Why America Needs More City Parks and Open Space

The Benefits of inst exclusively Why the States ask to a greater extent(prenominal) metropolis state of affairs and move everywhere put BY Paul M. Sheerer promulgated by 116 peeled Montgomery pass Fourth Floor San Francisco, CA 94105 (415) 495-4014 www. Tip. Org 02006 the put for customary primer coat Reprint of pose for great deal ashen paper, published In 2003. Table of Contents front pull up stakes Rogers, President, Trust for ecumenic Land 5 Exe film editingive Summary 6 America Needs More urban center set U. S. Cities Are position-Poor Low-Income Neighborhoods Are Desperately bypass of honey oil Space Case postu later(a) bleak set for Los Angles The Public Wants More Parks 8History of Americas urban center Parks Inspiration, Abandonment, revivification The Decline of city Parks A Revival Begins Bud constitute Crises Threaten City Parks 10 Public wellness Benefits of City Parks and Open Space Americas Twin Plagues Physical In action at law and corpulency Access to Parks Increases Frequency of practise Exposure to Nature and unripenedery Makes People Healthier 12 Economic Benefits of Parks 14 Increased billet determine Property Values in Low-Income urban Areas Property Values at the Edges of urban Areas Effects on Commercial Property Values Economic Revitalization Attracting and Retaining Businesses and Residents TourismBenefits environmental Benefits of Parks Pollution Abatement and chilling Controlling Stemw atomic number 18 Runoff 17 social Benefits of Parks Reducing Crime pleasure Opportunities The Importance of Play Creating Stable Neighborhoods with fortified association 18 Conclusion 20 Notes 21 Bibliography 24 3 Forward At the turn of the 20th century, the bulk of Ameri cig atomic number 18ts lived in rural aras and sm whole towns, comparatively close to the get. At the outgrowth of the twenty-first century, 85 desperate deficiency of fall outs to obtain nature and refresh ourselves in the out-of- d oors.The result of America as an urban kingdom was anticipated by Frederick Law restrain and other nineteenth-century super C lotaries, who gave us immature Works Central Park, San Franciscans Golden Gate Park, and akin proud set in cities crossways the state. They were gardeners and designers- nonwithstanding also preachers for the power of position, fired from at heart by the understanding that they were shaping the type of American lives for generations to come. In the open opinion of these cat valium visionaries, position were not amenities. They were necessities, providing re foundation garment, inspiration, and native falling out from the urban center bl atomic number 18 and bustle. And the visionaries were evently bear on that puts be available to all of a urban center residents-especially those who did not rush the resources to escape to the earthside. As tribe raise uped to the suburbs afterward World War II, this vision of viriditys for all faded. Many cities lost the resources to build raw cat valiums. And in the saucily suburbs, the rambling landscapes of curving CUL-De-sacs were broken mostly by boxy shopping centers and coer position lots.The time has come for Americans to rededicate themselves to the vision of commonss for all the nations heap. As the actions lead story preservation assembly creating position in and or so cities, the Trust for Public Land ( reorient) has launched its Parks for People initiative in the belief that all American peasant should revel convenient access to a nearby park or playground. This white paper outlines how desperate the destiny is for urban center lay-especially in inner- metropolis neighborhoods. And it goes on to describe the social, environmental, economic, and health clears put bring to a metropolis and its people. slant hopes this paper ordain generate discussion close the need for parks, prompt natural research on the wellbeings f parks to citi es, and serve as a university extension for government activity leaders and volunteers as they coif the case that parks ar essential to the health and well-being of all Americans. You will invite to a greater extent information about the need for city parks and their benefits in the Parks for People section of Taps weather vane place (www. Tip. Org/poor) where you can also sign-up for Parks for People information and support Taps Parks for People wee-wee. limit is proud to be highlight the need for parks in Americas cities. convey for Joining our military campaign to ensure a park within reach of every American home. Will Rogers President, the Trust for Public Land City parks and absolved quadrangle rectify our physical and psychological health, strengthen our communities, and brand name our cities and neighborhoods more hypnotic places to live and work. But too some Americans atomic number 18 able to enjoy these benefits. 80 component of Americans live in metrop olitan aras, and legion(predicate) another(prenominal) of these areas are loathsomely lacking(p) in park lieu. barely 30 share of Los Angles residents live within paseo withdrawnness mile. Low-income neighborhoods populated by minorities and recent immigrants are especially short of park stead. From an amendfulness standpoint, there is a strong need to redress this imbalance. In Los Angles, white neighborhoods enjoy 31. 8 acres of park dummy for every 1,000 people, compared with 1. 7 acres in African-American neighborhoods and 0. 6 acres in Latino neighborhoods. This inequitable distri barelyion of park quadrangle harms the residents of these communities and make waters tangible costs for the nation as a whole.U. S. Voters ask repeatedly shown their willingness to raise their own taxes to net income for sweet or improved parks. In 2002, 189 conservation patronage measures appeared on ballots in 28 states. Voters approved ternion-quarters of these, generating $ 10 billion in conservation-related musical accompaniment. Many of the nations great city parks were strengthened in the second half(a) of the 19th century. Urban computer programmemeners believed the parks would improve commonplace health, relieve the stresses of urban life, and create a demonstrating public space where well-situated and poor would mix on fit terms.By the mid-20th century, city parks fell into diminish as people fled inner cities for the suburbs. The suburbs fared no better, as people believed that backyards would meet the want for public open space. Over the chivalric couple of decades, interest in city parks has revived. Governments and civic groups around the country film revalidated run-down city parks, built gre asks on rivers, transfigureed decrepit railroad lines to trails, and planted lodge gardens in inert lots.But with the current economic downturn, states and cities facing severe reckon crises are slashing their park spending, threaten ing the health of existing parks, and curtailing the creation of in the raw parks. Strong evidence shows that when people require access to parks, they exercise more. even physical activity as been shown to annex health and reduce the risk of a wide range of diseases, including heart disease, hypertension, colon cancer, and diabetes. Physical activity also relieves symptoms of first and anxiety, improves mood, and enhances psychological well-being.Beyond the benefits of exercise, a growing dead body of research shows that contact with the natural orbit improves physical and psychological health. Despite the grandness of exercise, but 25 per centum of American adults quest after in the recommended levels of physical activity, and 29 percent engage in no leisure-time physical activity. The sedentary lifestyle and flatulent diet of Americans receive produced an epidemic of obesity. The Centers for infirmity Control and Prevention has called for the creation of more parks a nd playyard to benefactor fight this epidemic.Numerous studies have shown that parks and open space exploitation the value of neighboring residential property. suppuration evidence points to a akin benefit on commercial property value. The approachability of park and recreation facilities is an distinguished prize-of-life constituent for corporations choosing where to locate facilities and for well-educated individuals choosing a place to live. City parks such as San Notations Riverview Park often become valuable tourism draws, contributing heavily Green space in urban areas rears substantial environmental benefits.Trees reduce air pollution and water pollution, they help keep cities cooler, and they are a more effective and tiny expensive way to manage stemware runoff than building systems of concrete sewers and drainage ditches. City parks also produce important social and community development benefits. They make inner-city neighborhoods more livable they offer in expert opportunities for at-risk youth, low-income children, and low-income families and they provide places n low-income neighborhoods where people can feel a sense of community.Access to public parks and recreational facilities has been strongly cogitate to reductions in nuisance and in particular to reduced Juvenile delinquency. Community gardens bring residents sense of community ownership and stewardship, provide a focus for neighborhood activities, observe inner-city youth to nature, connect people from diverse cultures, reduce crime by cleaning up vacant lots, and build community leaders. In light of these benefits, the Trust for Public Land calls for a revival of the city parks movement of the late 19th century.We invite all Americans to Join the effort to bring parks, open spaces, and common landgages into the nations neighborhoods where everyone can benefit from them. 7 The residents of many U. S. Cities lack fit access to parks and open space near their homes. In 2000, 80 percent of Americans were living in metropolitan areas, up from 48 percent in 1940. 1 The park space in many of these metropolitan areas is grossly inadequate. In Atlanta, for example, parking lot covers only 3. 8 percent of the city area.Atlanta has no public green space larger than one-third of a settle mile. 2 The city has only 7. state of park space for every 1,000 residents, compared with a 19. 1 acre average for other medium-low population density cities. 3 The story is practically the same in Los Angles, San Jose, modernistic Orleans, and Dallas. heretofore in cities that have substantial park space as a whole, the residents of many neighborhoods lack access to nearby parks. In unseasoned York City, for example, nearly half of the city 59 community board districts have little than 1. 5 acres of commons per 1,000 residents. Low-Income Neighborhoods Are Desperately Short of Park Space Low-income neighborhoods populated by minorities and recent immigrants are especially short f park space. Minorities and the poor have historically been shunted off to live on the ill-timed side of the tracks, in paved-over, industrialized areas with few public amenities. From an equity standpoint, there is a strong need to redress this imbalance. In Los Angles, white neighborhoods (where whites make up 75 percent or more of the residents) ball up 31. 8 acres of park space for every 1,000 people, compared with 1. 7 acres in African-American neighborhoods and 0. Acres in Latino neighborhoods. 5 This inequitable distribution of park space harms the residents of are costs simply are potentially enormous. Lacking places for recreation, minorities and low-income individuals are probatively less likely than whites and high-income individuals to engage in the regular physical activity that is crucial to good health. Among non-Hispanic white adults in the unify States, 34. 9 percent engage in regular leisure-time physical activity, compared with only 25. 4 pe rcent of non- Hispanic obscure adults and 22. 7 percent of Hispanic adults. And adults with incomes under the poverty level are three times as likely as high-income adults to never be physically active. in time where the government or voters have allocated new money for park acquisition, there is significant risk that wealthier and better-organized districts will grab more than their fair share. The Los Angles neighborhood of South Central-with the city second-highest prove- The Trust for Public Land TTY rate, highest share of children, and lowest access to nearby park space-received only about half as much per-child parks patronage as affluent West Los Angles from Proposition K between 1998 and 2000. Case Study New Parks for Los Angles With 28,000 people crammed into its one square(a) mile of low-rise buildings, the city f Manhood in Los Angles County is the most thick populated U. S. City outside the New York City metropolitan area. 10 Its residents-96 percent are Hispanic a nd 37 percent are children-are often packed quintette to a bedroom, with entire families living in garages and beds being used on a time-share basis. The Trust for Public Land (TIP) has been operative in Manhood since 1996 to purchase, assemble, and convert sixer separate former industrial sites into a seven-acre riverside park.The project will trope Manhoods park space. 11 Before TIP began its work, the future park site was diligent by bedraggled arouses and industrial buildings, cover in garbage, graffiti, rusted metal, and barrels of industrial waste. Until the late asses, the helpings contained a glue factory, a transfer facility for solvents, and a motortruck service facility one parcel was designated an Environmental Protection Agency superfine site. 12 TIP is preparing to acquire the last-place parcel and has developed preliminary designs for the site.The undefiled park will invite Manhoods residents to store up at its picnic benches, stroll its walking trails, re lax on its lawns, and play with their children in its tot lot. The Manhood project is a precursor of Taps Parks for People-Los Angles program, an ambitious new effort to create parks where they are most desperately needed. The case for more parks in Los Angles is among the most oblige of any American city today. Only 30 percent of its residents live within a quarter mile of a park, compared with between 80 percent and 90 percent in capital of Massachusetts and New York, respectively. 3 If these residents are Latino, African American, or Asian Pacific, they have even less access to green space. TIP has set a goal of creating 25 new open space projects in Los Angles over the would be invested in undeserved nonage communities. To accomplish this goal, TIP will help these communities through the gauntlets of public and cliquish fundraising, certain estate transactions, strategic planning, and stewardship issues. Los Angles is also the site of Taps first application of Geographical s tudy Systems (GIS) to assess the need for parks.TIP launched the GIS program in late 2001 in Los 9 O The Trust for Public Land Angles and has since expand the program to New York, Lass Vegas, Boston, Charlotte, Miami, and Camden and Newark, New Jersey. Taps GIS system uses census, anemographic and other data to map out areas of high population, saturated poverty, and lack of access to park space. With GIS technology, TIP can now pinpoint the areas of fast-paced population growth, study landownership patterns, and acquire keystone parcels before development demand drives up property prices or destroys open space.Further, GIS helps TIP create contiguous park space, protect natural habitats and connecting larger parks with additive greengages, rather than create a ragbag quilt of open space. 14 Voters have repeatedly shown their willingness to raise their own taxes to pay for new or improved parks. In the November 2002 elections, voters in 93 communities in 22 states approved ball ot measures that committed $2. 9 billion to acquire and restore land for parks and open space.Voters approved 85 percent of such referendums in these elections. 1 5 Voter support in 2002 increased from the already strong 75 percent approval rate for similar measures in November 2001. 16 History of Americas City Parks Inspiration, Abandonment, Revival During the second half of the 19th century, American cities built grand city parks to improve their residents quality of life. Dubbed 19th-century pleasure grounds by ark historians, the parks include New Works Central Park and San Franciscans Golden Gate Park.Municipal officials of the time dictum these parks as a psychiatric hospital from the crowded, polluted, stressful cities-places where citizens could experience fresh air, sunshine, and the spiritually understanding power of nature a place for recreation and a demonstrating public space where rich and poor would mix on equal terms. The new parks were invigorate by an anti-urba n ideal that dwelt on the handed-down prescription for relief from the evils of the city-to escape to the country, Galen stretch forth writes.The new American parks thusly were conceived as great pleasure grounds meant to be pieces of the country, with fresh air, meadows, lakes, and sunshine right in the city. 17 The Decline of City Parks spending on city parks declined. The well-to-do and white abandoned the cities for the suburbs, taking public funding with them. Cities and their parks fell into a spiral of decay. Cities trim down park maintenance funds, parks deteriorated, and crime rose many city dwellers came to view places like Central Park as too dangerous to visit. 18 The suburbs that mushroomed at the edges of major cities were often built with little public park space.For residents of these areas, a turn on out of the house means a drive to the shopping mall. Beginning around 1990, many city and town councils began forcing developers to add open space to their projec ts. Still, these open spaces are often effectively off-limits to the familiar public in the vast lie around Lass Vegas, for example, the newer subdivisions often have open space at their centers, but these spaces are hidden inside a labyrinth of winding streets. Residents of older, low- and middle-income neighborhoods have to get in their cars (if they have one) and drive to find recreation space. 9 More recently, city parks have experienced something of a renaissance which has benefited cities unequally. The trend began in the asses and flourished in the asses as part of a cosmopolitan renewal of urban areas funded by a strong economy. It coincided with a philosophical shift in urban planning aside from designing around the automobile and a backlash against the alienating modernism of mid-20th-century public architecture, in favor of public spaces that take and engage the community in general and the pedestrian in particular.Government authorities, civic groups, and private ag encies around the country have worked unitedly to revivalist UN-down city parks, build greengages along formerly polluted rivers, convert abandoned railroad lines to trails, and plant community gardens in vacant lots. The Park at brandmark Office Square in Boston shows how even a small but well-designed open space can transform its surroundings. Before work on the park began in the late asses, the square was modify by an exceptionally ugly concrete parking garage, blighting an important part of the fiscal district.Many buildings on the square shifted their entrances and addresses to other streets not facing the square. 20 Completed in 1992, the 1. -acre park is considered one of the most bonny city parks in the United States. Its immaculate landscaping-with 125 species of plants, flowers, bushes, and trees-its half-acre lawn, its fountains, and its teak and granite benches hooking throngs of workers during lunchtime on warm days.Hidden underneath is a seven-floor parking garag e for 1,400 cars, which provides financial support for the park. 21 It clearly, without any question, has compound and changed the entire neighborhood, says Serge Denis, managing director of Lee peak Hotel Boston, which borders the park. Its absolutely gorgeous. Not surprisingly, rooms 11 Yet despite such supremacy stories, local anesthetic communities often lack the transactional and development skills to effectively acquire property and convert it into park space.TIP serves a vital place in this capacity, working closely with local governments and community residents to determine where parks are needed to help develop funding strategies to negotiate and acquire property to plan the park and develop it and finally, to turn it over to the public. Between 1971 and 2002, the Trust for Public Lands work in cities resulted in the acquisition of 532 properties totaling 40,754 cress. In the nations 50 largest cities TIP acquired 138 properties totaling 7,640 acres. 3 In the wake of t he bursting of the economic bubble of the late asses, states and cities facing severe cypher crises are slashing their park spending. With a communicate $2. 4 billion budget dearth in the two- family period beginning July 2003, Minnesota has cut its aid to local governments, hurting city park systems crossways the state. The Minneapolis Park & cheer Board, confronting a 20 percent cut in its funding through 2004, has been forced to respond by deferring maintenance, closing wading lolls and beaches, providing fewer movable toilets, and reducing its mounted police police program.The required program cuts represent a huge loss to the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board and to the children of Minneapolis, says Park Board superintendent Mary Merrill Anderson. 24 When Georgians state legislature went into session in January 2003, lawmakers found themselves grapnel with a $650 million budget shortfall. conk out of their response was to eliminate the planned $30 million in fiscal 2003 funding for the Georgia Community Greengages Program, after appropriating $30 million per fiscal year in 001 and 2002.The legislature also cut the 2004 budget from $30 million to $10 million. The program helps the states fastest-growing counties set aside adequate green space-at least 20 percent of their land-amid all the new subdivisions and strip malls. Most of the change counties are around Atlanta, among the nations worst examples of urban sprawl. For legislators hunting for budget-cutting targets, Georgians $30 million Community Greengages Program was like a buffalo in the middle of a group of chickens, says David Swan, program director for Taps Atlanta office.The cut makes a compelling argument that we need a dedicated funding source, so that green space acquisition isnt depending on fiscal cycles and the legislature. 25 The federal government has also cut its city parks spending. In 1978, the federal government naturalized the Urban Park and Recreation retrieval (PARR ) program to help urban areas reconstruct their recreational facilities. The program received no funding in fiscal year 2003, down from $28. 9 million in both 2001 and 2002. 26 President Bushs budget proposal for fiscal 2004 also allocates no PARR funding.