ya know what I find egregious (and unfortunately I contribute to it) is all these yuppie sports leagues that some how got their hands on field permits to all the good fields around NYC at the best times. In turn they charge participants fees to play organized games while forcing the local kids to play on the fringes or not at all. Like I play up in riverbank park and i see all these neighborhood kids forced to play in small sections of the park and people yell when they get onto the pitch and interfere and all i can think is this park should be for the local community, and instead some jerks (like me) are coming in using the park from 6-10pm and these kids never get a chance because some corporation has the rights to the permits in perpetuity it seems.
I live in astoria and the big news is we are redoing the track in our local park and it will have a full soccer field in the middle, which you would think is great*... but in reality it'll mean some organization like zogsports will go get the field permits (if they didn't already) and lock up all the good times and all the local people who's local tax budget went into the renovations won't actually be the ones who benefit directly**
*actually its not a very popular idea. people don't like large swath of space that can only be used by 10-20 people at a time
** you could argue it helps indirectly with more people coming in and buying stuff, so the local business benefit which refills the tax pool
