PRECM 09-01-1982 - Laserfiche WebLink

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• THE ECONOMICS OF IiRBAN PARKS RE URBAN PARKS WORTHWI--IILE? To those of us in the parks and recreation field, the question seems foolish. Yet to administrators forced to snake difficult decisions between programs, the answer may seem less readily apparent. In an era of general budget tightening, it is increasingly important to provide solid documentation of the benefits of urban parks. This article reports the results of a study designed to quan- titatively estimate the value of urban parks in a benefit/cost analysis. Parks of all kinds provide multiple benefits. At a general level, these benefits can be divided into two categories: on-site and off-site. On-site benefits are those that accrue directly to the users of a park. The most ob- vious of these are the recreation benefits supplied to users. These, in turn, can be subdivided into a whole ar- ray of socio-psychological benefits including such things as freedom and education, improved physical and emo- tibnal health, increased family solidarity, and so forth. Ott-site benefits (or "externalities' as economists are fond of calling them) are a bit more difficult to grasp because they accrue to people not actually in the park. ~c}me of these kinds of benefits include the visual diver- . sity provided by the parks, the preservation of recreation opportunities for people who are not now using the park but who may wish to do so in the future, and, to a lesser extent, monumental, landmark, and traffic control func- tions. Although many of these externalities are legitimate benefits produced by the parks, they are rather difficult to assign an economic value to. How, for instance, does one compute the worth of the fleeting glimpse of a park that motorists receive as they flash past? Or the value of the park as a resource that someone thinks they might possibly use in the future (but just as possibly might not)? These kinds of problems have made it difficult to study the exrert~at benefits of urban parks. A form of external benefit that has not been plagued with such problems is the effect of urban parkland on the value of surrounding property. One major effect of parks is that they can make a neighborhood a nice place to live. Recognizing this, people may well be willing to pay a larger amount of money for a house located close to a park than they would for a comparable house further away. Thus, the value of many of the benefits (and also some of the costs) of living near a park are captured in the market value of the property that surrounds the park; examining the effects of parkland on property values provides one way to assign a dollar value to the worth of urban parks. PARKS & RECREATION/AUGUST 2982 31