The city's "million tree" project is 13 percent ahead of schedule, according to Parks Commissioner Adrien Benepe who declared in an interview at americancity.org that "at last count [in early November we had planted 402,000 in three years against a goal of one million in ten years."

He also said a goal of PlaNYC to have a park or playground within 10 minutes' walk of every New Yorker is also progressing and that "so far we've transformed 165 part-time schoolyards into full-time playgrounds."

"The other big aspect," he continued, "is the creation or enhancement of major regional parks in eight neighborhoods across the city. In some cases they're not parks but facilities: Those include the renovation of the McCarren Park pool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and the new construction of an indoor track and field facility in Staten Island. The other six are more conventional regional park projects, in that they tend to be the development of previously undeveloped parks. In the 40s and 50s the Department obtained large tracts of land that weren't ever given the money necessary to develop. In some cases they naturalized, which was pretty great. PlaNYC gives us the opportunity to take some of them and develop them, in areas including South Brooklyn, Rockaway Park in Far Rockaway, Highland Park in Queens and Fort Washington Park. Most of these parks are in poor and working-class neighborhoods. They were not necessarily underserved in the amount of parkland, but they were in terms of the in the development of recreational facilities. That was also where we focused our tree-planting efforts. We've filled up some of those neighborhoods with street trees: We've maxed out in Far Rockaway and we're busy filling up East Harlem and a few neighborhoods in the South Bronx. We're averaging 18,000 to 20,000 street trees a year."

"Another aspect of plaNYC," he added, "was converting large asphalt yards into synthetic turf fields - in 40s and 50s, in the Moses era, the Department built these multi-purpose play areas which were basically big sheets of asphalt. In these intensively used areas, grass would never last more than a season. So thanks to technology we can now put turf in instead of asphalt - which uses few resources, no chemicals, and all the things that a so-called natural grass lawn requires. So we're converting just through PlaNYC 25 large asphalt yards into synthetic turf fields. If you build it, they will come, and a demonstration of this, which predates PlaNYC, is that up in Harlem, near 125th street there was an old asphalt lot next to a school lot that was never used. It went to synthetic turf and is now being used all the time....It's not cheap; each field costs $1.5 to $2 million dollars. But once they're built the maintenance is very inexpensive."

"The idea that government should do everything on its own with a virtual monopoly on how to care for parks and how to program them," Mr. Benepe declared, "is an antiquated notion. The city was doing everything on its own in the 1970s, and the result was some of the very worst parks in the world. The city's parks descended into an abyss that it looked like we could never recover from. Part of the recovery was spurred by citizens saying to government, 'We've got to help you find a better way to do this.'"