In May, New York Mayor Eric Adams released a budget that would have cut funding for the Department of Parks and Recreation by about $55 million. That’s not much more than a rounding error in the city’s $112 billion budget, but the proposal represented a massive cut to park funding. It would have eliminated more than 600 jobs in maintenance and operations, a number that dwarfs the entire staff of most cities’ parks departments.
After a fight with advocates and members of the City Council, Adams eventually signed a budget that kept parks funding intact. But it was a far cry from the expansion of the parks budget that many New Yorkers have wanted for years. And it illustrated how parks — public amenities that many local leaders professed a deepened concern for during the socially distanced days of the COVID-19 pandemic — so often get pushed aside when it comes time to divvy up spending.
There is some evidence that cities are investing more in parks systems. In 2022, cities spent more on parks, adjusted for inflation, than any other year since the recession that started in 2007, according to an analysis by the Trust for Public Land. But much of that funding represents capital spending that’s been boosted by federal pandemic relief programs and infrastructure grants.
Funding for operations — the day-to-day maintenance, cleaning and programming of city parks — is lower now than it was before the pandemic. “The old adage is that parks are the first to be cut in budget season,” says Will Klein, associate director for parks research at the Trust for Public Land.
Civic groups and parks advocates have spent years pushing leaders to dedicate 1 percent of New York City’s budget to parks funding. Mayor Adams pledged to meet that goal while campaigning for office. But although the city’s recent budgets have included record funding for parks, after adjusting for inflation the parks budget peaked in 2020, according to a report from the city’s Independent Budget Office. Park spending now represents less than 0.6 percent of the budget.
Supporters argue that parks provide layers of social, environmental and economic benefits to cities and therefore should be a higher priority. Those arguments seemed to gain footing during the pandemic, when parks saw a surge of visitors with nowhere else to safely socialize. “Parks are the heart of our city, vital for community well-being and environmental health,” New York City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan said in June, during the final days of budget negotiations.
New York’s ranking on the ParkScore index — a measure of urban park systems’ accessibility, size and funding levels, released annually by the Trust for Public Land — has gone down a few spots in recent years. The struggle to keep the city’s park system in good shape is as old as the city itself. That’s true even for places like Central Park, an urban oasis renowned well outside the city limits. But it’s especially true for the hundreds of small neighborhood parks and playgrounds with lower profiles.
The fortunes of the city’s park system have depended on the relative interest of its successive mayors, says Betsy Smith, the president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy and a former top parks official under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The conservancy was created in 1980 following a decline for Central Park and municipal fiscal crises in the 1960s and ’70s. The group is now responsible for the park’s upkeep and improvement, a $100 million-a-year job it carries out primarily with private funding.
Many more park conservancies have formed in New York City and across the country in the last half-century. Along with volunteer “friends of” groups, they often carry out the work that cities don’t budget for. “There just hasn’t been a savvy political approach to parks,” Smith says. “There’s been a lack of will to think about parks as critical civic infrastructure. [Leaders] need to make the argument that parks are as important as the subways and the roads.”
Many cities increasingly take advantage of private funding to supplement their own parks budgets. Philanthropic foundations often put up the lion’s share of funding for new landmark parks and capital expansions. Philadelphia, for example, is carrying out a plan to rebuild many of its parks and recreation centers with $100 million from the William Penn Foundation. The George Kaiser Family Foundation put more than $450 million — the largest-ever gift to a public park — toward the creation of the Gathering Place in Tulsa, which opened in 2018. The Atlanta Beltline, a decades-in-the-making amenity that is driving development in the city, gets about 30 percent of its annual budget from philanthropic sources.
But local government funding still accounts for about 85 percent of all spending on urban parks. Cities that spend less of their own money on parks sometimes struggle to raise additional funding from private sources. Even Central Park improvements — a relatively easy pitch to private donors — require some local funding to show donors that the city has skin in the game. “It’s often difficult to secure funding when there’s very little leverage,” says Darius White, director of park projects for Parks and People, a nonprofit in Baltimore that raises funding for capital projects and youth programming. “Limited resources for public parks put Baltimore at a disadvantage.”
Baltimore spends about $106 per capita on parks. That’s below the median for big cities. Cities that spend the most include Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Seattle; and Minneapolis. Irvine, a planned city in California, invests by far the most in its public parks system — about $1,200 per capita, nearly double the next biggest investor.
But Irvine’s spending is driven mostly by the Great Park, a massive, decades-old redevelopment of a former Marine Corps air base with sports stadiums, trails and an arts complex. The city has already completed 500 acres of the park, with at least 300 acres more in development.
Signature capital projects such as the Great Park account for most of the money that gets spent on parks in the U.S. When it comes to the annual allocations for maintenance and operations, even the wealthiest cities still sometimes come up short. “I’ve worked for a lot of different municipalities, but budget time is still budget time,” says Corey Lakin, deputy director of community services for Irvine. “We’re still vying for the same dollars that the police department is. The same anxiety and competition and finger-crossing still occurs.”
