How Many Parks Do You Need?
The District of Columbia has many, many, many fewer schoolchildren than it once did, so there’s been a trend toward closing DCPS facilities and trying to reuse the sites for something else. Office space for city agencies is a popular idea, but sometimes that doesn’t work out for various reasons. In that case, the tendency is for the local community to look fondly on various ideas to build parks instead. I suppose this is idiosyncratic of me, but I’m a bit of a park-skeptic. Obviously, a park is better than a collapsing abandoned school. And in my neighborhood there’s a bit of a “park versus parking lot” dispute in which case I’d clearly prefer the park. But as a general matter, I’d rather see this land put to use with buildings and stuff:
The future of the former Gage-Eckington school
It seems to me that human beings have some kind of psychological tick that leads them to overestimate the amount of time they’re going to want to spend engaged in outdoor recreating. It’s one thing if you live in California, where the weather’s nice all of the time, but here in the Northeast how much use do we really get out of parks? People don’t go to the park at night, or during the winter, or when it’s raining. Compare that to, say, an apartment building with some retail on the ground floor. People go to stores all the time. Obviously, that’s not to say that an ideal city would have zero parkland—parks are nice. But it’s not clear to me that we’re suffering from a park shortage. And in environmental terms, it’s much better for the planet to construct additional housing units in already-urbanized areas than to pack a bit more green space in the city and have more people living in sprawling exurbs.
Part of the issue I that I think there’s not enough “in it” for the local community to allow development as opposed to park creation. An elected official doesn’t want to be in the position of giving land to insidious developers instead of using it for public purposes like a park. But perhaps the lion’s share of the revenue from the auction of a city-owned facility could be given directly to a local community association. That could be spent on improving the public spaces that already exist in the area or dealing with whatever other local issues seem pressing. It does seem to me that DC and other cities suffer from more a problem of quality in our public spaces—too much basically empty, unprogrammable land—rather than a lack of quantity.
95 Responses to “How Many Parks Do You Need?”
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August 7th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Unprogrammable? Oh the horror! Land that is pleasant to look at rather than filled with another public building of some sort? Oh the humanity!
But seriously, this is the writing of a terminally impaired control freak, who needs dominion over everything and anything of value. Anyone deriding a park as a matter of course has a serious problem with his priorities.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:37 am
“Part of the issue I that I think there’s not enough “in it” for the local community to allow development as opposed to park creation.”
How true!
Between local officials lining their pockets with donations from Big Park and all the political activism from trees and blades of grass, it’s a wonder that cities have any concrete in them at all.
—–
Did Matthew have some horrible experience in Washington Square as a child?
This has got to be one of his weirdest posts of all time.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Or here’s another option: I’ve lived in cities in France and Germany , and in both countries cities tend to have lots of parks. And, the parks get used. Why? Because adults are allowed to be adults and enjoy lunch or an evening with wine and/or beer. I know it seems silly that just being allowed to use alcohol makes the difference, but it does. And it does without a doubt improve the public climate. I guess asking Americans to change our stupid public consumptions laws is too much, and so the point is moot….but still….
August 7th, 2009 at 8:42 am
“And in my neighborhood there’s a bit of a “park versus parking lot” dispute in which case I’d clearly prefer the park.”
This is an interesting admission. If you can call it that.
I thought the reason for disliking cars and parking lots was supposed to be that there was better use for the property. That it was a waste of otherwise valuable space. Why put a surface parking lot, or even a parking garage, downtown when you can have a glorious high-rise building with condos and other sweet stuff. Density!
But here, we see that it’s not really about that. We have some space. One proposed use is a parking lot, which will be of great value, at least to the people parking there. The other option is a park, which MY says people really don’t like all that much. And which he doesn’t really like at all, especially given a large number of already existing parks.
And his preference is for the park. Which he won’t use.
THis seems a pretty clear statement of anti-car bias, as opposed to a pro-something-else.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:43 am
The big issue is that once you decide to get rid of land for a park you can never get it back, the cost is just too high. So yes there is going to be an incentive to make parks because anyone paying attention knows that getting the city to buy private land for a park is never going to happen.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Part of the issue here is that MY is a workaholic, and probably has less time for parks than most of us.
But beyond that, there’s a broader fallacy in the argument — which is that parks are only useful when people are in them “using” them. MY forgets that parks are also used whenever people glance at them from a distance, or walk by them. Part of the point of the park is simply to put some green leafy stuff in the landscape — because people like having green leafy stuff in their visual field.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:44 am
It seems to me that a lot of public school sites are probably ideal for parks, though. Many, especially elementary schools, already have playgrounds, etc. And they are typically in pretty conveniently located areas, but not usually right next to a lot of businesses. Now, high schools and such are probably not ideal sites for this sort of conversion, but that doesn’t change the fact that elementary schools (which we tend to have far more of) are.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:47 am
@Ted – good point about the positive externalities of parks. Also consider their effect on reducing the higher temperature of cities, their effect in absorbing excess carbon emissions (even if small), and the fact that they provide a place for squirrels to be merry.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:48 am
I though the lack of greenery was one of the most depressing aspects of the several months I lived in DC. Having lived in the midwest and the west coast, it was a bit of a shock how concrete-jungle-y the city really was, even in the more residential neighborhoods.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:50 am
An elected official doesn’t want to be in the position of giving land to insidious developers instead of using it for public purposes like a park.
OK. Here, where some of us aren’t on crack, that’s not really the case.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:52 am
I don’t know what amount of parkland is the right amount, but I think Matt is seriously discounting the extent to which parks increase density by making urban space more attractive and enjoyable to live in.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:54 am
In my experience, every scrap of green space around Dupont Circle is filled with office workers during lunch hour, and often after work. As one of those office workers, I’m definitely pro-park. Green city parks are pleasant to spend time in or even to walk by. Not everything needs to be filled with retail. People shop too much as it is.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:56 am
I agree that Matt is probably under-valuing parks. If it’s a nice one, it will be well used. But it still means that land won’t get used for housing, or offices, or retail, which may have benefits outside of the immediate locality. So there’s still an incentive mismatch. In fact, local homeowners have a double incentive to support a park – it will increase their property value directly through an improvement in amenity, and indirectly through holding down local supply. So a wider view needs to be taken.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:57 am
I grew up in a middle sized city in the Midwest, one that developed significantly after the explosion of public parks that occurred in the middle of the 20th century. As such I had access to untold acres of public parks with fantastic amenities including tennis, basketball, baseball, pools, shelters, handball (!), etc. It was great. We were all thinner then.
I have since moved to New England, a place that was ‘thickly settled’ long before any notion of public parks existed. Yes they had ‘commons’ but they were for grazing animals not recreation. They almost universally have shitty parks with no amenities. And no one uses them, except where there are maintained amenities.
Minneapolis has a fantastic parks system and the parks get used year round by large numbers of people.
There is a point at which you could have too many public parks, but I’ve yet to go somewhere where that is the case.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Amplifying what Maria #12 wrote, parks in the DC area are very heavily used. You don’t see a lot of 20-something intellectuals in the park, unless a bike trail happens to cut through, but you see lots of parents with kids, and hispanics. Hispanics love parks. We could use far more green space than we now have.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:05 am
do you also hate babies and puppies? what city dweller outs themselves as anti-park?
part of the issues might be the park tipping point. when city parks are too few and too small they are likely seen (by you, MY) as ornamental, not for regular use. But you get enough parks and they become a facet of the city rather than an idiosyncratic patch of green. The site you picture seems to certainly be large enough for regular use.
I’m not sure what you’d otherwise be suggesting… retail where a school used to be?
The is the best “get off my lawn” post i’ve read in awhile. it’s so “get off my lawn” you don’t even want a lawn for people to think of enjoying.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Is it possible to combine building and parks? Keep the buildings at a human scale and integrate them into open space that would allow the workers/residents to act like adults (referencing an earlier comment) and allow the broader public to join in the fun.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:07 am
This post is dumb but not surprising, coming as it does from MY.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:09 am
“Park” was the first word one of my kids said.
Many people in urban environments don’t have access to the “natural world.” Green spaces are important even if people only drive mindlessly past them.
You’re missing something, Matt. Balance?
I’m sorry.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:10 am
DC barely has any usable green space. We have the Mall, which is a giant trek from virtually all the residential areas, and Rock Creek Park which is less a useful park than a wall of trees designed to protect the rich from The Blacks.
I suppose you could also count the “circles” (like Dupont or Thomas Circle) which are pretty enough, but not great places for outdoor activities b/c, y’know, you’re basically hanging out in the middle of a bunch of frustrated cars and trucks. Anyone who lets their kid run around in, say, Thomas Circle, is making a bad decision.
The SOLE Washington, DC park I’ve encountered that usable green space comparable to Chicago or NYC parks is Meridian Hill/Malcolm X, although you have to climb a ton of stairs to get to it. If DC is building a park that features actual, usable green space, I’m all for it.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Boy, I can tell this is going to be one of those pile-on comment sections . . . and far be it for me to resist!
First, you don’t have to be “recreating” in your local park for it to be adding value to your life, because there are well-demonstrated aesthetic and psychological benefits to simply having green spaces in our environment.
Second, they also give a safe place for children to play, and they provide a casual place for neighbors to meet, and they provide free opportunities for pleasant exercise (particularly valuable for the elderly, I might note), and they help promote a sense of community identity, and they provide a habitat for local wildlife, and they provide a place to take dogs (which themselves can add a lot of value to people’s lives), and they can provide environmental benefits, and they increase property values (something Matt normally takes seriously), and on and on.
Third, unless you are going to start forcing people to live in cities, you need to maintain and indeed increase the appeal of cities versus low-density suburbs and exurbs if you want to keep up the urbanization trend. And for all the reasons above, you need to provide cities with green spaces to that end. In other words, there are reasons why people want big yards, and what you have to do is sell them on the benefits of shared open spaces in the form of parks as opposed to lots of private yards.
Now obviously there is some upper bound on the acreage you can devote to parks before you start interfering with otherwise desirable residential densities. However, that upper bound is higher than some might think, because what really matters in most cases in things like weighted density (think Central Park: it doesn’t really reduce the weighted density of Manhattan significantly). And what we are really talking about here is smaller local parks, and again you can have a lot of those without dramatically interfering with weighted density (as demonstrated by many European cities).
Finally, as usual, I think Matt is being biased by his very limited experience with cities in the United States, and he isn’t accounting for the fact that many cities, both old and new, actually have plenty of capacity for additional residents while still devoting lots of land to parks as well. Fortunately, urban planners long ago learned about the importance of parks, so hopefully as our older cities are redeveloped and newer cities are expanded and become more dense to meet the needs of a growing urban population, these cities are not going to make Matt’s mistake and dismiss the importance of parks.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:15 am
Neighborhood parks are undervalued by young singles like Mr. Yglesias. They’re overvalued by parents (and, tangentially, dog-owners). Having to drive somewhere just to take your toddler for a walk, or to let him or her kick a ball, or see a bird, is not pleasant.
Put more parks in a city, more young parents (and birds, and squirrels, for that matter) will choose to live there, as heading for the suburbs at the first sign of parenthood. This is a good thing.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:17 am
I often agree with general themes in MY’s posts, but this one is flat out wrong. Whether or not D.C. kids are going to city schools, there are kids in the city and parks are usually important all year round. We’re not in Chicago, I can count the WEEKS of winter where I can’t go outside with my children because it is too cold. Shops are nice, but when children need to run, it can’t be on a narrow sidewalk on a busy street and it should be possible to get there on foot.
MY is proposing an idea that would push even more families out of urban cores. When they are pushed away, they end up in single-family homes. Making urban cores with few families surround by sprawling suburbs for families is terrible urban planning and anything that makes cities more welcoming for young children is vital to healthy cities and the environment.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Jesus Matt, visit other parts of the city. Lincoln and Stanton park on Capital Hill are full during daylight hours. Lots and lots of kids. And dogs. I use them and so does everyone else. ALso, those weird little parks because of DC crosscutting streets, I have a few of them right near me and they have little playgrounds, and I use them all the time.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:18 am
I think if Matt had kids, he’d have a different perspective. I spent much of my NYC childhood in parks.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:21 am
I dunno, when I was growing up there was an abandoned building that my friends and I had a ton of fun running around in. Only one of us had to get a tetanus shot.
The parks in my town were quite nice and I used them all the time. Maybe if it’s a big city and parks are or have been used to deal drugs, full of homeless drunks, covered with grafitti, sporting broken-down features do to budget cuts, and so forth people are less likely to use them. Parks are public space and if the public has problems, those problems will show up in the parks. OTOH in some antiseptic suburban area where the cops and the Block Watch people chase off undesirables, parks are usually great. That’s because those rich areas are pushing their problems onto the city, which is awful, but the parks are nice.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:29 am
I’d say more (indoor or indoor-outdoor) community centers, rather than parks.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Between local officials lining their pockets with donations from Big Park and all the political activism from trees and blades of grass, it’s a wonder that cities have any concrete in them at all.
Talk about a grassroot movement!
- zing -
August 7th, 2009 at 9:38 am
This post has set off quite the furor, but I don’t think it’s as daft or ugly as some folks seem to think. The post does go somewhat surprisingly against MattY’s political type; this is about as pro-developer a post I’ve ever read on a left-wing blog. I only lived in DC for one summer so I’m not overly familiar with the District’s park structure, but as someone lucky enough to live right by a suburban nature center and several parks, I don’t undervalue them.
Still, Matt makes some good points about the usage parks actually get. It’s probably not a bad idea for a few of these parks to be mixed-use retail/affordable housing units instead. Of course, real estate being what it is right now, probably best to plant more areas over with grass.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:39 am
I live in Philadelphia which is chocked full of vast park-lands compared to places like DC. And these parks get used constantly, year-round, by children (playgrounds, chasing games, exploring, bicycling, etc.) and adults (horseshoes, dog-walking, picnicking, jogging, etc.). This is so, even in bad weather, though of course more so on sunny days. Living near one was a requirement set by my wife (who grew up in a rural area) when we were looking to purchase home. So, on all those counts, I’d say more parks are better.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Not knowing the existing park situation in DC, I can’t comment directly on whether it has “enough” parks or not. But I wonder if Matt would consider a bit of a compromise. Here in Champaign, IL (admittedly a small city), we have a few large parks, but we also have a series of “mini-parks” that provide a nice break of greenspace that breaks up the terrain (most of them, I think, are single-building lots that were donated to the city). I wonder if big cities don’t tend to think about these sorts of projects because they tend to think on a big scale about everything.
Perhaps something like this could be implemented: Auction the land off to developers, but require the developers to use a quarter of the land as a public mini-park; make them responsible for upkeep (they wouldn’t be all that averse b/c it improves their building’s value) but require that the park be for public use, not meant solely for who lives in the development.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:43 am
> Third, unless you are going to start forcing
> people to live in cities, you need to maintain
> and indeed increase the appeal of cities versus
> low-density suburbs and exurbs if you want to
> keep up the urbanization trend. And for all
> the reasons above, you need to provide cities
> with green spaces to that end.
I agree with everything you say in your #21 DTM, but I will point out that in today’s modern exurbs all the supposed green space barely gets used – except for the highly regimented baseball fields when leagues are in season. The kids are all in the houses playing xBox (and exercising with Wii!) and the parents are at work or surfing the Internet. On my sister’s not-atypical exurban street the houses have a total acreage of back yard larger than most of my city’s parks yet even on a very nice day one seldom sees anyone in them (unless dad fires up the uber-Weber for 45 minutes).
I would say that human beings have some kind of psychological tick that leads them to think they want to live in exurbs, then when they arrive find it too inconvenient to actually do any of the things they thought they wanted.
Cranky
August 7th, 2009 at 9:46 am
> We’re not in Chicago, I can count the WEEKS of
> winter where I can’t go outside with my children
> because it is too cold.
Hey, the parks in Chicago are tons of fun when its 20 below zero and they are covered in deep snow. We don’t let a little thing like winter stop us!
Cranky
Problem was my kids’ snowboots were WAY warmer than mine…
August 7th, 2009 at 9:47 am
I’m sorry, but did you refer to D.C. as part of the Northeast? Matthew…
August 7th, 2009 at 9:55 am
I agree with posters above that this is one of the stanger Yglesias posts ever (and I usually agree with him). As a middling term DC resident, and now home-owner, I think that Dc is woefully short of park land. Even counting the Mall, the Potomac Parks (East Potomac Park is nice but you have to bike or drive ther fom any residential DC neghborhood, with the excetion (maybe) of the Waterfront), Rock Creek, etc. A lot of DC’s parks (really national parks) are not accessible on a day-to-day basis.
Oh, and I would add that LOTS of people use parks on a daily or almost daily basis. LIKE SAY, IF YOU HAVE A KID AND LIVE IN A HOUSE W/O A YARD (OR IN AN APARTMENT). Like, say, many of the folks who live in urban DC neighborhoods.
Parks very much make for quality of life. I live b/w Lincoln park–which is a great public space–and Stanton Square/Park, which is less so (but des have a vry nice fended in playground). Those two public spaces really make the area.
But not every residential area is so fortunate. I used to live in Logan Circle. The Circle itslf is kind of a park; but it is small, lacks any area not exposed to traffic (it is literally the inside of the traffic circle, for non-DC folks), and does not have a playground.
There is no other park anywhere near Logan Circle. So if you live there, or in the U Street corridor, you’re out of luck. The best you have is the lot at Garrison elementary, which is not up to park standards.
I also don’t see that DC is short on new, high-density developments. Now a lot of it is near the new ballpark, which may not be the most desirable location for renters. (It is, however, close to the Hill.) But look at Mass Ave (near where Matt lives, IIRC), the U Street-Columbia Hts area, etc. How many vacant units (counting unsold condos) are set to come on the market, or already there?
I for one would like to see less concrete in the next 10 years and more green space.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I will point out that in today’s modern exurbs all the supposed green space barely gets used – except for the highly regimented baseball fields when leagues are in season. The kids are all in the houses playing xBox (and exercising with Wii!) and the parents are at work or surfing the Internet. . . . I would say that human beings have some kind of psychological tick that leads them to think they want to live in exurbs, then when they arrive find it too inconvenient to actually do any of the things they thought they wanted.
Absolutely. And this is part of the case we need to be making when it comes to convenient (e.g., walkable) parks versus yards: yards are relatively boring (which explains the paradox of people in the exurbs spending so much time indoors). When you go to a park, you can people-watch, your kids can interact with other kids (without pre-arranged playdates), there might be dogs playing around, the open spaces can be bigger, a community can afford to buy and maintain much better stuff (playsets, tennis courts, and so on) than if each household in the community has to try do that for itself, and on and on.
The only thing I slightly disagree about is that I don’t think this is a tick shared by human beings in general: people in lots of countries seem to get what is desirable about well-designed urban living, and an increasing number of Americans are getting that too. Instead, I think this was a temporary cultural thing in the United States (driven in part by race–but we needn’t go into that here).
August 7th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Try a fenced in dog park (if there’s none currently around the area), it will provide enormous value to a subset of the population and increase the sense of community in the area.
When I lived in DC, there was a park we used as a dog park. We had to run and get our dogs when the cops came by, to avoid a ticket. The city kept promising to put a fence up and make it official, but didn’t by the time I left.
Anyway, there were 20 people crowded into a very small area w/ the dogs everyday after work until about 11pm. It was heavily used for this purpose, and when I went out to eat I’d always see dog-owner neighbors. It really helped us become part of the community, something I’d felt I missed in other places I lived.
Of course, the value drops as the land mass grows (less interaction between owners, and the number of users will not really increase due to size). It’s nice to have reasonably small dog parks around town.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Ok I have to disagree with you. I live in DC, but have also lived all over the country. By far, DC has the worst park space of anywhere else I’ve lived. This is in part because it’s a much smaller area and land is at a premium, but existing green space is: rock creek park (aka woods and a running trail, not much real green space), the mall (overrun and run down), meridian hill park (again, not enough green space) and a few scattered parks and circles.
People like big open spaces – St. Louis’ Forest Park was an absolute revelation, it changed the whole nature of the city and people flocked to it. San Francisco and New York have similar centrally located mega-parks which are major attractions in their own right, not to mention their effect on quality of life. When you add parks, you add green space, but you also add community – events are hosted there, people meet up there, games are played, neighbors are met. That doesn’t happen in an elevator.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:08 am
It seems to me that parks, like other infrastructure investments, benefit by having a coordinated plan (versus an as-a-site-becomes-available approach). A new park within a Linked Open Spaces Plan programmed with certain activities in mind (as part of a cohesive system of parks programmed with their own uses)would probably be more successful than a shoehorned-in greenspace with some swings.
Having said that, there has got to be some research on effective park development in the planning literature.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:09 am
You don’t acknowledge any of the benefits of parks/urban green spaces aside from the least tangible (how much time people spend in parks.) I’d argue that even in the inhospitable hinterlands of the East Coast (where I reside), people spend plenty of much-valued time in parks. For example, dog owners really appreciate parks, and parks are generally invaluable for neighborhood/community-building. Urban green spaces also provide lots of more tangible environmental benefits, notably: reducing stormwater runoff, combating the heat island effect, and improving local air quality.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Several others mentioned that parks look nice, but I just wanted to mention the environmental benefits as well. If you have concrete, pavement, and buildings everywhere then you cause rain to simply run off into the storm drains and rivers rather than soak into the ground to recharge the local water table. Additionally, I think I remember Matt was advocating trees in an earlier post about trying to counter the heat island effect urban areas experience.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Goddammit. Green space is more than just about utilitarianism. It has a psychological benefit too, which adds to the quality of life.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:18 am
@ Kyle – I always found those mini-parks in Champaign hilarious, especially how they are all numbered (Mini Park IV, etc.). While they are a good use of space that wouldn’t otherwise be used (may as well put in some flowers and make things a little prettier), I think they are the sort of park MY is actually thinking of here – so small that they serve no other purpose than to be pretty. There are apparently a lot of this sort of thing in DC because of the circles and diagonal streets, and no one ever uses them for anything. Everyone else, though, is thinking about the big parks (not unlike Hessel Park in Champaign) that you can actually do something in – those parks are definitely used and highly appreciated.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I think MY’s post is being a bit misread here. He’s not anti-park, he’s against reflexively replacing every demolished public building with a park. The example of the former public school building is not a good one, however, because the school probably already had a playground, so converting the rest of the property to park use is probably not a big stretch. Here in Chicago, everyone uses the public school playground just like a park when school is not in session anyway, espcially in neighborhoods that are already park-deprived. And sometime over the next 100 years I expect the number of public school children will rise again and new schools will need to be built – much easier to keep the land vacant and under control of the city than to sell it off now and have to buy land at a very high price later.
But it does bother me when a lot on a main commercial street gets converted into a park. The reason commercial streets are so convenient here is that several different kinds of businesses are all lumped together and you can walk between them and get your errands done quickly and on foot. If you break up the corridor with lots of “green space” you make it more difficult to get things done without driving and parking several times. Which is not very “green.”
Speaking of:
THis seems a pretty clear statement of anti-car bias, as opposed to a pro-something-else.
Well, until cars run on sunlight, fresh air, and human happiness instead of burning fossil fuels that are literally destroying the world, I think a strict anti-car bias is entirely called for.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Maybe Matt doesn’t spend a lot of time in that neighborhood? Well, I do, since I live there, and I have to say that unlike upper NW, we don’t have a lot of parks in the LeDroit Park / Bloomingdale / Eckington area. Actually, we don’t have any of any significant size. Is is so unreasonable for us to want to have a park? There are kids that play football in the street that I live on. I would love it if they had a park that they could play in. I would love it if the park had a playground for parents to take their kids to. These kinds of amenities are not only deserved by rich white families up in upper NW. East of 16th NW, there are not very many parks in DC.
Matt may not be familiar with the neighborhood, but the enormous, hideous condo developments that are springing up in the U street area would simply not work in the neighborhoods immediately east of Howard University. The areas are composed of historic three story row houses and a few modestly sized apartment buildings. A big mixed use development springing out of nowhere wouldn’t accomplish much; there is almost no retail in these neighborhoods because we live adjacent to other neighborhoods like Shaw, Brentwood, and the U St Corridor that have plenty of retail and way more pedestrians and outside visitors.
Seriously, do you think that DC needs more overpriced condos for yuppies? How about something to benefit neighborhood residents? And renters like, say, me that don’t plan on buying a condo and couldn’t afford one anyway? And people with dogs? And children? I’m very happy that my neighborhood is going to get a park.
And what’s with this assertion that people don’t use parks in DC? Maybe you don’t use parks. Ever been to Malcolm X park on a weekend? Chock full of people.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Here’s the related post.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:22 am
I hate to pile on MR Yglesias but i live in Baltimore City and all i have around me is asphalt and concrete.I enjoy living in the city . But the one thing that keeps me sane is the fact that i live 50 feet from Patterson Park and 5 minutes walk from Canton Waterfront Park .
During the summer i have no air conditioning and i go to both of those parks on my time off to read books underneath a tree.I like to joke that i have the biggest backyard in Baltimore since i am so close to Patterson Park.I also volunteer with otheers to help mantain the park.This has helped me meet many of my neighbors.Park cleanups lead to neighborhood cohesivness in my experience.
If you took Patterson Park away I would have to move .Because as great as urban living is ,everyone needs to enjoy the grass and trees .
In fact i think that people living in the city enjoy parks more than people in the suburbs.We have smaller houses and often no a/c so many urban areas have people being outside most of the day.I am always shocked by how empty the suburbs feel.Everyone seems to be inside.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Just why should this surprise anyone. Mr. Yglesias is against natural law, so it should not be surprising that he is against nature too. He would rather see ‘useful’ gray buildings and skyscrapers rather than trees and flowers. He reminds me of Dr. Filostrato in “That Hideous Strength”.
This post ticks me off so much that I will have to respond to it at more length, but I have to run right now.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:28 am
here’s on example from Philly, although the developer acquired the land via bankruptcy auction, not from local gov’t.
http://www.atthepiazza.com/about-the-piazza.html
August 7th, 2009 at 10:30 am
This post reminds me of the recent internet prank/rumor about Central Park being turned into an airport.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Does Matt not exercise? Or does he only do so indoors for $500 a month?
August 7th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Yes, Shooter, your insistence that the government take over all available land so that you can keep it empty and look at it, rather than making it available for the private sector decide what to do with it, is indeed the writing of someone who needs dominion over everything and anything of value.
What is it about other people using land in a productive manner that offends you so? Why do feel the need to maximize the amount of the land owned by the government? What is it about privately-owned buildings that makes you view them with such scorn and fear?
August 7th, 2009 at 10:42 am
I’m a little late to the game, on this, but I doubt that
Part of the issue here is that MY is a workaholic, and probably has less time for parks than most of us.
MY may work more hours than what is typical, but a lot of those hours are on weekends, where he can work from anywhere and presumably takes long breaks he could spend sitting or walking in a park. His is also a more self-paced job than many, so he can carve out park time if he wants it.
As for Hector @48,
Mr. Yglesias is against natural law, so it should not be surprising that he is against nature too. He would rather see ‘useful’ gray buildings and skyscrapers rather than trees and flowers.
You’re really phoning it in on this one. Half-block parks and triangular parks are not large enough to give one a sense of being in nature. Matt Y also has repeatedly advocated for building taller buildings, thereby reducing the footprint of human land use and leaving more land as farmland or pakland or wilderness. This is orders of magnitude more important than whether half of a block has buildings or a park barely large enough to play volleyball in, let alone confer any sense of being in nature.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I spent a few weeks in DC this year and, coming from Somerville, MA, I thought I was in park heaven. So did my dog, who was along on one of the trips.
My family uses parks 365 days a year. Rain, snow, or sleet do not deter us. Most of my friends are the same. Of course, I met many of my friends at the dogpark. My toddler wants to visit every park we pass. Most of the time we oblige her. As a lifelong urban dweller parks are central to my existence.
Parks MUST be well-designed! Somerville recently renovated a park using an awful design (Perry). The park has a certain superficial aesthetic charm, but it wasn’t built for human use. It is vastly underused by the surrounding community. I went to the design meetings and the design firm flat out refused to listen to the people who were going to use the park. Why the City went along is a mystery, but I’ve been told City officials learned their lesson.
Some places may not need more parks, but most cities in the “Northeast” do.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Jacques Chirac ran for Mayor of Paris on a platform containing the promise to put a park within 500m of every residence. As mayor, he succeeded. He was subsequently elected President of France. Coincidence? I think not.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Matt’s post is awesome for how wrong it is.
Let’s start with the conclusion- sell the public land to developers and give the proceeds to private groups. Awesome! He’s gone directly to the ur-source of public poverty and bad government!
But wait, there’s more! It’s public land that could easily become a park or a school- but will never be either if it’s sold in a down market and has to be repurchased later.
In a previous life I lived in Manhattan, and was amazed at how many people used the parks. Eventually I realized it was easier to just walk down the street smoking a joint than to find an unwatched place in a public park.
Matt is reacting, of course, to the pressure cooker atmosphere of cute Libertarian girls and DC’s height limit for buildings. In anywhere other than DC you would improve density by allowing developers to build higher, a simple fact known to planners for over a hundred years.
You can also allow the retail-commercial across the street from a park to occupy their full footprint, rather than requiring the open space that is typical for modern codes.
Now that I live in a notably green environment, I was naturally pleased to find that greenery (of the live variety) is actually a measurable anti-depressant. I needed all of that I could get during the Bush years.
For the first 125 years of our national existence, we financed the nation by selling off the lands we stole from the Indians. Since then mineral rights and grazing rights have destroyed huge amounts of natural resource, and the runoff from our roads and herbicided-lawns has poisoned almost all of our waterways. Continuing the sell-off, at markdown prices, could quite literally be fatal.
If Matt really believed that, and wasn’t just pulling our chain, maybe he should put down that hipster reading challenge he’s been wading through and get some fresh air.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:59 am
This ranks with PlumberGate among the most inane things I’ve read here. Yes, I suppose somewhat frumpy, bookish, childless, 20-something bloggers struggle to make sense of the baffling deluge of pretty green spaces. How myopic.
I gotta be honest. On my list of policy problems, Too Many Parks ranks with Advertisers Who Are Too Honest and Too Much Soul-Searching At Commentary Magazine on my list of things to worry about.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Not that Matt appears to care, but parks (even poorly designed ones) provide urban toeholds for the nonhuman world– habitat for animals, resting places for migratory birds, even stepping stones/corridors for larger animals moving through the area. So they serve a valuable function even when humans aren’t using them.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:06 am
You can clear out a good 20-30% of my best childhood/teenage memories if I hadn’t had a fantastic and spacious park two blocks from my house. Absolutely off-base on this.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:10 am
As often happens on this blog, this has become a conflict over first principles when it’s really a question about urban policy (this is, btw, quite similar to Matt’s inexplicable backing of the Chicago parking meter sale on “environmental” grounds while ignoring the actual, awful terms of its implementation). The real question isn’t “are parks good,” it’s “does this park in this location make sense.”
I’ll admit I’m not familiar with this specific lot. But I am familiar with the streetscape of DC and, particularly in areas east of Rock Creek Park (not a “park” so much as a densely packed forest criss-crossed with highway and dangerous bike paths), there is an enormous shortage of useful green space.
Whether or not land in general is better used for commercial or recreational use is kind of beside the point — it’s very likely that THIS park will contribute far more to the neighborhood than a big chunk of retail. Indeed, given DC’s recent experience at FORCING gentrification (e.g. Shaw/Convention Center and H Street), the more likely result would be a bunch of half-occupied and bland storefronts alienated from the surrounding community.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:11 am
I take my kids to parks 3-5 days a week, every week. However, we don’t have a subway in my town. Therefore, I think there are too many subways.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:18 am
I used to think that too… then last month I visited Montral, Quebec. I would never have thought it could be possible to place such an emphasis on outdoor space in a city that spends half the year frozen!! A model city.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Matt may not be aware that the number of schoolchildren in DCPS has gone fallen dramatically but the number of schoolchildren in DC has not. We have tens of thousands of kids, including mine, who attend charter schools in DC. Charters get insufficient facilities funding (thank you, Mayor Fenty!) to build their own adequate playground facilities so they depend vitally on parks and open spaces.
Now if this issue is what to do with DCPS buildings that no parents want to send their kids to, the OBVIOUS answer is give those buildings to charter school operators who have been so successful at building programs that parents want. Minimal retrofitting of the buildings and lots is needed. This is a no-brainer, but the Mayor’s reputation is staked on DCPS per se, not public schools in general, so he cannot afford to help out the competition. He’d rather make sure the unused DCPS buildings go private developers or even sit empty.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Get out of lower see the rest of DC, people! In fact – and I can’t believe I’m saying this (I was born and raised in Adams-Morgan in the bad old days when that was a “sketchy” part of town) – just go see upper Northwest!
What’s pretty striking in this long thread is how limited the geograhic area under discussion is. There’s no discussion at all of the land along the C&O towpath (i.e., the Palisades), the parkland in upper Rock Creek Park (e.g. candy cane park), the parks along North Capitol St., let alone Anacostia Waterfront Park, Fort Dupont and the other Fort Circle parks. DC is a city full with a healthy amount of green space when you don’t live and play exclusively in the densest parts of town.
That said, I have a slightly different take on the original post. A park is an amenity and needs to be taken care of. Back in the old war-story days in Adams-Morgan, a lot of the pocket parks and even Kalorama Park were full of glass, drunk and/or crazy and/or homeless guys, and sometimes drug dealing. Just having open space is not by itself a clear win for a community, while having well-maintained green space absolutely is. I myself would be hard pressed to live far from a park, but the park in Pittsburgh I now live half a block from is both well-maintained and still a little sketchy at night.
OTOH, I completely agree that DC or really any American city is a long way from having too much green space. And it’s also very true that once piece of land is converted to a building it’s very, very rare to get an opportunity to convert it back to open space. So in the planning-wonk spirit of the original post, I would still endorse the creation of this park.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:50 am
> I would never have thought it could be possible to
> place such an emphasis on outdoor space in a city
> that spends half the year frozen!
Really guys: you don’ have to be afraid of winter. Get a decent parka and pair of felt-lined boots (from any number of sources priced high to low) and a polartec scarf. Then go out and walk and play in the cold and snow. Its a lot of fun.
Cranky
August 7th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Well if DC were a heat island you’d probably want to keep your parks even if no one used them. But my guess is it’s not (partly thanks to all those white-roofed buildings), so do whatever you want.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I would have more sympathy for Matt’s position, and the fact that he’s being sort of stawmanned in his comments, if there was a reasonable case against the situation he cites:
But c’mon. You think the community would be better served by a luxury condo building with a Gap in the ground floor? Jeebus.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Yeah. After all, nobody *ever* goes to Central Park or the Battery. Or the Mall, for that matter.
The low usage of these public spaces surely proves your point.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Eric E #64. It think there’s a difference between the beautiful, large parks you can drive (or take mass transit) to and local parks where children can go to spend an hour in an afternoon. I often take my toddler outside after dinner and she likes to spend 30 minutes lying in grass, chasing fireflies, or running around in the common green space of our rental complex. I don’t need a personal 1/2 acre of land, but I can’t image raising a child without easily walkable access green space. Building neighborhoods like MY wants keep people like me from considering living in D.C. (that and the fact that anything larger than a 1 bedroom in downtown is out of my price range)
Even the simple green places on your list like Candy-Cane Park are in walking distance to only a few suburban homes and are far off most mass transit.
And Cranky Observer #33, I didn’t mean to disparage Chicago park usage, but most D.C. residents are soft and the city shuts down for a few inches of snow. It’s just that it rarely snows and there are few weeks where the weather is actually below freezing. With barely a warm coat, one can use outdoors space all year round in this area.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I guess I am just a park person. As far as I am concerned the more the better. I spend a great deal of time exploring all the parks in my area and bird watching. I also ride bike and walk and hike a great deal. i am disabled by mental illness and do not work so have a lot of time on my hands. I look on what i do as therapy. I also pick up garbage in the park as a way of giving back to my community. I believe there are a lot of people like myself to whom a little bit of open space means the word.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Surprised no one’s brought up Jane Jacobs yet, who Matt may or may not have read. She was a park skeptic too—not in the sense of disliking parks, but in the sense of believing that the effectiveness of parks differed based on how they were used (”a park is not automatically anything”).
August 7th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
If I remember correctly, William F Buckley ran for mayor of NYC in 1965 on a platform of paving over Central Park into one big parking lot and then prohibiting cars in Manhattan south of like 96th St.
Hey – Central Park – no one uses it after dark, in the winter, or when it’s raining. But people drive their cars after dark, in the winter, and when it’s raining – so therefore that must be the best use of the land is to make it a parking lot.
August 7th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Matt, I love you, I really do. And even agree with most of the stupider stuff you occasionally post. But you finally just walked off the cliff on this one.
Got a suggestion for you. But a mobile broadband card. Then go spend some time blogging in the park. I have my beloved net book for this very purpose, small enough to fit in my motorcycle’s saddlebags, and one of my favorite things is just sitting on a park bench in the fresh air, watching all the kids and dogs as I surf the net. WAY better than sitting in a coffee shop.
August 7th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Urban gardens. They could be growing food on those lots. It would be visually appealing, and healthy. It works in NYC, it would work in D.C.
August 7th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
In some ways matt is right but for the most part this is quite a naive post. Nearly twent percent of nyc’s land area is parkland. Making dense living ameable to residents requires the adequate provision of parks and public space. This gets to what is perhaps the most important factor with parks, that is providing them within close proximity to residents. So for matt’s neighborhood the question might be: do we have parks already within walling distance? And second, is it enough and what kinds of amenities do residents want within those spaces?
August 7th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I second the pro-park posts. When I was father to a young boy, having some nearby open space to play in was killer. Now that he’s almost grown, the green space still gives me a lift as I walk, ride, or drive by it.
Looking further ahead, old school lots have potential as future school lots, but only if they aren’t sold off or otherwise developed into a massive structure. Something the LAUSD learned the hard way… just because the existing residents in an area have pretty much cycled out of the kid phase, doesn’t mean that demographic is going to remain static.
In the LA case, large parts of the San Fernando Valley that were once full of empty nester Anglos are now full of young Latino families. Selling off those old school lots ended up as a short-sighted, expensive mistake. Ah well, half of the school board circa 1985 was elected on a don’t bus our kids platform, and could have given a rat’s okole about future trends that were evident even then.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
One of these days, unless MY’s SO drags him to house out in Reston with a yard (and school) for the kids, he’s going to look back on this post and laugh at his naivete.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
DTM hits it out of the park, as usual. S/he should guest host.
And by Matt’s reasoning, I should get rid of my toilet too, because I spend less time using it than I do parks. I mean, think of all the things I could put in that space that I’d use more often!
August 7th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
@Cranky
I grew up in Chicago–far north of it, in fact. And we were in parks all the time during the winter. We used them year-round constantly. ‘Twas a pretty good childhood…
@Kyle I did some time at U of I. Some of the mini-parks are truly mini, but it always was nice having them. Then again, we had huge open spaces down south of campus, so we played soccer and ran down there.
Just to repeat a point that has been made by several already, many parks earn their keep in mere aesthetic value alone. They’re performing an important function even if no one (including wildlife) uses them.
OT: Everyplace I’ve lived has had some park people called “Drug-dealer Park.”
August 7th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
My only experience with DC’s parks (as distinct from the Federal stuff around the Mall) was a work trip last summer. I worked with the Parks and People organization, which is fixing up some of DC’s parkland. I did some work at Watts Branch Park (aka Marvin Gaye Park), assembling a sign board, then at Oxon Run Park putting up the sign and clearing a lot of brush and garbage. My impression was that DC has a fair amount of parkland, at least once you get away from the city center, but a lot of it is neglected and poorly maintained.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I love your blog, read it every day, and more often than not agree with you. But…..
It seems like having decent parks helps on the obesity front, the not needing stupidly large lawns thing, the making inner city areas have some of the beauty that is so enriching and quality of life enhancing, the having public space for events that some group of shops will never offer, and the list goes on.
I can only hope this was a glib post not thought through very well.
August 8th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias doesn’t really dig the park: I suppose this is idiosyncratic of me, but I’m a bit of a park-skeptic. Obviously, a park is better than a collapsing abandoned school. And in my neighborhood there’s a bit of a “park versus parking lot” dispute in which case I’d clearly prefer the park. But as a general matter, I’d rather see this land put to use with buildings and stuff… [...]
August 9th, 2009 at 12:37 am
I was raised in NYC back when it was the biggest city in the world. I now live in a small valley on Oregon. I have forested hillsides rising to my east and west. Each move I have made since I became an adult has been to a smaller, more vegetative place. And with each move I have become saner, calmer and happier. I don’t think that there can be too many parks in cities. Anything that increases the greenery and decreases the population density is a benefit to humanity as a whole.
August 9th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
One word for MY: Osaka
I live nearby Osaka (i.e. Blade-Runner-scape) and it affords any visitor one of the bleaker portraits imaginable of modern living. Dystopic to say the least. Green spaces are one of those QOL indicators that doesn’t make it into our GDP rubric.
And I’d add that it’s ironic that a CA liberal would even contemplate such a thing–wasn’t it the Terminator’s idea of shuttering 200 state parks?
August 9th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I like parks, but it does strike me that in North America, we’re not very imaginative about public spaces. Whenever there’s some spare land around, the only non-commercial proposal anyone makes is a park. I’d love to see a few new public squares, craft markets, sculpture gardens, or such. Open space doesn’t have to filled with a new condo plus street retail, but it doesn’t have to hold a traditional park either.
August 9th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Matt clearly does not have any kids or dogs yet.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:26 am
As one of the aforementioned affluent whites from upper NW DC – well, used to live there, anyway – there are plenty of small green spaces dotted about up there and they are all heavily used – year round despite the tundra-like conditions when you get so far north of downtown.
dd #69 – it doesn’t help much for post-dinner frolics, but off the top of my head I know you can walk to the Chevy Chase Community center in 5 minutes from the Friendship Heights metro even with a toddler, and the Lafayette park is only another few minutes on one of 5 buses. Go the other way on Western and you’re at the FT Bayard park in no time. I suspect the same is true of Turtle Park on Van Ness, but the competition for sand pit space is fierce.
I’m having a hard time seeing why anyone would recommend less – or at least no more – park space in DC. The city is far less likely to screw up lawns than most other development ideas they’ve concocted.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Really? You’re now a “pave the earth” person? You must be kidding. Little neighborhood parks are the jewels of the city. Unplug, man. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to walk somewhere from your home that isn’t paved.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:57 am
[...] Yglesias responds to my observation that his visceral hatred of parks might lessen if/when he has kids:I never find this to be a particularly useful way of [...]
August 10th, 2009 at 10:06 am
You guys are all high if you think DC doesn’t have much in the way of parks. It has more parkland than almost any other American City. Rock Creek Park is one of the largest urban parks in the nation- it’s larger than Central Park. It is not landscaped like many parks people are used to but has natural forests criss crossed with hiking trails. 5 minutes down one of those trails and you can litterally forget you’re in a big city rather than some rolling forest in the country. The paved bike trail is heavily used by bikers and pedestrians (walkers and especially runners) alike, and I use it to commute by bicycle – it’s a lot safer than sharing the road with cars. The national mall gets used all year round by runners, walkers, and various rec leagues and people who organize pickup soccer, ultimate, softball, etc. games. Then there is Anacostia waterfront park, plenty of parks in Capital Hill and Northwest. The U Street Cardozo and much of Northeast are underserved when it comes to parkland.
Parks, aside from the other benefits listed above, are very good for public health. Per capita exercise rates are highly correlated with access to parkland in urban areas. Thanks to it’s parkland, DC has one of the highest rates of regular exercise per capita according to Men’s Health magazine. The idea that they are largely useless is laughable if we want to get obesity rates under control and improve health outcomes. People use them to get regular exercise all the time and it’s a lot more enjoyable to go on a long walk or run in Rock Creek park than down a crowded smog filled city street.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I moved to New York City in the 1970’s, just before it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. It is easy to conjure the state of parks and the state of the city then, since so many Hollywood movies portrayed Central Park as a kill zone, and scenes from “Death Wish” were actually shot in Riverside Park. But as the city has since grown and prospered, the parks became a key element of its resuscitation and of the quality of life that made New York City not only livable, but desirable. Riverside Park is now full of soccer fields, baseball diamonds, flower gardens, basketball courts, nature walks, tennis courts, jogging paths, and some great snow hills in the winter, all of which are only a few blocks away. My family could not conceive of living anywhere else. So the question about parks should be framed as a larger issue: not whether another lawn and set of shrubs is needed, but how it fits with the rest of the community. The parks — large and small — in New York have contributed significantly to every neighborhood they occupy because they are integral to community life.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Two footnotes here:
1. Matt is still incorrectly citing the decline in DC Public Schools students as evidence of a decline in children in the city. The DC charter school enrollment has been increasing every year, taking up the slack in DC (traditional) Public Schools. In other words, families are not leaving the city, they are switching schools.
2. MarkJ is right that Rock Creek Park is ginormous, but the part of Rock Creek Park that is (a) within the District or (b) accessible to the majority of DC residents, is very small. The park land in DC is poorly distributed. DC Public School buildilngs are everywhere, and Matt is talking about repurposing those particular buildings.
August 11th, 2009 at 1:07 am
This person seems to be yet-another of the folks who just got out of Urban Planning For Developers’ Lackeys Indoctrination class.
There’s this absolute spam-blast of this idea circulating in blogs that have the tangential reference to urban planning and “social engineering”.
The whole idea seems to be that the world must be transformed into a pile of giant beehives.
If I believed in that sort of thing, I’d suspect in space invader aliens who grew up on a starship and are still totally freaked out by the idea of a natural ecology on a natural planet, not that we are all that natural anymore.
I have lived in many cities, and the District is still the most endurable, mostly due to the fact that it has the highest per-capita allotment of parklands, even if half of the parks are maybe large enough for five people and a few dozen pigeons. But it’s a fact in my mind, only total aliens actually prefer the manufactured sterility of living in a technological beehive — where you can travel either only on your own feet or only on publicly funded and politician-controlled conveyances — to an intermix of the technological world we have build, and the natural world which created us.
Seriously, I think there is a lot of pathology going around right now in the Urban Planning community and the commentators on that. The main symptom of that pathology is an overwhelming need to not merely lock themselves into their rooms, but to lock everyone else into rooms, leaving nothing outside.
I think it’s time we recognize this for what it is: either some sort of introverting obsessive disorder, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers demanding that we all turn our lives into a huge beehive of what might as well be prison cells.
Because that’s the nature of prison: you’re never outside.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:37 am
DTM writes, in part:
> Absolutely. And this is part of the case we need
> to be making when it comes to convenient
> (e.g., walkable) parks versus yards: yards are
> relatively boring (which explains the paradox
> of people in the exurbs spending so much time indoors).
I’ve noticed this myself. I think it may be the case that in the modern day, so many distractions have been manufactured for — and marketed to — the urban dwellers for the purpose of making a life endurable which is spent inside, that they have made the indoors preferable to the outdoors, even in the exurbs.
But be that as it may: I live in the house where I was raised, and we have spent over 40 year making this our little slice of heaven. Sure, it’s a bit less than a quarter acre in an elder core suburb swiftly sliding into the status of slumburbia, where people move in and pave their yards and illegally park their take-home work fleet on the paved yard.
But my yard isn’t paved. It is a privately maintained park, if you would, with large and healthy representatives of seven major tree species: ash, gum, oak, poplar, holly, dogwood and beech, not to mention some non-native ornamentals. And we love it. In azalea season, the white dogwood stands over the white azalea and Japanese people get off of the bus to take photis of it.
Why?
We love our land, and we don’t hire “people” to care for it. This is where we live, this is what we enjoy, and our house is modest, the lawn is not paved, we have “rain gardens” and if worst came to worst and civilization collapsed, we could cut half of the trees and have fuel for a decade and lumber enough to house 20 people and still grow summer provender to feed everyone we could house and heat.
Why do so many people want to turn all of the cities into sterile machines that will become horrid deathtraps if power provision and sanitary disposal systems fail? We live in a nice Suburban Forest that could as quickly be a farm. And as much as it may dismay me, ours is the most popular bus-stop on the route: our bus-stop is in a shady and natural forest that nature built and which we nurture.
Down the street is a bus-stop in the summer sun, devoid of shade and all of the houses have paved yards and gated doors. Almost nobody waits for the bus there… they walk up to where nature is preserved, to wait for their public transportation.
Think about that when you talk about yanking up every last vestige of the natural world and paving it over.
August 12th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Thank you!!! I’ve been thinking this myself. Parks are the lazy man’s way of planning. Don’t know what to do with a space? Put a park in there no one will use.