Boston’s parks have slipped further down the national rankings, barely making it into the top 15 this year after recovering slightly post-pandemic.
The city took the number fourteen spot in the Trust for Public Land (TPL) 2024 Parkscore rankings. That’s down significantly compared to previous years, with Boston netting tenth place in 2023 and twelfth place in 2022.
The city has in the past scored as high as fifth place nationally, achieved in 2015.
As in years prior, access to public land continues to be Boston’s strongest point. The city got a perfect 100 points, indicating that all residents are within a ten-minute walk of a public park.
Boston also does well when it comes to equal access, scoring a 77. White neighborhoods do have 16% more parks than communities of color, but compared to the average, neighborhoods of color only lag by 2%.
The least served neighborhoods, those being the areas of mixed or ‘other’ racial makeup, have 36% less park access than the average. That’s not too bad for a category that presumably includes industrial zones, and though Asian neighborhoods at the next lowest spot still have 30% less access.
The categories really hurting the city’s scores are park amenities, investment and sheer acreage.
Acreage is Boston’s lowest score with just a 50. The city uses 18% of its land for parks and recreation, just 3% higher than the national average. Parkscore’s access maps suggest spots just north of South Station and west of South Boston are the ripest for park development.
Boston’s amenities have gone up slightly, 58 points this year compared to 55 the last.
The city scores poorly on playgrounds and basketball courts but gets a particularly dismal score for public restrooms. Boston only has 0.5 public restrooms per 10,000 residents, getting it a 10 out of 100 for that metric.
Park investment saw a drop of 14 points since last year, settling at 65 out of 100. That score is calculated relative to the other top 100 cities, meaning Boston lags well behind its peers in how much it spends on parks.
The city invests $175 per capita. 46% of that comes from the city, with another roughly 25% each coming from private organizations and other public agencies. By comparison, Chicago spends $200 per capita and Seattle invests $367 per capita.
Boston continues to hover around New York City, which got 12th place. Washington D.C. took the top spot, with San Francisco in 7th and Chicago in 10th.
Liz Vizza, president of the Friends of the Public Garden, said that Boston’s funding landscape is a bit more complex than some comparable cities because so much city land is in fact owned by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR.)
“Boston is pretty unique in the country for having half the public acres in the city be state acres. If the DCR upped their funding, which we always advocate for, it would be a big difference,” she said.
Vizza’s recommendation to improve investment is simple. Pressure local politicians to move money to parks in the city budget, with her goal being 1% of city funding going to parks. This year that number is closer to 0.76%.
“The bathrooms are definitely where we’re lagging. The Friends’ seasonal trailer bathroom gets over 140,000 visitors each year. It’s monitored and cleaned daily, which is something people should expect in an American park. People have told us that being able to use a free bathroom when they walk into the park has literally changed their lives,” Vizza said.
Funding does tend to vary by year as major projects come and go, and that number could jump in coming budgets as the Boston Common Master Plan moves forward. Funding for a permanent public restroom serving the Common and Public Garden is among those proposals.
