Order In The Court

The Park walked three postures a public good can take — fenced and gated, worn and organic, natural and unmanaged — and asked, along the way, whether "public good" names anything real at all. Its answer set two conditions a thing has to clear before the label is earned honestly: it has to be optional, nobody compelled to fund it, use it, or defer to it; and it has to cost nothing to the people who have no interest in it. Most of that essay walked open lawn, benches, and a fallen log. This one goes back to the fenced corner of the same park and stops at the one amenity inside it that fails both tests more often than it passes them: the tennis court.

What a tennis court actually is, as land

Start with the plain geometry, because the bias this essay is about to describe is built directly into it. A regulation court, including the run-off space a player needs to actually move, occupies roughly 7,200 square feet — a bit over a sixth of an acre, fenced, single-purpose, and resurfaced with a specialized clay or hard-court composite no other park feature requires. A full basketball court's playing surface is smaller, around 4,700 square feet, and unfenced, but the real gap isn't in the footprint. It's in the throughput. A tennis match seats two to four people and routinely runs an hour or more before the court frees up again. A basketball court absorbs a run of pickup games — five aside, next team already waiting on the sideline — cycling through dozens of players across the same stretch of afternoon a single tennis match spends serving four.

Player As Firm described the professional tour as one of the most individually accountable markets in sport, every cost and every benefit landing on the one name on the scoreboard. The recreational court underneath that tour runs on the opposite logic: a large, dedicated, single-use footprint, built and maintained collectively, serving whoever happens to hold the one reservation for that hour and nobody else.

The bias, named plainly

That land-use pattern doesn't distribute itself evenly, and the data on who actually walks through the gate says so without much ambiguity.

Portland's own parks department, reviewing its outdoor tennis facilities, found USTA-affiliated players skewing white, concentrated in the city's wealthier northwest and southwest neighborhoods, and sitting at or above the city's median income — a demographic profile that tracks the sport's country-club lineage more than it tracks the city itself. New York City runs its public courts on a seasonal permit: a hundred dollars a year for an adult between eighteen and sixty-one, twenty for a senior — a real, upfront paywall standing between a "public" court and the public, filtering not by need or by turn but by whoever can and will pay the fee before the season starts. None of that is unique to New York. A growing number of American cities now run reservation systems charging five to fifteen dollars an hour, a structure that, whatever its intent, reproduces a club's own entry logic with a municipal seal stamped over it.

Then there's the other half of The Park's test — the cost to people with no interest in the thing at all.

A single court's resurfacing runs on the order of fifteen thousand dollars, and a court whose maintenance gets deferred can turn that fifteen thousand into a seventy-five-thousand-dollar rebuild. That money comes out of general park budgets in the overwhelming majority of cities, the same pool that pays for the open lawn and the play structure everyone actually uses — which means a resident who has never picked up a racket, and never will, is routinely subsidizing a fenced, fifteen-thousand-dollar surface built for a demographic skew Portland's own data already described.

A Meadow of Sacred Cows named this shape once already, at a much larger scale: a real, continuous cost paid by a diffuse group that never voted on the line item, producing a concentrated benefit captured by whoever happens to already be positioned to use it. A municipal tennis court is that mechanism running at the scale of a single city block.

The correction nobody official ordered

Here's the part worth sitting with before proposing anything, because it's already happening, and nobody with the authority to plan it planned it. A regulation tennis court can be converted into four regulation pickleball courts on the identical footprint — the same fence line, the same fifteen-thousand-dollar resurfacing job, split into quarters — and 2026 has seen exactly that conversion accelerate across American parks departments faster than almost any other single facility change in recent memory, driven overwhelmingly by demand outpacing supply rather than by any city council's land-use study. The throughput math flips immediately: four courts instead of one means four times the simultaneous players, and facility operators report three-to-four-hundred percent increases in court-fee revenue on the same converted square footage. Nobody voted on this as public-good doctrine. Cities dully noticed foot traffic, permit requests, and empty courts sitting next to overbooked ones, and quietly were forced to do the arithmetic themselves.

That's The Park's worn posture arriving at a fenced amenity from the outside rather than growing up through it — the market-adjacent, undirected correction a park's own foot traffic can force onto a facility nobody centrally planned to fix. It's also the clearest evidence available that the original allocation was never load-bearing on the merits. A single-use court serving four people an hour wasn't a hard technical requirement of the land. It was a default nobody had gotten around to questioning until enough people simply stopped using it and started asking for something else.

What would actually earn a subsidy, if anything does

It would be naive to stop the argument at "price it correctly and the market sorts it out," as if a Georgist correction were self-executing the moment its logic is stated clearly enough.

Society doesn't adopt the mechanism that's correct on the merits; it adopts the mechanism enough people are willing to fund, and a lot of people who will never touch a racket are nonetheless willing to fund something recreational, on purpose, with their taxes.

That willingness isn't confusion. It's worth asking what it's tracking before dismissing it as the same sacred-cow reflex A Meadow of Sacred Cows already named.

An answer is that some activities really do carry a social value a purely individual accounting misses — not because the individual match matters to anyone but the players, but because a population that moves, competes, and shows up to the same public ground regularly is cheaper to govern and cheaper to insure than one that doesn't: lower chronic-disease burden, more informal supervision of shared space, more of the low-grade familiarity between strangers that keeps a neighborhood legible to itself.

That's a positive externality, and a positive externality is exactly the case classical liberalism has always granted as a legitimate reason for the state to put its hand on the scale, Land as Road's own Georgist logic included.

The mistake isn't believing government has anything worth promoting. It's skipping the test for which activities actually qualify and awarding the subsidy to whichever facility got built first.

The test, once you're looking for it, is the one the throughput numbers already supplied. An activity earns a public hand on the scale to the degree its benefit is broad and diffuse rather than concentrated in whoever reserved the hour — which is precisely why a four-court pickleball conversion clears a bar a single tennis court never did, without either one needing a word about fairness or demographics.

The externality case is a case for subsidizing participation at scale, not for subsidizing whichever sport happened to claim the fenced corner of the park first.

Read that way, the simple libertarian and the naive subsidizer make the identical error from opposite directions: one assumes the correct price always wins on its own, the other assumes any government-run recreation is self-justifying because government is running it. Both skip the only question that actually decides it — how many people's Tuesday afternoon does this fence line improve.

Where we actually play tennis, in a social liberty world

None of this is an argument that tennis should disappear from public land, and it would misread everything this site has argued about markets to conclude that. It's an argument for matching the financing to what The Park's test already demanded and municipal courts have mostly ignored.

The honest version keeps three lanes distinctly separate rather than blurring them into one paid-for-by-everyone default. Private clubs and HOA-financed courts — the model Land as Road already described through Fred Foldvary's actual case studies, Reston's association-run infrastructure, private neighborhoods financing their own collective goods through dues rather than general taxation — remain exactly what they already are: genuinely optional, genuinely costless to the indifferent, and honest about being a club rather than a park wearing a club's access rules under a public name. The complication is worth stating rather than skipping: this lane reproduces the exclusivity Portland's own data already documented, just openly instead of behind a municipal seal, which is a real cost even when the financing is honest.

Public courts that stay public can clear the same test a different way, by actually pricing to it instead of gesturing at it. A reservation fee set to cover the court's full amortized cost — construction, resurfacing, lighting, the whole lifecycle — rather than a token permit charge subsidized underneath by everyone else's park budget, is the Georgist principle Land as Road already applied to roads, run here at recreational scale: whoever captures the use pays what the use actually costs, and the resident who never plays stops involuntarily underwriting the resident who does.

And wherever a fenced, fifteen-thousand-dollar single-purpose surface isn't actually justified by demand, the pickleball conversion already happening across the country is the template worth generalizing rather than treating as a niche trend: multi-use, subdivided, high-throughput surfaces as the default public provision, with a genuinely single-sport, exclusive-use court reserved for the cases — a real club, a real fee structure, a real waiting list proving real demand — where dedicating that much land to that few people is actually what the people paying for it want.

That's the fenced corner of the park, walked one more time, with the gate finally priced honestly instead of merely locked.

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Sources: City of Portland, Outdoor Tennis Courts and Emerging Recreation Sports Demand; NYC Parks, Purchase or Renew a Tennis Permit; TennisPal, Public Tennis Court Fees in the USA (Hidden Costs); Sports Venue Calculator, Tennis Court Resurfacing Explained: Tips, Costs, and Benefits; Hybrid Clay, Pickleball vs Tennis Conversion: Maximizing Court Space; Pacecourt, Tennis Court Size in Square Feet: Dimensions and Layout.