Park Yourself

Is it safe to go outside yet? As I write this, the temperature is hovering around 12, and even the cynics are starting to think maybe we’re done with the minuses until next winter. Time to start going to the park.

Check out the marketing literature for any new development in the city, and if there’s so much as a tree within blocks, you’ll find they wax rhapsodic about greenspace, nearby parks, landscaped squares and anything else with a leaf or a bud.

It may seem obvious – green is good – but parks have an enormous impact on their surrounding neighbourhoods, and in ways that may surprise you.

“Parks provide intrinsic environmental, esthetic, and recreation benefits to our cities. They are a source of positive economic benefits. They enhance property values, increase municipal revenue, bring in homebuyers and workers, and attract retirees,” according to the American Planning Association.

Not the least consideration in the building business and on the homeownership front is that parks increase property values. A lot.

In the late 19th century, a New Yorker named Frederick Law Olmsted conducted a study of parks and property values in an attempt to justify the creation of Manhattan’s Central Park.  He found that over the next 17 years, properties immediately adjacent to the park increased by $209 million in 1873. A little limited in the science of statistics, obviously, because he can’t know how much they would have appreciated if the park hadn’t been built, but it certainly makes it easy to justify the $13 million the park cost.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., city officials, community groups and businesses banded together to help fight the unemployment, pollution and crime that was bringing the city down by buying up space and creating parks. Property values in the (now quite pretty) city went up more than 127%.

(I found Canadian data limited, but the Americans have done their homework, and it’s simple enough to extrapolate that our results would be similar.)

In one study in Amherst, Mass., cluster housing with a dedicated open space appreciated at a rate of 22% annually, where the increase in value of properties in an otherwise-comparable conventional subdivision rose by 19.5%.

What happens when property values go up? People pay more taxes. In Chattanooga, property taxes went up almost 100% from 1988 to 1996. A greenbelt in Boulder, Colo., was found to have added half a million in tax dollars each year.

Which all leads to more money in the local economy.

Prices on products in districts with trees were found to be on average 11% higher than in districts with no trees! And purchasers rated the products 30% better in quality and satisfaction when purchased in an area with sidewalk landscaping. Riverwalk Park in San Antonio, Tx., an area of outdoor cafés, bars, art galleries and hotels, has overtaken the Alamo as the city’s most popular tourist attraction.

Neighbourhoods with parks have been shown to attraction affluent retirees. According to a study by John L. Crompton in Chicago in 2001, a hundred retirees with $40,000 incomes make a similar economic impact as a new business that spends $4 million in the community. Retirees are also positive taxpayers, in that they pay for more services than they actually use, such as contributing substantially to schools in which they have no children enrolled.

Knowledge workers — and our economy is now based on knowledge-sellers versus labour-sellers — love parks too. These are people employed in the “footloose” sector: creatives, service providers and techies who aren’t tied down geographically to their jobs. These are the people who make places with a diversity and abundance of outdoor recreational activities so desirable — look at Portland, Seattle, Austin, Denver, and our very own Vancouver. These are terrific outdoor cities that are also leaders in knowledge-based fields.

People just want to be near pretty green spots. In the U.S., two-thirds of the people who buy homes on the ubiquitous golf-course residential development don’t even play golf.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but parks even reduce crime. The Human-Environment Research at the University of Illinois looked at apartment buildings that were otherwise virtually identical and found that crime was directly disproportionate to the amount of vegetation nearby. The greener the surroundings, the fewer crimes occurred — almost half as many in those buildings with “high” vegetation, and almost 40% less in those with “medium” vegetation. Prior studies found that residents surrounded by greenery experienced fewer quality of life crimes, like littering and graffiti, as well as fewer disruptive problems, like noisy neighbours. People said they felt safer, and in spite of what you might assume about barren areas versus heavily treed areas (where the latter might provide shelter for criminals), statistically they were safer.

Time spent in nature relieves mental fatigue, which in turn relieves irritability and impulsivity, both precursors to violence. Time in nature restores directed attention capacity, according to the Journal of Environmental Psychology. When concentration is restored, so is the ability and willingness to handle tasks and problems thoughtfully and calmly. Calm, thoughtful people make great neighbours.

So get out here, folks, and play in the park.