Stephan, I'll try to answer your questions. One, I think that, in effect, a piece of land that was stolen from someone long ago, which is how the state gets most its property — that, or it buys it with stolen money or goods — is effectively unowned if its proper owners can't be found. It is ripe for homesteading, within libertarian homesteading theory. But for the state to try to enforce anyone's preferences there with state violence, fines and imprisonment, is very dangerous.

What do you think of my gun control analogy? A local majority might oppose guns in their own homes, and that is their right, but should libertarians view local gun control ordinances that apply in public parks as not un-libertarian, just because the local majority, the local taxpayers, are setting policy? I see local political rule not as any sort of libertarian good, but simply as a vastly lesser evil than centralized political rule. So while I don't lose sleep over what a city does with its parks, I think that libertarians should generally oppose most majoritarian ordinances in their own local communities—whether they be cigarette smoking bans, concealed carry bans, restrictions on free speech, bans against feeding the homeless or anything else where we could expect people to extend their preferences for how they would govern their own private property to the socialized realms of society, the public streets and parks. If there's a libertarian case against laws that forbid smoking or concealed weapons in public, there's a libertarian case against the homeless-feeding prohibition.Furthermore, the idea that the taxpayers are the true owners, since they were victimized by the state to help pay for the park's maintanence, seems to me highly problematic. The state victimizes all sorts of people far more than it can ever have the ability to compensate. I understand your reimbursement argument. But if the state puts an innocent person in prison, for example, which happens every day, that person might have quite a moral claim against the state officers who did it to him. However, I'm not so sure what say he should have over how policy in the commons should go.

Land is a tricky issue, and I don't say this because I'm a Georgist or anything, but because so much land has been so thoroughly tainted by injustice and state expropriation. Perhaps the first owners of that Las Vegas land that was turned into a park would want homeless people fed there; perhaps not. Perhaps if people there now homesteaded it they would encourage or discourage such charity. But I am extremely wary about inviting the state's agents into a public park to enforce their monopoly on public charity. You favorably mention "normal rules that might prevent practices that attract the homeless and maybe a criminal element." Well, how about practices that attract a definitely criminal element? The cops are the enforcement arm of the criminal gang known as the state, and so I agree with Mr. Lora's sentiments on wanting to keep that clearly criminal element out as much as possible. Perhaps some right-libertarians don't want unproductive members of society, the homeless, in their public parks. Well, I prefer them to the counterproductive members, the agents of the state. Does that make me a left-libertarian? If so, that's fine with me. :)