(Credit: The Trust For Public Land)According to The Trust For Public Land, an authority on parks and green infrastructure, parks are essential for public health, climate resilience, and strongly connected communities. Climate change affects everyone, but in cities, low-income communities often face the starkest threats. On average, low-income neighborhoods have fewer parks and green spaces to absorb stormwater, provide cooling shade, and protect homes and businesses from flooding - 100 million people in the U.S., including 28 million kids, don't have a park within a 10-minute walk of home.
What’s more, the past year due the pandemic proved that parks are a necessity. Local parks from Washington to Tennessee to Virginia saw dramatic upticks in usage from people seeking exercise, safe social connections, and the restorative effects of nature. Parks also served as venues for meal distribution, COVID tests and vaccinations, and gathering spaces.
The Trust For Public Land's ParkScore index is the national gold-standard comparison of park systems across the 100 most populated cities in the United States. Published annually, the index measures park systems according to five categories: access, investment, amenities, acreage, and equity. The 2021 report suggests to make communities more resilient in the face of climate change, parks and green spaces need to be deployed deliberately in order to protect the most vulnerable.
For park scoring data on your city, explore this slick interactive and visual tool by entering a city into the search field.
The top 12 U.S. cities according to the 2021 Park Score Index are:
For more than 45 years, The Trust has partnered with city leaders and residents to design, fund, and build climate-smart parks and green spaces where they're needed most. The Trust helps cities use parks and natural lands as “green infrastructure” serving four objectives:
