When a single good-sized maple tree can add over $7,000 to a home’s sale value, according to a study in Portland, Oregon, it’s not difficult to imagine the effect of turning large swaths of derelict urban land into parks, gardens, and playgrounds. Private properties in financial distress, or “redfields,” are the focus of a number of cities, such as Philadelphia, that are developing creative re-utilization strategies for underused land.

Increased property values are expected to be one of the most profound impacts of the Green 2015 initiative; the report states that vacant properties can reduce adjacent home values by 6-20%, adding up to a total of $3.6 billion in lost household wealth across the city.

Parks can significantly increase nearby property values, as evidenced in the real estate that surrounds Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia.

Well-tended parks could not only eliminate this negative effect, but also significantly improve the value of nearby residences. The Center for City Park Excellence has calculated that Philadelphia’s 10,000 acre park system is responsible for adding $220 million to the assessed value of nearby homes. Though the study only included parks larger than one acre, it is known that even small green spaces can influence property values. 

As part of its Green City Blue Lake initiative, Cleveland began the ReImagining a Greater Cleveland program in 2008, which is focused largely on promoting urban agriculture and green infrastructure. Cleveland has 20,000 vacant lots, 5,000 of which are held in a land bank. With funds from the Surdna Foundation, Neighborhood Progress, Inc., and Cleveland’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program, 56 community groups have started pilot projects which the city will examine to develop best practices moving forwards.

Residents of Baltimore have undertaken many self-motivated conversions of city-owned vacant land.  Community gardens, pocket parks, and horseshoe courts, often marked with handmade signs, have sprouted up in unused lots. When the city recently announced efforts to accelerate the sale of 14,000 of its vacant lots, a group called Baltimore Green Space responded by enlisting residents to help catalog the vacant properties which they had converted, which the city plans to use to help preserve up to 300 green spaces.

Miami-Dade County’s redfields to greenfields plan, centered on the creation of transit-oriented parks alongside the Metrorail line and Miami River greenways, emphasizes job creation as a primary benefit. The construction industry (hit hard by the same recession responsible for the glut of abandoned properties in the region) could stand to gain over 14,000 jobs per year over five years, reports the City Parks Alliance.

The process of cleaning up vacant sites can be green and economical, too. The Dirt (ASLA blog) featured an article recently detailing how abandoned brownfield sites can be cleaned up with a process called phytoremediation, in which plants absorb toxins into their tissue. Some plants eliminate the toxins entirely, while others have to be removed as hazardous waste. In any case, the process, used by Cleveland in some of its pilot projects, can be 90% cheaper than traditional methods while providing the added bonus of improved air quality and stormwater retention.

Cities pursuing redfield to greenfield strategies are varied in terms of geography and economic history, but their ethos, summed up nicely by ReImagining a Greater Cleveland, is the same:

A city’s weakness is only as weak as their lack of ability to see potential in the opportunity any ‘crisis’ affords.

In the 19th century, Baltimore was one of the greenest cities, with the creation of Druid Hill Park, Patterson Park and others.  But as other older cities such as New York, Chicago, and Boston have made huge investments in their park systems by adding new glamour parks, Baltimore has been neglecting its own green gems.

The biggest problem in Baltimore has been a lack of working together between the private sector and the public agency,” [Peter] Harnik says. “The private sector can’t do it alone, and in 90 percent of all cities the public sector can’t do it alone either.

While the poor economy has depleted city funds, the general lack of support from government and local businesses has not helped the situation.  To make matters worse, there has also been high turnover among staff in the Parks and Recreation Department.

There have been some successes, namely with the work of the neighborhood group Friends of Patterson Park, but much more is needed.

“I would like to see that every park has a ‘Friends’ group, and every city has an umbrella group that lobbies the city council and lobbies the mayor, almost like a union,” Harnik says. The city also needs a deep-pocketed conservancy that channels private contributions to parks. “They’re the ones that step up to the plate and do extraordinary fundraising to build a beautiful parks system.”

For a more in-depth discussion of the work the Friends of Patterson Park have done in Baltimore, read this article from Landscape Architecture.  For more information about Druid Hill Park, see an earlier post.

Independence National Historical Park. Credit: NPS

It is easy to forget the many different types of parkland located in urban areas. Besides municipal parks, there are also state, county, regional and national parks. In the 85 largest cities, 15 cities are home to 48 National Park units, which include monuments, houses, forts, battlefields and preserves. Washington, D.C. has by far the most national park units (21 and counting) but smaller park units in other cities are also recruiting new staff.

With half of the nation’s park rangers slated for retirement in the next five years, the National Park Service has struggled with recruitment of new staff, especially in the urban park units. Enter in the “ProRanger Philadelphia” internship program, a joint effort between Temple University and the National Park Service, that placed 13 college students in urban national parks this summer. This pilot program trains (and pays) interns the beginnings of law enforcement while also exposing them to interpretation and maintenance of the park. While the program is targeted towards Criminal Justice majors, students from any major can apply. After successful completion of the program, interns are guaranteed National Park Service jobs upon graduation from college. The 12-week summer program can begin as early as the summer after freshman year.

One of the exciting aspects of this program is that it is attracting minorities to a career path that is not really diverse within the Park Service. Many of the students participating in the program had never met a park ranger before or even visited a national park. Others had never even considered a career with the Park Service. This program is giving urban minority students an opportunity to work in a national park in their home communities and should be used as a great catalyst to bring visibility as well as new users to city parks.

Recent articles in The Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer highlight the program at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore and Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, respectively. More information about the ProRanger Philadelphia program can be found here.

The Sun recommends that a 5-cent fee “should be seen as an investment in a cleaner, greener Baltimore, not just another revenue stream for the city’s general fund.” It recommends that the council “earmark the proceeds for the kinds of environmental enhancements people can appreciate, such as cleaning up the city’s waterways, planting trees or upgrading parks and bike trails.”

The city once had a dedicated fee for parks. In 1860, the city imposed a trolley fare tax that generated millions of dollars for the city’s greenspaces for 80 years.

While these fees are very different from one another, it does show that there is a history of establishing dedicated funding for the environment in Baltimore.

(It would be interesting to look at plastic bag usage compared to transit usage.  Many Baltimore residents may actually use more plastic bags than they do public transit.)

In Druid Hill Park: the heart of historic Baltimore, authors Eden Unger Bowditch and Anne Draddy give great insight into how cities and their political leaders once strived to provide beautiful pleasure grounds for their residents. Having a great park put cities on the map.

After years of urban decline and residents moving to suburbs, several features and buildings in the park have suffered drastic decay, sometimes to the point that they were demolished or closed to the public. Reading about these structures and thinking about their current state brings both a feeling of nostalgia and demoralization.

One of the most striking examples is the Grand Promenade (sometimes called “the Mall” or “yellow brick road” for its paving scheme). The quarter-mile allée was once lined with trees and benches that led to a Turkish-style Music Pavilion and hosted the park’s one-time band, other concerts and was demolished in 1961. Today the walkway has been relegated to serving as a back alley and parking area for the adjacent Conservatory. The bright side is that the brick-paved mall still exists, and presents an amazing opportunity for further park revitalization as the city slowly works to rebuild itself.

The park director’s mansion is also mentioned in the book. The house that sits on the very edge of the park has all but fallen into the ground after years of neglect. Amazingly though, in a true sign that the park is on the mend, the Baltimore Parks & People Foundation is raising funds to create a nature center and move its offices to what will be remarkable renovation.

The history of this public place also shows the country’s trek through segregation and civil rights. For years, a “colored only” pool separated whites and blacks. Today the pool is filled with earth, its water now only imagined through the green grass gracing the surface.

Druid Hill is not only a treasure of Baltimore, but a true gem of an American urban park. It seems to reflect the history of Baltimore itself — its growth, its struggles with race, its decline and today, its slow and winding path toward revitalization. Let’s hope that the latter continues to make the park a greater natural and public place for the city.

A brush clearing goat. cc: the Sun

Revitalization starts with goats, or so it goes for Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park. The city’s Parks and People Foundation is undertaking a $10 million renovation of a decrepit mansion on the edge of the historic 745-acre park that will house an environmental learning center, the group’s main offices and trail connections to the rest of the park. With the mansion property in need of severe brush clearing, the group weighed the options and found the most reasonable to be hiring a goat herd.

The Baltimore Sun covered the herd of 40 urban brush chewers and reported the following:

“They’ll eat just about anything, except the stuff that’s poisonous,” Knox said…….. The Boar and Spanish species of goats in their second day on the job had been eating much of the vegetation and left a lot of twigs and bare trees. They can reach up to 6 feet off the ground. Goats have been used around the region before to clear parks, residential properties and the shoulders of highways.

The foundation had to gain permission from animal control and health department officials to bring in the goats, which are considered exotic animals in Baltimore. There is some interest in having a resident goat to help maintain the property, but that’s still against the law in Baltimore – unless you’re the zoo. Interestingly, sheep were once used to tend to the lawns of the park, possibly through World War Two.

Patterson Park, Baltimore, Md.

On Common Ground, a magazine on smart growth of the National Association of Realtors has a great piece (pdf) on urban parks in its current issue. One of the more interesting pieces in the article is how density and parks complement each other. Baltimore’s 155-acre Patterson Park, situated in a neighborhood of tightly-knit row houses is used as an example, with quotes from Chris Ryer of the local Southeast Community Development Corporation:

The park’s Web site proudly proclaims Patterson Park as “the best back yard in Baltimore.” Ryer calls it a “classic example” of the power of parks to help make neighborhoods more valuable — especially where development is dense.

“It’s a little counter-intuitive, but you want green space in a high-density area,” he said. “The green space is what allows the density to happen. Patterson Park is a great example of that because there is nothing denser than southeast Baltimore. It’s street after street of row houses as far as the eye can see.”

That strategy — balancing the yin of green space against the yang of greater density — is a cornerstone of Smart Growth.

Smart Growth encourages compact development as an antidote to sprawl. Preserving green space is part and parcel to that approach. The green space makes the density more palatable and the density makes the green space more desirable.

Likewise, it means that cities with infill projects might consider new parks near those new developments and placing added housing near parks.