Public? Free? Pschht, everyone knows that what's outside the fence is free for the taking!
But there were also tons of fruit trees in nature in the city. Went jogging one time at a jogging trail, saw chanterelles in the forest, came back with my t-shirt full of tasty, tasty mushrooms.
If you've grown up with always being able to pick fruits and berries and mushrooms in nature, maps like this are so weird. Why would you need a map? Nature is full of it?
Oh, you're not allowed? Oh, you can't access it? Oh, there aren't any around, really? How sad.
Commercially its a different story. Trees are planted and pruned to maintain easy harvesting. They are sprayed and rodents managed, as well as being overall outproduced by the yield on the farm. Fruit trees are a lot of work. Even literal money growing on trees would be work, against what the saying might imply.
This is a big issue. Every bush and tree I've added to my yard is a learning experience about what "ripe" means and when to harvest. The bright red plums are enticing to the eye but bitter and chalky. Perfect blue blueberries that taste like lemons.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X2...
Food arrives at the grocery store: perfectly checked, standardized, quality controlled, and ready to consume. /s
Only if there is a problem. /s
I think most people around here don't know that they're edible and anyway that fruit is somewhat of a hassle to pick and prepare, but anyway once they're ripe they fall on the sidewalk and on cars, staining everything red, making the sidewalks slippery and leaving seeds behind. And there's no wild life to speak of, maybe some rats but not many, and birds don't seem to eat the fallen fruit. Wasps do, but it's not a positive point.
There's no soil (except a ~1m² square around each tree) because it's just a street in the city so although I don't find them a bother and I can pick a fruit from time to time while walking, I can well understand why people who live in this street would complain about it.
I can't understand what went through the mind of people who chose to plant these trees here. I think it's almost as bad as if those were mulberry trees (relative to staining power).
But it's just a remark on how fruit trees can be annoying to some people, for my part I used to live in another city where I was able to pick blackberries and raspberries on my way to work or to the supermarket, sometimes pears, and it was great. And in autumn I pick chestnuts here. Not too often because of PFAS pollution.
Where we've got it wrong is that only thing we have in common is a shared interest in how the market perceives us, and since markets are batshit crazy, we end up doing crazy things like maintaining a lawn in a drought just for the aesthetics of it. If there were actually something we had in common, like I dunno a lathe or something, there would be something with practical considerations around which to anchor HOA policy.
(bias note: I don't live in an HOA, but my friends seem to hate it an I'm offended by the lack of character/sense in the HOA-governed neighborhoods that surround mine.)
Afaik, most of them are vestigial instruments left over from master planned development financing, that gave the developers X years of voting control in order to recoup some part of their investment.
From what I heard, their level of tyranny would give most dictators a worthy challenge.
In many places, people worry about bugs and rats eating them, and the ones that don't get eaten start to rot and grow moldy. Generally just things people don't like in a dense city.
Any rotting fruit that falls on the ground will attract many animals and bugs. Lots of flies and wasps, as well as bigger animals like rats or raccoons. Depends on the city for the specific animal, but seems like there are plenty of animals in big cities (at least here in the US) - NYC famously has rats, for example.
Finally no fruit ...just pollen everywhere. (Good luck with allergies)
I presume that Americans always take the poo of their beloved pets from the streets. /s
They're supposed to by law (and just good old-fashioned manners), and many do clean up after their pets, but anywhere you go there's always gotta be at least one jerkwad that doesn't care one little bit about anything beyond the tip of their own nose.