How Big Is Your Piece of the Park?

According to the Parks Department, 79 percent of New Yorkers — that’s almost 8 in 10 — can walk to both a small and a large park in under 10 minutes. "We have a target that is to increase the number of New Yorkers within a walk to a park to 85 percent. Our timeline is by 2030," says Alyssa Cobb Konon, the Assistant Commissioner for Planning and Parklands for the New York City Parks Department.

It matters how close your park is, but park professionals also look at how many neighbors you're sharing it with. Dense high-rises mean a lot more park-goers than a sparse neighborhood of single family homes. That’s where the open space ratio comes in. "We look at a measure of acres of parkland per thousand people... In New York City we have 2.83 acres per 1,000 residents citywide," says Cobb Konon.

That’s a little more than two football fields that you get to share with 999 other New Yorkers.

We did our own analysis of open space ratio within a half mile, and found that this varies quite a bit by Census tract.  If you live around Midwood, you could be near a park but only have about half a football field to share with your 1,000 neighbors. Go a little north, closer to Prospect Park, and you’ve got 50 times that.  It varies from borough to borough as well — even with Central Park taking up so much space, Manhattan has the least open space, with a little over one football field per 1,000 residents. Staten Island has more than five times that.

Access is not just about area and distance, it’s also about what you're getting in a park. Looking at specific amenities, we found that more than 95 percent of residents live within a half mile of a playground but only about 79 percent of residents live within a half mile of a basketball court.

All in all, New York is doing pretty well in terms of park access. We currently rank fifth out of the 75 most populous cities in the US, according to the Trust for Public Land, a national non-profit aimed at protecting and creating parks and open space. But if you are looking for the best in parks, you’ll have to move to the Twin Cities in Minnesota.

Acres of open space per 1,000 residents by Census tract

For each census tract, we added a half-mile buffer around it and determined how much park space was within those boudaries in order to calculate the amount of space each resident has. Park data was a combination of New York City open spaces data, OpenStreetMap data for state and national parks, as well as parks near the borders of NYC, plus some manual collection of missing data.  Census tracts and demographic data are from the 2010 US Census.

Distance to nearest park by residential parcel

We determined the distance to the nearest park (as the crow flies) for every residential parcel. Park data was a combination of New York City open spaces data, OpenStreetMap data for state and national parks, as well as parks near the borders of NYC, plus some manual collection of missing data. Parcel data from the NYC PLUTO dataset.