The very suggestion — public land parceled off for a price — set off the city's easily ignited outrage. More than 17,000 people signed a Change.org petition to end the reservations. One city supervisor (in the midst of an election fight) declared on Twitter that the city wasn't for sale — or for rent. Deadspin called the story the best quick encapsulation of "how fast San Francisco has become a parceled-out playground for a class of moneyed, efficiency-fetishizing manchildren."

Within 24 hours this week, the parks department had suspended the permits.

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The episode, though, says as much about how we view public parks — and how easily they become platforms for anxieties about inequality — as it does any class warfare waged by park rangers. Parks elsewhere in San Francisco use this same system, without controversy. Cities throughout the country do, too. And they frequently charge administrative fees for those reservations. In New York City, you need a permit to gather more than 20 people in a city park, and it costs $25. A picnic in Chicago for up to 100 people will cost you $140 (plus an application fee and a security deposit).

In a certain light, though, this standard practice suddenly looks more sinister. In San Francisco, a public good requiring a fee — and online application — looks like the latest lever newly arrived tech wealth might pull to displace everyone else. And, this time, from city lawn space, of all places.

Online commenters worried about the slippery slope: Today it's a few "straight up sections of grass," tomorrow it will be all of them. The program conjured deep-seated fears of the privatization of public space, the commodification of everything. And in a city where housing, restaurants and amenities have grown ever more expensive (the newly reopened SFMOMA costs an adult $25!), public parks are what people feel they have left.

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But idealized notions of the public park as an unregulated peoples' space are at odds with the reality of how they're run. Not just in San Francisco, but everywhere.

"Peoples' desire in a park is to do exactly what they want to do, wherever they want to do it, when they want to do it," says Adrian Benepe, a former head of the New York City parks department who now runs the Trust for Public Land's national urban park program. " 'This is my park, I pay my taxes, and you’re supposed to be able to do whatever you want in a park.' "

That conviction, he says, has roots in the 1960s, in places like the Berkeley People's Park. And cities eager to reanimate abandoned public parks that had become dangerous in an era of urban decline encouraged people to come and use them however they pleased.

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"So people got used to the idea that you could do whatever you wanted in a park," he says. "If you wanted to play soccer, you could play soccer. If you wanted to have a barbecue, you could have a barbecue. Except nothing kills grass faster than soccer — except when someone spills a hibachi full of hot coals on the grass."

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This do-whatever-you-want attitude can spoil a park, he says, for the same public it's supposed to serve. Parks are a scarce and fragile resource. And so cities began to do what most do today: They have rules for when you can be there, and what you can do, and how you should play nice with others. They set up the kind of permit systems San Francisco has to manage competing claims to scarce space. They have to balance the demands of people who want an off-leash dog park with the demands of people who don't want off-leash dogs running through their picnics.

And this part the public should support: If you want to lay personal — if temporary — claim to public land, you have to compensate everyone else for it. You have to pay a deposit so public tax dollars aren't left to clean up after you. You have to pay an administrative fee so that we're not funding park staff to make sure you don't trash our shared space. The fact that San Francisco charges corporate parties significantly more than private citizens and nonprofits is in keeping with the view that parks should be especially accessible to the latter groups.

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Without these rules, Benepe argues, we get the tragedy of the commons. Literally.

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On a given Sunday, Dolores Park looks like the site of a festival. Thousands of people in dozens of ways simultaneously use the park, which the city recently renovated for $20.5 million (last year, the parks department adds, it spent $750,000 just to pick up after everyone there). But all of this works because the designated off-leash dog area is separated from where people play soccer games, which is separated from where families picnic. It works because there's a mechanism to clean up the place and money to do so.

There are rules that govern the park, even if it feels like there aren't. That doesn't mean people who love the place are wrong to be vigilant about anything that might threaten the public's access. But a reservation system for a limited portion of land isn't necessarily an attack on working-class picnics.

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"Parks and public spaces are at the epicenter of democracy in many cities, so they become politically and emotionally loaded," Benepe says. It's no coincidence that the Occupy movement began in parks, or that the Million Man March gathered on the Mall in D.C., or that protests of the 1968 Democratic National Convention formed in Chicago's Grant Park. Parks are political, and they give people power. And that in itself is worth defending.