But the Bay Area is also thinking of sustainability in terms of smarter growth throughout the region as a whole. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) has identified Priority Development Areas to encourage infill development, combining housing, amenities, and transit in a walkable environment.

These increasingly dense areas will need carefully planned parks. Some jurisdictions have done little more than hope for additional green space, while others have worked diligently but unsuccessfully to acquire parkland. Still others have succeeded in creating new parks but now have difficulty funding their maintenance.

To provide some guidance, The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence performed a study for ABAG, one component of which was identifying examples of how recently-completed infill parks were financed. We will be publishing each of the four case studies over the next several weeks. First up is Doyle Hollis Park in Emeryville.

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Tiny Emeryville, squeezed between Oakland, Berkeley and the Bay Bridge, has 10,000 residents and 20,000 daytime workers on only 1.2 square miles of land. For most of the 20th century it was an industrial center, famous for meatpacking plants and a Sherwin-Williams paint factory. It has since evolved into a hub for biotech and software companies, including Pixar Animation Studios, as well as a major shopping destination.

Emeryville has a dearth of parkland, particularly parkland away from San Francisco Bay, east of Interstate 80, since that highway is a significant physical and psychological barrier to the enjoyment of green space along the waterfront. The city also has a demand for auto parking because of the daily commuter influx. Doyle Hollis Park grew out of the competition between these two forces.

The park site was slated to become a parking structure. Credit: MIG, Inc. Courtesy Emeryville Planning and Building Department.

In 1999, when the city’s planning department began to develop the North Hollis Area Plan, situated in the transition zone from commercial to residential, it focused upon a warehouse in the block bounded by Doyle and Hollis Streets. In 2002, the warehouse site was slotted for a parking structure and steps were taken to relocate the tenant and arrange acquisition.

During this time, citizen opposition to the idea of a parking structure in the geographic heart of the North Hollis Area grew. The proposed six-story, 700-vehicle building abutted a low-density neighborhood and stood across from a middle school that lacked playing fields. It would have also shaded the new Emeryville Greenway and a pocket park.

“We first considered putting the garage beneath the park,” said Planner Diana Keena, “but the site is so narrow that just the entryway would have consumed a third of the space.” The city also considered building a smaller structure or allowing diagonal street parking around the perimeter of the park, but those, too, would have swallowed most of the park.

Neighbors, who had coalesced a few years earlier to redesign the greenway as a park rather than as a tree-lined auto-oriented street, arose again, voicing opposition to the parking structure, lobbying individual councilmembers, and gaining the support of the school board. “With persistence and a lot of hard work, we eventually convinced the City Council that a park — not a parking structure — was the right thing for the neighborhood,” recalls Jim Martin, one of the original leaders of Doyle Street Neighbors. The group ultimately convinced the City Council to rezone the block to open space.

Kids playing at Doyle Hollis Park. Credit: MIG, Inc. Courtesy Emeryville Planning and Building Department.

From then on, things moved relatively quickly. In 2005 the site, which had already been on the city’s acquisition list, was bought by the Emeryville Redevelopment Agency for $5.1 million, using capital improvement funds from a combination of tax revenue and bond proceeds. That same year, Economic Development Coordinator Ignacio Dayrit, now with the non-profit, San Francisco-based Center for Creative Land Recycling, secured a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) brownfield assessment grant for Emeryville, $75,000 of which was applied to the Hollis Doyle parcel. (The site was found to have some petroleum contamination.) Also in 2005, Gates Associates was hired to do planning and community workshops for the park. Later, a $200,000 brownfield cleanup grant was used for site remediation, along with a $500,000 loan from the EPA’s Brownfield Revolving Fund, which was matched with $100,000 from the redevelopment agency. (The loan has since been repaid by the city.)

Design, construction, and remediation added up to $5.25 million, some of which was paid for through the city’s community development block grant program ($109,557), the California workforce housing benefits program ($37,000), and the StopWaste.org Bay-Friendly Landscaping program ($25,000). All told, $10.35 million was spent on the park. Day-to-day park maintenance is handled by the Emeryville Department of Public Works and costs approximately $53,000 a year.

Basketball court at Doyle Hollis Park, with fountain in foreground. Credit: MIG, Inc. Courtesy Emeryville Planning and Building Department.

Opened in 2009 after a year of construction, the 1.25-acre park includes a children’s play area, restrooms, a recreation lawn, a basketball court, a rain garden that processes 85 percent of stormwater runoff on-site, and a striking public art fountain designed by artist Masayuki Nagase. It opened “to great fanfare,” according to City Manager Pat O’Keefe, and Diana Keena remembers that eager children crawled under the construction fencing to play on the climbing structures before it was dedicated.  Since then, park use has exceeded all expectations. “During lunchtime on a sunny day the place is packed with workers, kids, and food vendors,” notes Jim Martin.

As for the existing parking concerns, the city is attempting to address them through transit improvements, including the free Emery-Go-Round shuttle that links downtown to the MacArthur BART station one mile away, partnering with developers in providing public parking components to private parking structures, and prodding employers to offer their workers free transit passes. Finally, Emeryville plans to install meters for all street parking to nudge more drivers into existing garages that traditionally have been underused. The efforts are already successful – recent statistics show that the single-occupancy-vehicle commuting rate of employees to Emeryville is only 36 percent, well below the East Bay average.

This is a complex question. An individual’s willingness to walk varies greatly depending on age, health, time availability, quality of surroundings, safety, climate, and many other factors. On top of the variability in walking patterns, a city’s density has a bearing on what is considered a reasonable distance and where it is cost effective to add new parks.

The majority of walking studies are for and about commuters. Broadly speaking, they indicate that most people are only willing to walk a quarter-mile as part of a commute. A New York Regional Plan Association study, for example, found that residents within a quarter-mile of a transit facility are 5 to 7 times more likely to walk to the station than other passengers.[1]

Credit: Lynn D. Rosentrater (Flickr Feed).

The quarter-mile standard is also supported by park equity research. Jennifer Wolch, now at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in 2002 that a quarter-mile is reasonable “for parents taking toddlers and small children to a park for everyday outings and playground opportunities.”  In the context of Los Angeles, she noted, “trips of more than a quarter mile (especially in high-traffic areas or neighborhoods where parents have safety concerns) are unlikely to be acceptable to parents.”[2] 

Conversely, several studies show that a half-mile walk is well within a reasonable distance for most people. The 2002 National Survey of Bicyclist and Pedestrian Attitudes and Behavior, by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, surveyed almost 10,000 people over the age of 16 and found that only 5 percent of walking trips were for getting to work. [3] (This suggests that transit studies should not be too heavily relied upon to determine a reasonable distance to a park.) Of the other trips, 38 percent were for personal errands, 28 percent were for exercise, and 21 percent were for recreation or leisure. The average trip length was 1.3 miles.

A 1976 study of the Bay Area transit system found that only 50 percent of riders who walked to the facility came from within a six-minute walk, but 80 percent came from within ten minutes, or approximately a half-mile.[4] This data supports cities that set a standard of a half-mile (and in some cases, more) as a reasonable distance to walk to a park. Perhaps the crux of the issue is: do people consider walking to the park a chore, or is the walk part of the recreational experience itself?

This isn’t as funny as it sounds. A 1997 study from Austin, Texas stated that “utilitarian and recreational walk activities have been found to have distinct structural characteristics.…Walk distance and duration for commuting, shopping, and reaching transportation are shorter, and recreational walks for exercise, walking the dog, and socializing are longer.”[5] 

Transit-based studies also underscore people’s variability: most won’t walk much more than a quarter-mile to a bus stop, but most will walk up to a half-mile to a commuter rail station. Parks, too, draw pedestrians from “catchment areas” of various sizes, depending on their quality and amenities offered. In a 2002 article, Van Herzele and Weidemann note that “the maximum walking distance may differ according to the function a green space fulfils.”[6]

In summary, research supports the validity of both quarter-mile and half-mile distance goals, depending on perceptions of the built environment, safety, and time constraints. Of course, people’s preferences and habits are only part of the equation for planners, who must also take into account the cost effectiveness of expanding the park system versus improving current parks or focusing on connectivity.

Density is a major factor. Building a new park in a low-density area (5 units per acre) provides access to only about 1,500 people within a quarter-mile range.  In a very dense area (90 units per acre) it serves close to 30,000. So even if planners in, say, Charlotte found a reluctance to walk more than a quarter-mile to a park, the city still probably could not afford to build a park for every 1,500 residents.

The following table illustrates the total population within quarter-mile and half-mile buffers in areas of varying density:

He sees parks as a way to increase density without sacrificing beauty and creativity. This is a somewhat of a twist on the usual tension between density and open space, in which cities have to force developers to include parks as an offset to residential and commercial projects (in a future article, we’ll discuss Seattle’s Green Factor codes, which require new developments in dense areas to provide publicly accessible and visible landscaping).

In Toronto, Lamb wants to build a slender 47-story residential tower and replace the podium space of other towers with a tiny park (the entire lot is only 62 by 200 feet). The building is between two historic buildings and the park would feature a lawn, benches, and a fountain.

His plans, though, face some opposition from city planners. This is certainly not the first time that open space and density have struggled to coexist.

Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco. Credit: Kenneth Lu (Flickr Feed)

San Francisco’s Proposition K, otherwise known as the Sunlight Ordinance, was the source of a recent clash between parks advocates and proponents of dense, transit-oriented city living. Passed in 1984, the ordinance bans the development of any building over forty feet that would cast a shadow on an existing park.

The Sunlight Ordinance halted the development of a group of residential towers, part of the high-profile remake of the Transbay Transit Center, when it was discovered that two of the towers would cast a shadow on nearby parks. The shadows would have fallen on St. Mary’s and Portsmouth Squares for an hour a day in the spring and fall, and on Justin Herman Plaza for an hour around lunchtime in the middle of winter.

The project, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, eventually got the go-ahead, in part because developers agreed to pay $10 million for park improvements and to offset the impact of the shadows by building a 5.4-acre rooftop park over the transit center.  The park, which according to this video has the potential to match the grandeur of Chicago’s Millennium Park, will feature an open air amphitheatre, gardens, a trail for running and walking, open grass areas for picnics, lily ponds and more.

It will also provide significant environmental benefits by minimizing the heat island effect, regulating interior temperatures, and absorbing and filtering pollutants rising from the terminal, which will connect 11 regional transit systems and accommodate 100,000 passengers each day.

With more people yearning to move into cities, it is critical to ensure that densification and parks are mutually reinforcing. And in the end, there is no reason why they should not be: people in dense areas need nearby parks for health and relaxation, and parks benefit from a lively atmosphere that comes from being close to homes, shops, transit and workplaces. With the recent success of Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s High Line, cities such as Los Angeles , Seattle and San Diego are recognizing the potential of elevated parks to encourage density while also generating excitement and boosting livability.

Gold Medal Park, nestled in the Mill District mixed-use neighborhood in Minneapolis has been a draw for downtown residents.

More parents with children are living in downtown Minneapolis neighborhoods, says a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. We’ve reported on this trend in places such as Portland, and have made the case that cities need to provide the parks and playgrounds that parents want if they are to have truly diverse neighborhoods from young to old.

The article makes it pretty clear what downtown parents want — parks and playgrounds.  Given the lack of backyards and schools in the downtown Minneapolis area, a group of parents “agreed the single thing most necessary to make the neighborhood more livable was a playground” and they started lobbying the city. A playground is now being built. A city council aide says also that “there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of young children living downtown, which is supported by the number of calls we’ve gotten requesting family-friendly areas.” (The city also recently built Gold Medal Park along the riverfront, which is cited as another draw.)

There is an issue of space — and developers and planners may be reluctant to take land away from buildings. But a lot of recreational activity can fit into a one or two-acre site (i.e. about one square block), more units can be added to buildings to make up for it and more people — parents in this case — will want to live in this setting. In the end, perhaps the real test of what makes a neighborhood livable is whether it is kid-friendly — and parks are necessary to making that happen.

Environmental impacts will occur with development; to limit them, we must concentrate them, and this can mean increasing them in some places.  This is what I call the environmental paradox of smart growth.  Only if we understand the paradox can we address it.  Only if we address it can we really create better places in which to live, work, and play – and surely that, not just lowering pollution numbers, must be our real goal.

Kaid goes on to describe how parks, stormwater mitigation and other efforts can make smart growth a more complete movement. He uses Ballston, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. as an example of a neighborhood that infilled and increased density and population (by 10,000 people) but didn’t add any green space.

In a second post, examples of “green density” are provided. Anyone who is a smart growth advocate would find these two posts worthwhile. Also, anyone who supports a more pleasant and environmentally friendly public realm, especially those who are skeptical of density, would benefit in seeing these examples of how it can work.

Midtown Greenway, Minneapolis

There is a symbiotic relationship between parks and population density. For those living in compact housing around a park’s borders, there is respite, a place to recreate, a back yard where little private outdoor space exists and an amenity that increases property values. For the park, there’s the “eyes” that make it safer, more property taxes to keep it maintained, nearby users to keep it vibrant and able to maximize its value as a public amenity.

While many parks are historically located in dense urban surroundings, the relationship of compactness and greenspace has not been an area of much attention in urban planning circles.

That may be changing to some extent. In Minneapolis, the city appears to be close to rezoning land along the Midtown Greenway, a 5-mile crosstown trail and linear park that links the city’s lakes to the Mississippi River. If passed in its proposed form, according to the Star Tribune:

Population density likely would increase along the popular Midtown Greenway…… One major reason for installing recreational paths was to spur redevelopment in blighted areas along the corridor. The proposal would raise residential zoning for some parcels, while rezoning some industrial parcels to residential.

Mostly located inside a former railroad trench, the bike and hike trail is largely undisturbed by cross streets, making it the fastest way to get across town and a popular place for recreation. (The Midtown Greenway Coalition is also helping build pocket parks with public performance spaces and gardens along the route.)

The Star Tribune also reports that a group of concerned citizens would like “additional protections, expressing concern that shade from taller housing developments and added advertising from commercial development could hurt recreational use of paths.”

These are legitimate concerns, and hopefully they can be dealt with in a way that ensures that density can be increased. As David Owen has pointed out in his book Green Metropolis, compact cities are the most carbon friendly. Concentrating more development along the greenway would: help the region decrease its reliance on the automobile, increase safety and usership of the trail and increase property tax revenue to the city. The key is balancing the concerns of residents.

If it does so, the city would be setting a great example of the kind of density-trails, yin and yang relationship (we’ve mentioned before) that has its roots in this country’s early urban green spaces.

For the most part, Owen is right on and the book is a good read. Citing high transit use, walkability and tightly packed buildings, he notes that “the average New Yorker annually generates 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases, a lower rate than that of residents of any other American city, and less than 30 percent of the national average, which is 24.5 metric tons.”

While the author has many strong arguments that will help change people’s view of dense cities, sometimes his thinking contradicts what actually is happening. First is the inference that New York is so compact, that biking is a common occurrence. The fact is that New York City ranks 32nd among U.S. big cities in bike commuting, and density alone does not guarantee high biking rates. Only under recent leadership has the city built substantial bike facilities, which requires taking away car space. Yet Owen disparages Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to institute a congestion charge, even though it would have provided additional funding and roadway for bicycle and bus lanes. And he oddly objects to the city’s “Summer Streets” program, which banned cars from about seven miles of streets for three Saturdays in August, saying initiatives like this “treat pedestrians and bicyclists the way Robert Moses used to treat cars, by segregating them on expressways of their own.” What’s the problem with that?

The Central Park Mall, New York City.

The book also seems to veer off a bit when Owen infers that Central Park and Prospect Park are too big. While concerns about safety need attention, in most people’s view it’s wrong to say that these parks should not exist as they do. Meandering within the parks’ natural settings and enjoying the hundreds of things to do there is a joy to many who live in the city. In fact, Manhattan is still as densely populated and energy-saving as it is even with Central Park. Without it, probably more people would prefer leaving for sparsely populated New England hamlets as Owen did. A better point would be that the number of large parks should be limited and that they are more successful with packed housing around their perimeters — something exhibited by Central Park in any aerial picture.

But Owen nails it when he says that in built out cities, what is really needed to entice density are smaller parks within walking distance of residents. He has some wonderful points about the value of places such as Washington Square Park and how recreational space should be “distributed around the city” and placed “toward outer edges,” such as waterfronts.

In this lies the key to environmental sustainability: livable compactness. And on that is one of the most important points of the book, that “environmentalists tend to focus on defending places where people aren’t rather than on intelligently organizing the places where people are.” This means thinking just as much about creating pleasurable and compact cities for families as much or more about protecting land on the urban fringe. Because by doing so, curbing sprawl and reducing energy use is exactly what can be achieved.

But the reason for those public spaces might surprise modern visitors: British General James Oglethorpe designed them as part of a military grid so his troops could set up camp and have shaded meeting spots. The soldiers were there to keep the Spanish from advancing north to the English colony in Charleston, S.C., and Oglethorpe’s statue faces south, as if still keeping a watchful eye on things.

Originally the city had 24 squares. It’s a remarkable feat of preservation that 22 are still in existence and one more is being restored.

Today the squares are home to great old Oaks, benches for people to sit, gardens, meandering pathways and attractive fountains that invite people in and make the city such a pleasant place to be.

Much of their success also has to do with the street layout, in which the squares usually occupy a square block and streets intersect but do not pass through — essentially encouraging through pedestrian traffic. (See figure below.) Via PPS, a submission on the squares quotes Allan Jacobs, author of the definitive book Great Streets, who wrote “. . . [T]he grid pattern of Savannah . . . is like no other we know in its fineness and its distinguishable squares. . . . [O]nce seen it is unforgettable, and it carries over into real life experience. See it . . ., in person, on the ground, and it is not difficult to draw. See it in plan, on a map, and you will recognize it on the ground.”

As cities have rebounded, and walkable urbanism has emerged again as a priority for planners, creating the day-to-day park experiences found in the pedestrian green spaces of Savannah is surely one model to consider.

Least kids found in most intense development areas, Vancouver. cc: Regarding Place

Vancouver, Canada is considered a model for infilling with compact, densely populated development. But there is a problem to this. As Regarding Place points out, a map of the distribution of children in the city shows that few of them are in areas that have seen the most concentrated development in the past few decades. This brings to mind an excerpt out of Mark Hinshaw’s great book True Urbanism, in which he devotes an entire chapter to planning for families. One of the elements Hinshaw makes particular mention of is parks — specifically, smaller parks that can address families’ needs.

As with schools, many city parks departments have in the past invested in peripheral locations, with the result that few downtowns offer green spaces. But this is changing as well. Jamison Square, within the central city area of Portland, was designed specifically with children in mind. Tucked into single 200-foot by 200-foot block is a large grassy areas where kids can play. But the most brilliant element is a water feature that gurgles up successive waves of water that then drain into a basin.

On any given sunny day – even on some that are not – children scamper about, get soaked, lie in the shallow pool, or lounge on the water-covered rocks. Parents sit nearby on stepped stone walls or benches and chat. On weekends, some families have picnics in this wonderful bit of open space right in the middle of the city.

Older cities such as Boston, New York and Chicago have long traditions of building parks that accommodate children right within dense urban neighborhoods. They may be small by suburban standards, but they are green and active nonetheless. As with many other elements of our culture in the last several decades, we have confused quantity with quality; we have held fast to the belief that bigger and more is always better.

But that is a false sense of what makes communities work and it may not even be sustainable over the long term given the costs of maintenance, water, and energy. Small, thoughtfully designed, and well-managed spaces can serve families with children within urban neighborhoods quite well.

Jamison Square, Portland; cc: Flickr user VJ_PDX

Jane Jacobs

Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute and author of the recently released book on Jane Jacobs pens a piece for the Boston Globe outlining a blueprint for a good city, using the lessons from both Jacobs and her adversary Robert Moses. Flint specifically points out the role of increasing density in making housing more affordable and available, and notes its importance to places such as parks.

We need to embrace density, which increases supply to meet the great demand for living in cities, in the places where it’s appropriate and desirable……The edges of the [Boston's] Rose Kennedy Greenway are a good example. Jacobs advocated low-rise streetscapes like Greenwich Village, but she was not adamant against towers, as long as the ground-floor experience was friendly for the pedestrian. She realized that density translates to activity in parks and open space and on the streets and sidewalks. There’s plenty of capacity in downtown Boston for all of this, as the city considers redevelopment proposals at the Government Center and Harbor garages.

In other words, density and parks complement each other.