Let’s put aside how eminent domain proceedings ended up provoking a settlement that cost taxpayers more than $90 million for a truck rental lot on a decrepit industrial site. The bottom line is that the system is capricious, promotes extortion and often acts against the public interest. While private developers quietly accrue properties to assemble big projects, keeping their intentions secret and upfront costs down, government must act openly, as it should, the upshot often being that landlords can have City Hall over a barrel.

The rezoning process invariably opens the door to speculators, like the ones now in East New York, where for months the de Blasio administration has been publicly mulling over a plan to encourage subsidized housing. Speculators have been buying properties there, escalating housing prices, creating instability for poor tenants in the neighborhood before a single new subsidized apartment is built — exactly the opposite outcome intended by the prospective rezoning.

The mayor’s latest budget strengthens legal services for endangered residents in districts slated for rezoning and puts aside $1 billion as a kind of rainy-day slush fund for unanticipated costs associated with those rezonings, the example of Bushwick Inlet Park being a prime cautionary tale. Both good moves.

But last week Mayor Bill de Blasio’s parks commissioner, Mitchell J. Silver, told the City Council that there was no money in the budget to acquire CitiStorage for Bushwick Inlet, which, despite its name, lies at the heart of Williamsburg hipsterdom, in the midst of Brooklyn Bowl, the Music Hall, Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg. East River State Park is next door. McCarren Park is a few blocks away: The city has also poured millions into fixing it up.

Spending millions more on a park in this affluent neighborhood is not the mayor’s priority, even though he voted for the rezoning in 2005. The mayor has said he wants to fix a few dozen neglected community parks in underserved areas of New York. At the same time, he wants to cut parks funding drastically from what it was under Michael R. Bloomberg — a big disappointment and a missed opportunity to spread social equity and environmental justice.

Meanwhile, that sympathetic judge, Abraham Gerges, a former city councilman for Williamsburg, no longer sits on the bench.