Among the 25 largest cities, Atlanta has the smallest percent of land dedicated to parks.  Even if the BeltLine reaches its goal of creating more than 1,000 acres of new parkland, Atlanta would only move to 23rd.  To put the problem in perspective, about 4.5% of Atlanta is parkland.  In New York that figure is almost  20%.  Same with San Francisco.  In Boston, it's 18%.

Parks improve all of our lives by cleaning the air we breathe, attracting economic development, providing positive activities for our children and increasing the likelihood that residents will exercise and get healthy.  Cities like Chattanooga, Portland and Minneapolis -- and even New York -- see parks as economic development tools, successfully leveraging investments in their park systems to attract new residents and businesses.

So how does Atlanta get out of last place?  The BeltLine is a good start, but it is not enough.  We need to invest millions of dollars to acquire land, build new parks and improve park maintenance.  The Parks Atlanta Rescue Coalition - dozens of park and community organizations - is trying to do just that.  To learn more about P.A.R.C. and their efforts, visit http://www.parkpride.org/get-involved/advocacy/parc.

And please share your own thoughts and ideas about how we can create more and better parks all over Atlanta so that we all can live cleaner, greener and healthier lives.

I didn't know that Atlanta was so far behind some of the other major cities with regards to greenspace.   Are there things that other cities have done that can be replicated here?  Is there open space that can be developed into parks?  From visiting the website it looks like the initiative has a lot of political support.   How can that momentum help the movement?

I first learned this statistic from the Trust for Public Land and then later learned more from the Beltline.  The interesting thing is that I always thought of Atlanta as such a green place.  So many trees you can't even see the houses when you fly into the city.  It's amazing that we have so little investment in green space!  George - do you know where the two mayoral candidates stand on funding more green space?  I've heard both of them pro-Beltline, but have not heard anything specific related to our park future.

You have to put those stats into perspective, though. Firstly, just because we have a low percentage of parks, that does not mean that we have a low percentage of greenspace. Elaborating on Jeannie's comment, Atlanta is overflowing with trees and other elements of greenspace. Luckily, unlike other cities (New York being the perfect example), we don't need to wander over to a park in order to find greenspace. It's in our backyards, lining our streets. Secondly, I would be interested to know the amount of land that we have dedicated to parks in Atlanta, versus the amount of land that other cities have dedicated to parks. Percentages are one thing, but they rely upon the actual size of the city for their weight. Acreage is an important additional statistic. And then you have to consider Atlanta's status as a sprawled city with a small urban core (in contrast to cities such as New York and Boston). I would be interested to know the amount of parks in our more peripheral (though still significant) areas. (Not the entire metropolitan area, mind you, but at least the areas inside the Perimeter.) I think that when you consider all of that, you would find that Atlanta shapes up pretty well next to other cities when it comes to greenspace ... possibly topping the list.

Before I came to Park Pride, I had the opportunity to hear Charles Brewer speak at Park Pride's annual conference.  Charles relayed the tale of visiting an old friend (from college, I believe), with whom he used to play a lot of volleyball.  They had both moved on and were successful in life, and his friend moved to a suburb of New York where he had a nice house with a big yard, lots of trees and a volleyball court.  After some small talk and a quick tour of the house, Charles motioned toward the empty & obviously unused volleyball court and said - "So, play any good volleyball games lately?"  The moral of his story:  it's awful hard to play volleyball by yourself.

Street trees and 20' setbacks are not parks and not public greenspace.  While they may serve some of the same environmental functions, they serve none of the social, economic development or recreational functions.  Moreover, development that allows larger private greenspaces creates greatly increased car-dependence, increasing congestion, air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution and other environmental harms.  From an environmental perspective, parks are a vital part of smart growth, walkable communities and increased quality of life.

In regards to Atlanta's quantity of parkland, it is poor anyway you slice it.  You can see that in the Trust for Public Land data at http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cd.cfm?content_item_id=20531&folder_id=3208.  We may not rank last in terms of parkland per resident, but we are at about half the national average among cities of similar density.  The surrounding communities are by and large worse - with Gwinnett and to a lesser extent Roswell doing a better job.  There is some data in an old AJC article at http://www.parkpride.org/media/content/article1--09-2-17-ajc-compiled.pdf.

The two mayoral candidates are aware of the problem and supportive of efforts to address it.  The issue will be how do we afford this investment.  The answer is that, in the long-term, we cannot afford to ignore the problem.  Investments in parkland will drive economic development and help the City and region attract retirees and knowledge workers -- folks who generally pay more in taxes than they consume in services, and folks who can live wherever they want.  The ASAP plan referenced in my initial email provides a 3-4 year road map to get where we need to be, which is dedicated funding to support this important investment.

George - are you familiar with ARCs work in growing Green Space?  I noticed this when I was looking for something else on the ARC's web site:

http://www.atlantaregional.com/html/259.aspx

Some very interesting info about their green space vidsion.  In the video Dan Reuters mentions that there is an on-line tool where you can identify the green space in your community with satellite photos - looks like it's on the same page as the video (http://www.atlantaregional.com/html/259.aspx).  He says that ARC is working with TPL and Georgia Conservancy.  Is Park Pride a part of this process with ARC?

Although I agree that private greenspaces do not perform the same social functions as private greenspaces, let us not forget that they do perform important social functions, just on a smaller scale (families instead of groups of families) and on intrapersonal levels instead of on interpersonal ones (psychological benefits). Plus, I'm not entirely clear on the logic that an increased amount of private greenspace causes increased congestion. I think the two are correlated, but only because there's a third variable at play: sprawl, which, I would argue, actually is the cause of congestion and the other environmental ills that you mentioned. Or, at least, it is more directly the cause of those things. Private greenspace is largely associated with sprawl, but it should not be conflated with it. I think better transportation platforms would help solve the problem. (Certainly, transportation solutions that help increase public greenspace, such as the BeltLine, would be great, but they would help solve the problems you mentioned not because of the greenspace aspect, but because of the transportation aspect; the two can be divided.)