granted.”

Yeah, and it also requires that a simple, clear, understandable version of the rules and reservation system be posted at the park so everyone knows what it is.

A system that simply posted a bunch of confusing rules on a website would not be a workable or just system at all, would it?
posted by koeselitz at 9:29 AM on October 13, 2014


koeselitz, this didn't seem any more baffling to me than a somewhat complicated parking sign, but YMMV.

How long would it take you to figure out that Tuesday was not an open-play day, and that permit holders have priority on the fields at all times?
posted by leopard at 9:38 AM on October 13, 2014 [3 favorites]


This thread is ridiculous even for Metafilter.
posted by josher71 at 9:57 AM on October 13, 2014 [6 favorites]


el io: a thousand favorites. Look, the Dropbox guys were in the right. The permit two nights, open everytime else system seems fair to me. They could probably stand to have a uniformed parks person go around a half-hour before the permit time starts and tell whoever's there they have a half hour left, then stay to ensure an orderly turnover.

I can even sympathize with the Dropbox guys. I moved to Hawaii for six years, and I've got to say there's nothing more frustrating than trying to follow the process in good faith and then finding out that's not how it really works.

The disappointing part is how they let this become a PR danger. How can you be in a tech company in SF and not be aware that there's this conflict already existing and still show up in matching branded gear willing to get into an argument with the locals? Come on now, let's have a little awareness. It's possible just being the visual icon of the invading enemy encouraged that conflict past the normal point.

The goal is to be accepted as individuals who are part of the community, not a group competing with the community for resources. The smart move (in the improvement sense, not that they did anything wrong) would have been to invite the kids to play with them today, or to finish the game in progress, then turn it over. Next time maybe send someone ahead to give fair warning, and not be wearing matching corporate overlord colors.
posted by ctmf at 10:12 AM on October 13, 2014 [4 favorites]


mistersquid,

I appreciate and believe that you want to be very careful. But there actually are bratty kids in the world (no need to scare quote that phrase on the formula of "douche"), and some of them are even working class! I actually think the failure to acknowledge that operating in this situation is itself an indicator of not only class privilege, but a kind of faithlessness in one's advertised values around that. If you relent in the self-instruction that the scrappy neighborhood kids are always already the glorious victims, who knows what you might relent on next?! No, doesn't ring a bell? Well, anyway... On the other hand, there is the naive faith in a perfectible bureaucratic formula that reduces an actually pretty negligible quantity of social friction between people actually dealing with each other in what is, again, already a pretty fair and transparent system to absolutely nothing...which, I don't even know, but it's certainly ironic how very "app like" the approach is...
posted by batfish at 10:23 AM on October 13, 2014


How can you be in a tech company in SF and not be aware that there's this conflict already existing and still show up in matching branded gear willing to get into an argument with the locals?

Perhaps they were unaware of the recent upswing in video camera sales.
posted by malocchio at 11:36 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


there's nothing more frustrating than trying to follow the process in good faith and then finding out that's not how it really works.

Why are we so sure that's not how it *really* works? The rules have been in effect for two years. Are you telling me the Dropbox guys are the first people to apply for a permit in that time period? Or wait, let me guess, organized leagues and summer camps and people organizing special events do apply for permits all the time, but when they show up they are always so impressed by the authenticity of the locals that they forget why they reserved the field in the first place, and gladly forfeit the permit fee in exchange for the delightful experience of playing pickup soccer?

How can you be in a tech company in SF and not be aware that there's this conflict already existing and still show up in matching branded gear willing to get into an argument with the locals?

I love how the goalposts have shifted in this thread from "look at these fucking douchebag dudebros buying up all the parks" to "how fucking stupid do you have to be to (1) wear a Dropbox shirt in public and (2) not immediately back down in a confrontation in which you're in the right?"
posted by leopard at 12:05 PM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Well, personally, I've gone from "you rich assholes can't buy a public park" to "actually, that sounds reasonable that some of the time that area can be shared for something other than a pickup game."

But I've always though that it was "fucking stupid" to represent your company poorly, even if you're technically in the right. And I've always thought that it would be smarter, if not required , community relations-wise to join the community rather than create an us/them situation. So no shifting there.

Is that ok?
posted by ctmf at 12:17 PM on October 13, 2014


Or wait, let me guess, organized leagues and summer camps and people organizing special events do apply for permits all the time, but when they show up they are always so impressed by the authenticity of the locals that they forget why they reserved the field in the first place, and gladly forfeit the permit fee in exchange for the delightful experience of playing pickup soccer?

Ignoring the almost discussion destroying levels of snark here, I live next to a field with a system just like this. I hang out there all the time when the weathers decent.

The groups you mentioned send out a camp counselor or someone who works for the league(usually with a logo'd shirt) or if it's a private event, the parks department will be there. In the situations where it's just a game and they're not, the counselor/league rep just walks around and goes "hey there's a game at $TIME, you guys still have like an hour though. Just giving you a heads up" and it goes totally smoothly. I've never seen a conflict.

I've also never seen anyone do this whole giant group shows up like the intro to Hey Arnold thing, and I think that comes off as kind of aggressive on some level and might have sparked some of what happened here.
posted by emptythought at 12:20 PM on October 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


It is completely plausible that in 2 years the pitch has been booked only a handful of times, especially if it was only recently renovated, and established leagues and summer camps already have go-to parks that they use (not to mention that a single pitch doesn't make a whole lot of sense for something like a summer camp or a tournament).

And yeah, I don't get the snark either. Like, what is your alternate theory of why the local kids are indignant or upset if you don't believe that they were unaware of the permit system?
posted by AceRock at 12:23 PM on October 13, 2014


leopard: that's a bid disingenuous. I had a single comment in the thread talking about the optics.

I think the moment you start giving thousands of employees corporate branded gear its inevitable that some of them will do things in their off-hours that don't represent the company well.

Pretty much the only time a large group of people should be sporting their corporate gear outside of work is if they are doing volunteer work ("oh, hey, look at those dropbox people building houses for Habitat for Humanity").
posted by el io at 12:27 PM on October 13, 2014


Well, personally, I've gone from "you rich assholes can't buy a public park" to "actually, that sounds reasonable that some of the time that area can be shared for something other than a pickup game."

But I've always though that it was "fucking stupid" to represent your company poorly, even if you're technically in the right.


So can we all agree that it's corporations who are the real victims here?
posted by The Tensor at 12:46 PM on October 13, 2014


Like, what is your alternate theory of why the local kids are indignant or upset if you don't believe that they were unaware of the permit system?

Of course it's perfectly plausible for people playing there to be unaware of the permit system. People presumably don't play there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

So these kids were enjoying their game and and then some guys in Dropbox shirts said they had to get off the field because the field was reserved. Which sucks, but rules are rules, and hey it's just an hour...

But oh wait, here's an asshole with the irrelevant "how long have you lived here?" and "I've lived here for 20 years!" bullshit. "Yeah the sign clearly says that permit holders have priority, and you pretty clearly have a permit, but who put the Parks Department in charge of the parks? Look, this is *my* park, and we play by *my* rules here. I'm authentic!"

And then let's bring on the ridiculous brigade of internet commenters with the "no that guy isn't an asshole, he's the real deal, he has the perfect time-tested system for resolving all park disputes, *he* gets to decide how the park is used, what a fascinating conflict between law and tradition, gee how on earth could we possibly resolve this intractable conflict between this guy's opinion and the permit system, oh Lord please grant us the wisdom to navigate these difficult waters."

Are you one of those dropbox guys?

No, I'm just a dude who's addicted to this thread for "someone on the internet is wrong" reasons. This whole thing is laughable.
posted by leopard at 12:49 PM on October 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


Leopard, what's funny is that the conflict was not intractable at all, and while you think the clear solution is to just follow the city's rules on the sign, the way the groups involved actually handled it appears to have been to follow the implicit, informal rules that normally govern the pitch and play pickup soccer.
posted by AceRock at 1:00 PM on October 13, 2014


How can you be in a tech company in SF and not be aware that there's this conflict already existing and still show up in matching branded gear willing to get into an argument with the locals?

To be sure, there's that whole, "Are you filming this? Why?" exchange from a DBer, which is pretty great.
posted by rhizome at 1:24 PM on October 13, 2014


the way the groups involved actually handled it...

Unless I missed a follow-up article (which is possible) I don't think anything has really been "handled." This specific incident ended, but what has been resolved? The city's permitting procedure remains in place, but with no indication that people will abide. This same conflict can arise every week. And PS, did the Dropbox folks get their $27 refunded? We can joke about whether a bunch of Bay Area techies can spare $27...but when we're finished joking, I assume we can agree it's not cool for city government to be collecting fees for what are in effect fake licenses.

Only the city can resolve this. Apparently there's a protest planned at City Hall on Thursday morning.
posted by cribcage at 2:59 PM on October 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


Really? Protesting the ability for people to reserve an hour of play time two nights out of the week?
posted by gyc at 3:13 PM on October 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


Protesting the ability for people to reserve an hour of play time two nights out of the week?

No, it looks like protesting the way it's been managed. I will predict that #1 is a negotiating item which has no chance, #2 and #4 will be implemented, and #3 will be agreed as a PR leader and matter of general policy but ultimately will carry no weight.
posted by rhizome at 3:32 PM on October 13, 2014


Yea, it's not a protest, it's a rally to protest. But I think those are good bets, rhizome. Mainly, there will be a proliferation of ridiculous, dishonest, and non-constructive review processes and little kings and queens to oversee them.
posted by batfish at 4:13 PM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


"Permits will only be issued during open play hours for special events." - Not to kick the neighborhood kids off the field so that your coworkers can have a private game...
posted by Chuffy at 4:27 PM on October 13, 2014


Open play hours were not in effect.
posted by leopard at 5:38 PM on October 13, 2014


You know what seems like a decent analogy here for what the Dropbox guys did? It's kinda like moving into a new apartment building and throwing a party without inviting the neighbors or doing any of the neighborly courtesies you would expect of a neighbor throwing a party. Maybe you get the landlord's explicit permission in advance, in writing. If someone knocks on your door to ask you to turn your music down or request that people not smoke or whatever, do you show them the letter from the landlord? That's kinda how the Dropbox guys handled it at least initially.
posted by AceRock at 6:58 PM on October 13, 2014


Mainly, there will be a proliferation of ridiculous, dishonest, and non-constructive review processes and little kings and queens to oversee them.

I'm not quite so cynical. I think it's obvious that there needs to be some staffing, at least until policies are well-understood. The review will probably be something like figuring out what parks have had their utilization rules changed similarly and devoting some resources to smoothing those transitions out as well. Park & Rec might be a shitshow at the top, but I think there are people there who want the parks to satisfy everyone (even if parents are taking an outsize role in the Dolores renovations), and that this won't be a perpetual issue.
posted by rhizome at 10:23 PM on October 13, 2014


AceRock: exactly. Then, to continue the analogy, the neighbors show up at your door with cameras rolling, demanding that you stop your party. After making a brief appeal to the permission that you had acquired from controlling authority of the building, you get the hint that they are not going to leave, so acquiesce. You cancel the party and send all your friends home. Then they post the recording of the encounter on ValleyWag.
posted by rustcrumb at 10:28 PM on October 13, 2014 [3 favorites]


> After making a brief appeal to the permission that you had acquired from controlling authority of the building,

And right here, instead of inviting your neighbors in, is where it goes off the rails. Appealing to authority rather then creating consensus.
posted by mikelieman at 3:37 AM on October 14, 2014


I'd previously only seen "don't tread on me" arguments in the context of guns, civil rights, central banking, labor and environmental regulations, and nationalized healthcare. This thread has opened my eyes to the awful tyranny of park permit regulations.

Abolish the Parks Department.
posted by leopard at 6:25 AM on October 14, 2014


Mikelieman: I disagree. You show up at my door filming, you've already crossed the line into hostility. It's very reasonable that inclusiveness and sharing are off the table once one side has adopted that stance. Also, remember that the local kids got their way, anyway. And then published their victory on the Internet to ... what? Punish these guys for interrupting their soccer game for 5 minutes and then going away? But somehow between getting up in the newcomers face with cameras, and smearing them on the internet, and demanding, essentially, that you cannot have a party unless you invite me or get MY permission, it's clearly the new guys who sent the whole situation "off the rails"
posted by rustcrumb at 7:32 AM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


So let me get this straight - a city has a rule to allow a common area to be reserved 2 nights for a few hours a week. And the response to it runs the gamut of : misgovernance, incompetence, corporate lackeys to class and racial divide? And the people who tried to follow such rules are self-entitled, ignorant, insensitive douchebros?

Huh...Must have missed the memo.
posted by 7life at 8:22 AM on October 14, 2014 [4 favorites]


They aren't being seen as self-entitled, ignorant and insensitive because they tried "following the rules".

They acted self-entitled ("I have the paper, we're going to start the game now, get off the field, thanks guys"), ignorant ("so share, let us [exclusively] have the field"), and insensitive ("who gives a shit, who cares about the neighborhood") while trying to enforce one set of rules (while breaking another, equally valid, set).
posted by AceRock at 8:34 AM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


Mikelieman: I disagree. You show up at my door filming, you've already crossed the line into hostility.

You throw a party and don't invite your neighbors? Game over, man. Game over. Anything past that, like video, is just details after the fact.
posted by mikelieman at 8:39 AM on October 14, 2014


You throw a party and don't invite your neighbors? Game over, man. Game over.

So you've never attended a single party in your entire life in which there was a single person on the planet who was *not* invited to attend?

Do you know how ridiculous you sound?
posted by leopard at 9:09 AM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


It's perfectly valid to argue that based on the video, you feel the Dropbox guys were acting entitled. To characterize them as self-entitled, however, shows a misunderstanding either of that term or of the scenario under discussion.

As for "dudebros"/"douchebros," that's just a very old and tired resentment rearing its head. Not everybody in the tech world is athletic or objectively handsome; as ever, those who aren't resent those who are. I imagine it must especially sting having them in the tent, so to speak. The term implies they should go back to Wall Street where they belong.
posted by cribcage at 9:18 AM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


I think it's obvious that there needs to be some staffing, at least until policies are well-understood.

If you mean something like park attendants on site to sort of ceremonially validate valid permits for all to see as they're scheduled to become active, I think it's probably too late for that now that this incident has exposed the plutocratic jim crow of park permits to the activist community. More likely, I think, is your suggestion about community review boards. At minimum, getting a permit will become a more arduous process, with probably a fast-track for favored regular applicants.
posted by batfish at 10:33 AM on October 14, 2014


As for "dudebros"/"douchebros," that's just a very old and tired resentment rearing its head. Not everybody in the tech world is athletic or objectively handsome;

Well, obviously. I've been calling them douchebags and douchebros for their sense of entitlement. Those guys aren't handsome or athletic looking; just average white guys. They're mid-thirties, clearly out of shape white collar guys. Clearly not regularly athletic. Obviously couldn't have kept up with the other teams rotating on the field.
posted by discopolo at 11:22 AM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


They're mid-thirties, clearly out of shape white collar guys. Clearly not regularly athletic. Obviously couldn't have kept up with the other teams rotating on the field.

Thank you for illustrating why I hate pickup.
posted by asterix at 12:16 PM on October 14, 2014 [4 favorites]


I mean, if you're not athletic, why should you even be able to play at all?
posted by corb at 12:34 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


27 dollars does nothing to fund the field. What is does is make sure that kids and the poor, to which $27 is a huge sum of money to regularly lay out for what used to be their free game, no longer have equal access. They may even not have easy access to sign up electronically, especially if the slots go very quickly. That favors people who carry around computers all day and can stop in the middle of work to grab slots as soon as they open, rather than being in school. And, of course, the people with this limited access are the same people who have vastly fewer options for recreation.

I'm not going to say that a registration system is *always* the wrong way to go; self-regulation can also result in some groups (women, bad players) getting walled out. But if you are going to set one up, the primary goal should be for the most vulnerable to have priority access, not privatize the formerly public field for the use of the well-off and powerful. Which is what was happening here.
posted by tavella at 1:50 PM on October 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


"The pickup system is ubiquitous, especially in the US, and these American tech guys are no doubt familiar with it. They just attempted to bypass it, in yeah kind of a douche-y way, and were prevented from doing so"

Maybe there's some kind of back story here (I mean, specific to these dudes, not gentrification generally), but judging by the video, they didn't attempt to bypass anything, they acquired a permit in good faith. Just because they seem like total d-bags doesn't mean that they did anything wrong.

Yes, the pickup system is ubiquitous, but so is the permit system that allows people to reserve exclusive use of the field during certain times. It's what organized amateur and youth sports in cities are built around. In my experience, the long-time working class residents are more familiar with how the system works than do the newly-arrived privileged kids.

Is there any major city in the U.S. that hasn't had recreational usage permits since forever, or is Philadelphia once again just an island of civilized behavior in a barbarous nation?
posted by snottydick at 1:56 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


This might be wading back into the weeds, but a comment elsewhere has an interesting angle about this controversy being the result of an invalid permit.
posted by rhizome at 1:58 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


This might just be me, but there seems like a big difference between organized youth/amateur leagues and the kind of private, exclusive, more informal Airbnb vs Dropbox match these guys were trying to play. Is it that there is a sense that youth leagues benefit or are at least part of the community? In a rec league, locals aren't being necessarily excluded like in this private match.
posted by AceRock at 2:18 PM on October 14, 2014



So you've never attended a single party in your entire life in which there was a single person on the planet who was *not* invited to attend?


We're talking about an apartment building and neighbors. I feel like the goalposts are being moved so that the community nature of an apartment relationship is all of a sudden irrelevant.
posted by mikelieman at 2:19 PM on October 14, 2014


I feel like the goalposts are being moved so that the community nature of an apartment relationship is all of a sudden irrelevant.

As someone who has lived in NYC, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I never knew the names of my neighbors in the apartment complex, nor would I want to invite them to a party of mine, nor would I want to be invited to their party. We're not all in it together, we are just all people renting tiny pieces of extremely crowded space and trying to pretend that we're not cramped.
posted by corb at 2:30 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


It's a bit goofy to me that the more inclusive, more welcoming system (pick up soccer) is being turned around. Like oh these poor grown men wouldn't be able to play for very long at all if they had to rotate in like everyone else.

Look at the video, the age range of kids has got to be like anywhere from 12 to 20. You're telling me that a system that lets all of those kids play is nearly as restrictive as a private game in which only employees of billion-dollar startups are allowed to participate?
posted by AceRock at 2:31 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yes, it's true. Only employees of billion dollar startups can afford to pay the princely sum of $27 in order to acquire the palatial privileges that a park permit obtains them.

Keep fighting the good fight, man.
posted by corb at 2:42 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


In a rec league, locals aren't being necessarily excluded like in this private match.

If you read my previous comment, apparently "this private match" requires an entirely different permit than the one they had.

Back to our regularly-scheduled axe-grinding.
posted by rhizome at 2:46 PM on October 14, 2014


That comment doesn't necessarily show that they needed a different permit than the one they had. It shows that the website wasn't showing the Mission Playground as a place where you could get a permit. It doesn't mean they weren't allowed.

What probably took place is:

Dropbox guy wants to play. Where? Hey, maybe the Mission Playground. Check the app/with the Parks Department and see if we can. We can? Awesome!

Everyone else: doesn't bother checking, because why would they?
posted by corb at 2:56 PM on October 14, 2014


That's fair, corb. You can't fault them for planning ahead. But they get to the field, and its FULL of kids already playing, and they try to clear the field waving a piece of paper around? Come on. It's allowed, but it is most certainly not cool.
posted by AceRock at 3:01 PM on October 14, 2014


The whole point of the permit system is that if you get to the park and there are a bunch of people on the field, you can wave a piece of paper around and kick people off.

Next week: a Mexican-American family reserves some park space for a 5-year-old's birthday party, but when they arrive some Airbnb employees are playing frisbee. The Airbnb employees refuse to stop playing, pointing out that they've had a regular pickup game going for years, and ask the kid's Mexican grandparents who drove up yesterday how long they've lived in the neighborhood. Then they generously offer to let the 5-year-olds join them in the frisbee game. They do this while recording the whole incident and then post it on the internet. The usual suspects here shake their heads at the "self-entitled" family "waving a piece of paper around" while unbelievably refusing to offer the Airbnb guys some birthday cake. So not cool.
posted by leopard at 3:16 PM on October 14, 2014 [4 favorites]


Yeah and the point "the usual suspects" here are trying to make is that the permit system was applied thoughtlessly and carelessly by the city and is not any more valid or effective of a system for managing access to the field than the long-existing pick-up system.
posted by AceRock at 3:37 PM on October 14, 2014


If that were indeed the only point being asserted, then I don't think this thread would have passed 30 comments. The trouble is in taking that next step of deciding (as Internet strangers) which of the two apparently valid schemes was "cool" and which was "not cool." And I'd add personally that I think it's tough to persuasively argue that allowable things are "not cool, man" while also disparaging other people as "bros."
posted by cribcage at 3:53 PM on October 14, 2014


Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is that there's two conflicting systems in play.

In one system, the field is totally monopolized by the most skilled players.

In the actual rules of the other system, the field is totally monopolized by the most skilled players, until 6:30pm, at which point occasional users may reserve the field for no more than one hour, no more than four hours per month. And this is somehow deeply unfair, a bureaucratic nightmare imposed by a distant and unfeeling authority with no regard for the beleaguered local players, who only get to use the field free from interference for 18 and a half hours per day.
posted by rustcrumb at 3:57 PM on October 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


Just want to clarify that while I think the pickup system is the better fit for this particular soccer field, I don't think permit systems in general are bad. And I'll concede that both systems are probably equally valid.

What's not cool is how the tech guys handled themselves and the situation. And its disappointing to see folks here call the local Mission kids "bratty" and "confrontational" when if this had been my neighborhood as a teenager, I definitely would not have been as restrained as these kids.
posted by AceRock at 3:58 PM on October 14, 2014


To rustcrumb's point -- typical pickup rules, in practice, usually result in more people getting to use the field. Games are short (a goal or two in soccer, maybe 11 pts in basketball) so more teams shuffle in. And people come and go, get tired, so the teams get mixed up too. It's never really monopolized in practice and if teams are picked, they typically end up being fairly even so that the game is more fun and competitive. And they don't really get the field for 18.5 hours a day... like anything else there are peak hours, etc. So I know you're really just making a sarcastic point, but really, the pickup system works pretty well and it ends up being much more inclusive and fair than you imagine it to be.
posted by AceRock at 4:04 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


I mean, if you're not athletic, why should you even be able to play at all?

I think it would help them to play against better players and learn something, maybe make friends and learn from the better players, instead of sticking to mediocrity.
posted by discopolo at 6:27 PM on October 14, 2014


AceRock's new theory is that while it's fine to make a reservation, you should understand that the reservation is only good if there's not something else going on when you get there... It's like a government minister out of Kafka...

Time to put a fork in this bullshit.
posted by batfish at 6:47 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


And eat it?
posted by AceRock at 6:50 PM on October 14, 2014



I think it would help them to play against better players and learn something, maybe make friends and learn from the better players, instead of sticking to mediocrity.


Playing up is great, within reason. If the other players are too much better, though, you can't actually learn anything other than to get rid of the ball as quickly as possible. But thanks again for your condescension.
posted by asterix at 7:30 PM on October 14, 2014


It shows that the website wasn't showing the Mission Playground as a place where you could get a permit.

It also describes the nature of the $27 permit as being for individuals and for half-pitch only. Exclusive use by defined teams is a different permit, according to the comment.
posted by rhizome at 7:38 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


I seriously doubt that there is an official "Dropbox league" consisting only of teams made up of employees of Dropbox. And if there isn't, then there's no "wrong permit" issue at all. Why wouldn't the Dropbox employee who made the reservation not qualify for an "individual" use permit?

Please also note that if there was an official Dropbox league, then they would presumably have played other matches at other times with some kind of permit.
posted by leopard at 7:48 PM on October 14, 2014


And eat it?

Fine, but if you're going to play at this level, you don't get to call anybody "bros" or "douche-y."

It also describes the nature of the $27 permit as being for individuals and for half-pitch only. Exclusive use by defined teams is a different permit, according to the comment.

Come on. Before, the permit was per se invalid because morality of pickup games in the state of nature....but now it's just the wrong permit for the occasion?
posted by batfish at 8:03 PM on October 14, 2014


OK, actually reading further the supposed story is that this was a Dropbox-Airbnb match, so this may indeed have been a corporate league match. But we don't actually have a reliable source for the permit being $27 either (that may very well have come from someone looking up the cost of the wrong permit). And of course that wasn't what led to the dispute, since the premise of the dispute was that no permits of any kind were valid.
posted by leopard at 8:03 PM on October 14, 2014


City ends reserved soccer at Mission Playground after Dropbox flap
The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department has decided to end reserved adult play at Mission Playground — the site of a video-recorded confrontation between tech workers and locals that went viral — after meeting with a group of neighborhood kids on Wednesday, according to department director Phil Ginsburg.

Ginsburg said park officials met with a combination of kids and youth soccer advocates and came to the conclusion that, in this instance, the need for unstructured play on weekday evenings outweighed the desire to accommodate adults.

“The most compelling suggestions came from the kids who said, ‘This is a safe place we can come and play and we feel like we need more time,’” said Ginsburg. “Our first priority is kids. We are always striving to balance different types of play.”

Youth teams will continue to be able to reserve the field after school until 7 p.m.
posted by Lexica at 11:13 AM on October 16, 2014 [5 favorites]


I'm so glad I don't live in San Francisco. FFS.
posted by corb at 1:13 PM on October 16, 2014


Sounds like the good solution to me, and notably it's the same conclusion that SF Soccer or whatever that private group was that did the first app came to. Youth soccer leagues can have first call on the field, ensuring organized access for kids (which helps relieve the potential issue of discrimination against women or poor players), and the kids can continue their self-organized pick-up access the rest of the time.

Adults in tech firms have a lot of options for recreation. Kids in the Mission have very few, and face much more in the way of threats to their future.
posted by tavella at 3:34 PM on October 16, 2014 [5 favorites]


Some (twitter) reporting from someone at the protest:

"Hugo Vargas from soccer video says that "Conor" from airbnb kicked him in the back while he was retrieving a ball. "

"Lots of parents at Park hearing talk about how important parks are to keep kids safe and out of trouble. No talk about learning to code."

"Someone is waving a copy of Hannah Arendt at the parks commission now."
posted by AceRock at 6:50 PM on October 16, 2014


I guess I'm not surprised at this outcome. Field reservations are ceased, but only for the "wrong" people, and only at that one park.
posted by rustcrumb at 9:24 AM on October 17, 2014


Yes, we all recognize your sullen resentment at allowing children to have priority at a playground. What savagery we have descended to!
posted by tavella at 9:46 AM on October 17, 2014 [2 favorites]


What children?
posted by rustcrumb at 1:46 PM on October 17, 2014


The ones playing in the youth leagues that can still reserve field space.
posted by tavella at 2:03 PM on October 17, 2014


I guess the sarcastic joke at this point would be, wouldn't the young kids have more fun, and get to play more soccer, and learn to be better players, by getting to compete head to head with high school students? But, that's pretty hollow.

I get that the optics of this have been bad for the grownups from the get-go. They blundered or blustered or bullied their way into this situation and came out looking like idiots. Technically they were in the right, but so what? This was not a situation where you can win on a technicality, like a computer program or a courtroom. I hope they have learned that lesson.

It seems reasonable to allot some time on playing fields to private events. Neither total free-for-all usage, nor 100% pay-to-play seems like a good solution. Maybe the balance between those things was set poorly for this location, and so maybe this is an improvement.
posted by rustcrumb at 2:20 PM on October 17, 2014


It seems reasonable to allot some time on playing fields to private events

It absolutely is reasonable. That's why it's still possible to do so at many other fields, a policy and mechanism that has not changed through any of this.
posted by rhizome at 2:39 PM on October 17, 2014


SorryWatch thinks Rec & Parks is to blame for the situation.
posted by Lexica at 4:23 PM on October 17, 2014


I'd certainly be inclined to think so. Setting up a policy without allocating any resources to enforce it (and expecting the people paying to be the enforcers) is poor management at best. The way the policy appears to have been set up, they're just skimming money off of people who don't know any better.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:12 PM on October 18, 2014




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