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New City Parks

New City Parks is an initiative to address the lack of thriving urban parks in underserved neighborhoods.

Parks within an easy walk from home provide opportunities for residents to move and connect with nature and provide a foundation for good health, but low-income neighborhoods are often short on safe, usable parks. New City Parks (NCP) is an initiative launched in mid-2019 to build non-traditional and revitalized parks in underserved neighborhoods. NCP coordinates community outreach, GIS analysis, and landscape design, and engages with local communities to design and steward new parks.

The need for these spaces couldn’t be starker than it is today. COVID-19 has hit Black communities hard, and underlying health disparities are one of the reasons. According to the CDC, African Americans are 50% more likely to have heart disease than white people and 40% more likely to die at an early age from any cause. Once they are exposed to the virus, they are much more vulnerable.

Parks are places to play, to commune, to escape into nature, to build mind and muscle. They are part of our DNA and should be part of every urban neighborhood.”

Harvey Rose

Rose Harvey

Senior Fellow for Parks and Open Space

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There’s a health crisis in this country, and greater poverty means worse health.

According to the Center for Disease Control

  • 1 in 3 adults and nearly 1 in 5 children in the U.S. is obese
  • Almost 30 million children and adults have diabetes
  • Heart disease is our leading cause of death
  • 1 in 10 Americans suffers from depression
  • We spend $500 billion a year treating these illnesses

Essential to a solution: parks within reach.

But low-income neighborhoods are tragically short on safe, usable parks. Teens in low-income communities are half as likely to have access to parks as affluent peers. Parks in close proximity increase the likelihood of actual use by almost 50%.

New City Parks is an initiative to address the lack of thriving urban parks in neighborhoods of need.

Seeded by The JPB Foundation and housed at Regional Plan Association (RPA), NCP is focused on putting parks on the ground in Northeastern cities and communities.

The cities and communities can announce a vision for neighborhood parks including vetted pilot sites that are ​“ready to go” into the final phases of design and construction. Measures of success will be the number of safe and sustainable parks completed; the number of people served; the depth of programming for local children; and the degree of local buy-in. The ultimate measure of success will be the extent to which our pilots produce what can and should exist in all cities: a flourishing park within an easy walk.

Campaign Featured Image New City Parks

If we build parks, people will use them. Mental and physical health can improve, along with resilience in the face of new health threats.

With that vision, NCP focuses on putting parks on the ground first in Northeastern cities. It leverages city support and engages with local communities to design, set up for construction and steward urban parks, integrating them into the neighborhood. NCP is led by Rose Harvey, Senior Fellow of Parks and Open Space at RPA. NCP has begun working with its first five cities in the Northeast: Baltimore, MD; Buffalo, NY; Jersey City, NJ; Passaic, NJ; and Poughkeepsie, NY.

Founding Advisors:

  • Diane Englander, Strategy and Communications
  • Katie Gwathmey, Strategy
  • Imran Hassan, Finance
  • Kim Mathews, Design
  • Sarah Stack, Development and Communications
  • The JPB Foundation & Regional Plan Association, Incubators

Research Areas

Energy & Environment

Location

National