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Brooklyn Pressed for Better Basketball Courts
A shrinking Parks and Recreation budget makes improving and maintaining New York’s basketball courts a tricky task
The Wall Street Journal's Stu Woo visited all 170-plus Brooklyn basketball courts maintained by New York City’s Parks and Recreation Department and created a comprehensive ranking. Here, he explains his methodology.
By STU WOO
Updated July 21, 2015 8:53 a.m. ET
Why are New York City’s public basketball courts so bad? I kept asking myself that as I spent two weeks in the spring and summer surveying every outdoor Brooklyn court listed on the Parks and Recreation Department website.
I went to 172 courts in all and found only a third of them in good shape. The rest had problems that varied from the annoying, such as bent or missing rims, to the ankle-breaking, such as cracks so wide that weeds actually grew out of them.
My colleague and I did a similar review of Manhattan’s courts in 2013, so the results didn’t surprise me. But they did disappoint current and former parks officials, who tried to explain why I found it tough to find a decent spot to play what’s supposed to be the city’s sport.
In short, it isn’t easy for New York’s Parks and Recreation Department to figure out how to spend a shrinking budget on its many basketball courts—about 1,800 of them, if you count each individual full court and half court across the five boroughs—while still maintaining other services.
In the 1960s, the parks budget was 1.4% of New York City’s total budget, said City Councilman Mark Levine, chairman of the Parks and Recreation Committee. The current year’s budget, about $400 million, is about half a percent of the city budget. And that sum goes to maintain everything in the city’s 1,941 parks: labor, gardening, playground equipment, recreation centers, pools, sports courts, bathrooms, etc.
“We’re underfunding parks relative to New York City’s history and relative to where other big cities are today,” Levine said. “Your survey reveals, in pretty stark ways, the unmet needs of the system.”
Parks and Recreation Department Commissioner Mitchell Silver, whom Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed to the position last year, said his job was to figure out how to best allocate the money he did have and, based on his department’s inspections, the city’s basketball courts got “a passing grade.”
Silver met me for an interview at a Brooklyn basketball court of his choosing, South Pacific Playground in Crown Heights. Parks employees had just refurbished three full courts here using funds from the Community Parks Initiative, a $130 million project that targets about 60 smaller parks in low-income neighborhoods that have gotten little funding over the past two decades.
During his childhood in Prospect Lefferts Garden, Silver played baseball, handball and a little basketball at public playgrounds that had minimal yellow paint and flimsy single-rimmed baskets. At South Pacific Playground, Silver marveled at the double-rimmed hoops and the bright sports-coating paint that covered the entire playing surface. The department figured out recently how to do that paint job using in-house employees for $3,000 per court.
“What makes Brooklyn different is that other boroughs have a lot of large parks. Brooklyn has a lot of small parks,” Silver said. “Open space in Brooklyn is basketball.”
At the same time, Silver said that when he speaks to residents about the parks system, they rarely bring up basketball as a priority. “It doesn’t come up that often unless we’re going to a Community Parks Initiative meeting,” he said. The department asks residents whether they want to keep a local basketball court, and 90% of the time they do, Silver said.
1,800: Number of Parks & Rec basketball courts in NYC
$100: Cost to replace a basketball rim
$550: Cost to replace a basketball backboard and rim
$3,000: Cost of painting a basketball court with sports coating
$150,000: Cost of resurfacing and painting a basketball court
Silver acknowledged that maintaining 1,800 courts isn’t easy. The park system has about 250 supervisors, as well as eight full-time inspectors who formally inspect each park about twice a year. They also get complaints from the 311 phone hotline, which got 150,000 parks-related calls last year (though complaints about off-leash dogs are among the most typical).
A parks employee would investigate a complaint and determine whether it can be quickly fixed using the department’s maintenance budget. Such small-scale projects include replacing a basket ($150), a basket and backboard ($550) and a small crack ($400).
Bigger capital projects, such as resurfacing and repainting a court ($150,000), would have to go through the city’s budget process, which former Parks and Recreation Department Commissioner Adrian Benepe called horrendous.
“There’s a lot of meddling by oversight agencies,” said Benepe, now senior vice president and director of city park development at the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. “Every little capital project has to go through nightmarish bureaucratic red tape.”
Benepe, who served under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said the parks department often had different priorities than city-council members, who each have a $5 million discretionary capital-project budget that they often spend on parks. “The parks department needs a larger discretionary budget,” he said. “Nobody knows better than the parks department what the priorities for investment are.”
‘What makes Brooklyn different is that other boroughs have a lot of large parks. Brooklyn has a lot of small parks. Open space in Brooklyn is basketball.’
—Mitchell Silver
The city also has many partnerships with not-for-profit and volunteer groups that maintain and fund specific parks. These playgrounds, such the one at Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 2, are usually the ones that have New York City basketball luxuries: glass backboards and nets. (Benepe said he never played basketball with nets when he was growing up. “There was a sense growing up in New York City that nets were in the suburbs or for wussies,” he said.)
Silver said that despite concerns over the privatization of some parks, he was happy with the existing ones and was open to more. “We are always considering whether it’s right for the parks,” he said.
During my tour of Brooklyn basketball courts, players or parents would see me taking photos and ask me whether I could help fix their courts. “It’s messed up,” said Bruce Green, who raised five boys in a house behind Eleanor Roosevelt Playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Maybe it was eight years ago they redid the ground and it’s torn back up.”
Green said he has called 311 to get officials to fill in the potholes on the court, and often complains to a supervisor at another, bigger park. But he said that in eight years, his neighborhood park has gotten scant attention. “It can’t be just one person screaming,” he said.
Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com
A shrinking Parks and Recreation budget makes improving and maintaining New York’s basketball courts a tricky task
The Wall Street Journal's Stu Woo visited all 170-plus Brooklyn basketball courts maintained by New York City’s Parks and Recreation Department and created a comprehensive ranking. Here, he explains his methodology.
By STU WOO
Updated July 21, 2015 8:53 a.m. ET
Why are New York City’s public basketball courts so bad? I kept asking myself that as I spent two weeks in the spring and summer surveying every outdoor Brooklyn court listed on the Parks and Recreation Department website.
I went to 172 courts in all and found only a third of them in good shape. The rest had problems that varied from the annoying, such as bent or missing rims, to the ankle-breaking, such as cracks so wide that weeds actually grew out of them.
My colleague and I did a similar review of Manhattan’s courts in 2013, so the results didn’t surprise me. But they did disappoint current and former parks officials, who tried to explain why I found it tough to find a decent spot to play what’s supposed to be the city’s sport.
In short, it isn’t easy for New York’s Parks and Recreation Department to figure out how to spend a shrinking budget on its many basketball courts—about 1,800 of them, if you count each individual full court and half court across the five boroughs—while still maintaining other services.
In the 1960s, the parks budget was 1.4% of New York City’s total budget, said City Councilman Mark Levine, chairman of the Parks and Recreation Committee. The current year’s budget, about $400 million, is about half a percent of the city budget. And that sum goes to maintain everything in the city’s 1,941 parks: labor, gardening, playground equipment, recreation centers, pools, sports courts, bathrooms, etc.
“We’re underfunding parks relative to New York City’s history and relative to where other big cities are today,” Levine said. “Your survey reveals, in pretty stark ways, the unmet needs of the system.”
Parks and Recreation Department Commissioner Mitchell Silver, whom Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed to the position last year, said his job was to figure out how to best allocate the money he did have and, based on his department’s inspections, the city’s basketball courts got “a passing grade.”
Silver met me for an interview at a Brooklyn basketball court of his choosing, South Pacific Playground in Crown Heights. Parks employees had just refurbished three full courts here using funds from the Community Parks Initiative, a $130 million project that targets about 60 smaller parks in low-income neighborhoods that have gotten little funding over the past two decades.
During his childhood in Prospect Lefferts Garden, Silver played baseball, handball and a little basketball at public playgrounds that had minimal yellow paint and flimsy single-rimmed baskets. At South Pacific Playground, Silver marveled at the double-rimmed hoops and the bright sports-coating paint that covered the entire playing surface. The department figured out recently how to do that paint job using in-house employees for $3,000 per court.
“What makes Brooklyn different is that other boroughs have a lot of large parks. Brooklyn has a lot of small parks,” Silver said. “Open space in Brooklyn is basketball.”
At the same time, Silver said that when he speaks to residents about the parks system, they rarely bring up basketball as a priority. “It doesn’t come up that often unless we’re going to a Community Parks Initiative meeting,” he said. The department asks residents whether they want to keep a local basketball court, and 90% of the time they do, Silver said.
1,800: Number of Parks & Rec basketball courts in NYC
$100: Cost to replace a basketball rim
$550: Cost to replace a basketball backboard and rim
$3,000: Cost of painting a basketball court with sports coating
$150,000: Cost of resurfacing and painting a basketball court
Silver acknowledged that maintaining 1,800 courts isn’t easy. The park system has about 250 supervisors, as well as eight full-time inspectors who formally inspect each park about twice a year. They also get complaints from the 311 phone hotline, which got 150,000 parks-related calls last year (though complaints about off-leash dogs are among the most typical).
A parks employee would investigate a complaint and determine whether it can be quickly fixed using the department’s maintenance budget. Such small-scale projects include replacing a basket ($150), a basket and backboard ($550) and a small crack ($400).
Bigger capital projects, such as resurfacing and repainting a court ($150,000), would have to go through the city’s budget process, which former Parks and Recreation Department Commissioner Adrian Benepe called horrendous.
“There’s a lot of meddling by oversight agencies,” said Benepe, now senior vice president and director of city park development at the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. “Every little capital project has to go through nightmarish bureaucratic red tape.”
Benepe, who served under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said the parks department often had different priorities than city-council members, who each have a $5 million discretionary capital-project budget that they often spend on parks. “The parks department needs a larger discretionary budget,” he said. “Nobody knows better than the parks department what the priorities for investment are.”
‘What makes Brooklyn different is that other boroughs have a lot of large parks. Brooklyn has a lot of small parks. Open space in Brooklyn is basketball.’
—Mitchell Silver
The city also has many partnerships with not-for-profit and volunteer groups that maintain and fund specific parks. These playgrounds, such the one at Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 2, are usually the ones that have New York City basketball luxuries: glass backboards and nets. (Benepe said he never played basketball with nets when he was growing up. “There was a sense growing up in New York City that nets were in the suburbs or for wussies,” he said.)
Silver said that despite concerns over the privatization of some parks, he was happy with the existing ones and was open to more. “We are always considering whether it’s right for the parks,” he said.
During my tour of Brooklyn basketball courts, players or parents would see me taking photos and ask me whether I could help fix their courts. “It’s messed up,” said Bruce Green, who raised five boys in a house behind Eleanor Roosevelt Playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Maybe it was eight years ago they redid the ground and it’s torn back up.”
Green said he has called 311 to get officials to fill in the potholes on the court, and often complains to a supervisor at another, bigger park. But he said that in eight years, his neighborhood park has gotten scant attention. “It can’t be just one person screaming,” he said.
Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com
