Koerth: This land is our land. But it sure feels like their land.

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To enter limbo, first you must go to the south side of Minneapolis’ Cedar Lake. Cross the beach heading east and toward the stand of trees. Then you just keep walking along the lakeshore.

At first, this is going to feel like strolling in a patch of park near some stranger’s backyard. As you go further, it will start to feel like you are just straight up standing in some stranger’s backyard. This is because you are. But you are also in a park. The growing discomfort really comes to a head as you find yourself at the base of a boulder retaining wall. A path rises up through the middle of the stones, passing a finely landscaped patio just waiting for someone to sit and sip an old fashioned as they watch the sunset. And, technically, I suppose, that someone could be me. Or you. Thanks to ongoing construction at the site, the property line is clearly marked. The path, the patio, the cascading layers of smooth rocks stretching down to the lakeshore — it’s all on land that belongs to the city park board. The homeowners are allowed to build there. But you’re also allowed to be there.

This land is their land. This land is our land. It’s a half mile of lakeshore in a city that tends to favor public ownership and access to the waterfront. But, here, nearly a century ago, the Minneapolis Park Board granted encroachment licenses that have allowed a dozen or so private landowners to develop the parkland around the lake as an extension of their backyards. The public owns the land, but over the years — and despite new plans to eventually put its maintenance back in city hands — the public has all but lost the ability to use it.

Today, it’s nearly impossible to even tell there is a public right of way around the southeast side of Cedar Lake. I tried to make the trek in early October, along with Andrew Tilman, an ecologist who has written about the encroachment licenses and their legacy for MinnPost. When we reached the top of the boulder wall, we had to ope our way between some potted trees to enter the next yard. Because it’s mostly unclear where the border between park and yard sits, we tried to keep toward the shoreline, eventually finding ourselves funneled onto the top of a foot-wide wobbly rock wall. On one side of us was a roped-off VIP lounge of perfect lawn. On the other side, there was a drop into the lake.

“When I look at this, I don’t see a park,” Tilman said, teetering on a rectangle of yellow stone. But I got a different perspective from Charlie Zelle. Zelle is the chair of the Metropolitan Council and also a homeowner on Cedar Lake who opened his door to me the same day I tried to walk the shoreline. Looking down at the lake from his house, he told me, “I think of it as parkland.”

These contradictory views of the same piece of land reflect a much larger disagreement over the functions parks should serve. Is a park meant to make a city more beautiful? Should it be a place for reintroducing nature and ecological health? Are parks meant to be usable by everyone? Most of us would probably say the answer is all of the above. But, as with the proverbial good-fast-cheap construction project, all of the above is usually impossible.

Historically, this strip of land was optimized to be pretty. In 1938, when property owners on the lake notified the park board that they’d be taking over development of the shoreline here, beautification was the goal, according to a park board historic timeline. In contrast, when the board voted in 2021 to begin the slow process of revoking those encroachment rights, public access and ecological health were at the forefront of the decision.

But while a formal trail on land and a water-skimming boardwalk were among the initial concepts tossed around for the Cedar Lake shoreline, the final plan approved last summer included neither means of public access. Instead, the plan is now to simply naturalize the shore. In the public comments and the perspectives of homeowners I spoke to, nature and public shoreline access were seen as almost in opposition to one another. The property owners feared a boardwalk or path would damage water quality and habitats, and that construction would create hard infrastructure in a place that should be peaceful and natural.

Setting aside the question of how the board will create a naturalized environment on a shoreline that now includes said grandfathered-in very large boulder retaining wall and formal patio, I was struck by how this nature/access conflict echoed the “tragedy of the commons.” This is the idea that unrestricted access to a resource will inevitably lead to the destruction of the resource. Building on a belief that commonly held grazing lands in ye olde England had been nibbled down to nothing by careless overuse, the tragedy of the commons presented a world where the only ways to protect resources were to have them be absolutely privatized or absolutely under government control.

But “in a literal sense the tragedy of the commons never happened,” said Harvey Jacobs, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shared ownership didn’t lead to overgrazing. Instead, the ecological balance was collectively maintained for hundreds of years until wealthy lords began privatizing and fencing pastures. What’s more, the Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom eventually published evidence that communities have successfully co-managed resources all over the world. The catch? To do it, they all rely on relationships that create clear boundaries and rules — including ways of monitoring the resource and enforcing community norms.

And that last bit is something sorely lacking at Cedar Lake, either in its current reality or future plans. There’s nothing to tell the public the shoreline is ours. There’s little way for us to tell where we are and are not allowed to be. And no one has ever invested much energy in making sure landowners allow for reasonable access. In England, public access to land that was once the commons is still maintained today by “ramblers” who organize and document walks through private pastures. It’s a community-based system of keeping land open to the community. At Cedar Lake, in contrast, we’ve had total privatization. Or, more recently, a power struggle between the park board and private interests — the outcome of which seems unlikely to lead to either a truly naturalized lakeshore or truly public access.

At least, that’s what I found on my visit when Tilman and I couldn’t complete our walk. About halfway through, we ran into a spot where a homeowner had pulled their dock onto the shore, stacking the pieces right in the middle of what would have been our accessway. We could have climbed over the dock. We could have walked around it through the person’s yard. In the end, we turned around and headed back to the beach. But maybe it would have been better to go through. Maybe the only way the public maintains access to public land is by doing just that — accessing it.