Is Evanston 'Park Poor?'

Controversy over the proposed sale of Evanston’s lakefront Harley-Clarke Mansion centered on the question of selling the 2.5 acres of parkland.

Opponents of the deal —which the city council rejected last week—said selling public parkland was simply wrong, and described Evanston as a “park-poor” community.

But is the community really lacking in public parks?

According to standards set forth by a regional planning agency, Evanston residents may indeed be underserved when it comes to open space.

In Evanston, there are four acres of park for every 1,000 people—a figure that falls short of recommendations from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). The agency recommends that cities around the area should have 10 acres of parks per 1,000 people within the next 40 years, although CMAP also says four acres may be adequate in densely populated areas. The city of Chicago, for example, uses a guideline of four to five acres of parkland per 1,000 people, according to CMAP.

All told, there are 92 parks in Evanston, for a combined total of about 300 acres, according to Evanston Parks and Recreation. Out of Evanston’s total area of 4,992 acres or 7.8 square miles, six percent is park space.

In its “GO TO 2040,” plan, CMAP uses the NRPA (National Recreation and Park Association) standard of 10 acres per 1,000 people to assess the state of parkland throughout the Chicago area. CMAP found that only about 49 percent of people in the region have “adequate access to park space,” as defined by the NRPA standard.

“Meeting the park accessibility targets will require approximately 5,200 acres of new parks,” the agency’s plan states.

Bill Beckner, NRPA research manager, said the original development of the acreage standard came from a study done by the federal government that was published in 1964.

The report recommended where parks should be located and determined 10 acres per thousand people as a standard.

“The standard of 10 acres per thousand [people] kind of became a goal… but they weren’t saying that it couldn’t be more and it couldn’t possibly be less,” Beckner said. “You have jurisdictions there in the Chicago area… that are considerably less.” 

He added that less acreage in some areas does not, however, mean that those area’s parks offer a lesser quality of service or fewer programs. 

Every 10 years, the NRPA reviews and adjusts its park standards; today, the agency simply issues “guidelines.”

Evanston’s population is 74,486, according to a 2010 population census. If Evanston were to meet NRPA’s highest guideline of 10 acres per 1,000 people, it would need about 750 acres of public parkland—more than double the 300 acres of park space Evanston has now. 

While Evanston may not fare so well in comparison to the NRPA standard, it does have more parks than several neighboring communities. Skokie has slightly less parkland at 3.8 acres per thousand people, while Morton Grove and Niles each have just three acres of park for every 1,000 people.

The median for all Illinois jurisdictions is 13 acres per thousand, which is close to the national median of about 13.1 acres, according to Beckner.

Evanston, Niles, Morton Grove and Skokie all fall below the median of the lower quartile (25 percent mark and below), which is seven acres per thousand people in Illinois, and about five and a half nationally. 

Beckner said that there is no longer a rigid standard for park acreage, but more than half of the jurisdictions in the country still use 10 acres of park space per thousand people as their standard.

But, he noted, “The standard can be whatever is best for your community.”