Big Answer in Tiny Parks

Good luck finding a place to hunt Easter eggs today if you live in one of Los Angeles’ poorest City Council districts. In a city that trails its peers in the ratio of park acres per resident, these are the most park-poor neighborhoods of all.

Los Angeles averages just 1.1 acres of neighborhood park space per 1,000 residents, far short of its goal of four acres. The six council districts encompassing South-Central, southeast and northeast Los Angeles and the northeast San Fernando Valley have less than half the already pitiful city average, just 0.445 acres per 1,000 residents. That’s hardly enough space for an Easter picnic, much less for a soccer game.

Numbers alone make a powerful argument for putting more parks in these neighborhoods, and a coalition of community and environmental groups argued just that before a City Council committee last week. But it’s the faces behind the numbers--the kids who have no place to run off boundless kid energy or just enjoy grass and trees--that should compel residents rich and poor to urge their council members to support the coalition’s call for an urban land trust.

The goal of the trust would be both ambitious and simple: to put a park within walking or biking distance of every child, and to do this by rethinking what a park is. What the coalition envisions is not the standard five-acre park that the city parks department has long developed--and has a hard time maintaining. The aim instead is pocket parks on vacant lots, however small, or where neglected buildings could be removed. In these slivers of land there may be room for a sandbox, some swings and a slide. Or grass and trees and pick-up basketball.

Neighborhood groups would help develop parks and act as stewards, with support from nonprofit groups. Money would come from private foundations, corporate donors and recently passed state and local park bonds, with the city helping groups navigate the application process. The trust would serve as the link between neighborhoods and City Hall, where Councilman Eric Garcetti is overseeing a task force to study similar trusts in other cities.

The momentum for parks is building. A community coalition recently won its battle to turn the Cornfield and Taylor Yards, two former rail yards near downtown Los Angeles, into state parks with greenbelts and playing fields. Pocket parks in the city’s most park-poor neighborhoods should be the next gems in this new necklace of green.