This dispute is ostensibly about a rights issue. But am I wrong, isn’t this really about preventing homeless and other itinerant people from entering the park? And as a side effect, Palo Alto harasses visible minorities trying to enter the park?

It’s interesting, the main way many parks in San Francisco avoid the former problem is by simply being inhospitable - the tops of hills, slopes, the cold, the lack of facilities. In Pacific Heights and the Presidio the parks are hard to use with dignity because of their geography, climate, etc, not necessarily by design. But it goes a long way obviating the need to deploy the law to keep homeless and crunchy people out.

Compare to the Mission, which is a very habitable, sunny and flat part of town, with most services accessible by short walks, that has many small parks that itinerant people use, sometimes pretty intensively.

If it could, would residents in the Mission restrict its parks? I don’t know if it’s possible to restrict public access to things, have a positive experience of gentrification as a net seller of homes / existing resident, and not harass visible minorities all at the same time.

Palo Alto residents are so confident in their belief they will never someday be harassed, that the demographics of their town will not change. And maybe when it does change there will be both homeless people and a visible minority family, unmolested, in the park.

In this sense the confusion about, who owns the park - it doesn’t really matter. If Palo Alto wants to prevent itinerant people from using the park, and if it doesn’t care that that also means every black and Hispanic person is asked if they are residents and white and Asian people are not, they will get their way. The solution is through hearts and minds - through empathy and selflessness really. If the ACLU could get people to see that anyone’s family member could be homeless, anyone could have mental illness, that those very same East and South Asian immigrants almost certainly had relatives who were beggars, you could maybe move the needle.