Not all of city is rich in parks

Coalition: Make green space within walking distance the goal

By Peter Korn

The Portland Tribune, Aug 4, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

David Plechl / The Portland Tribune

Sacajawea Park is one of the few green spaces in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood, which sits between Northeast Fremont Street and the airport.

Jim Labbe doesn’t like what he sees in the Cully neighborhood in outer Northeast Portland. Actually, it’s what Labbe doesn’t see – parks and natural areas – in Cully that concerns him. And there are other neighborhoods with similar problems, Labbe says.

Labbe is an urban conservationist with the Audubon Society of Portland, which participates as part of a nonprofit organization called the Coalition for a Livable Future. And the coalition, along with Portland State University’s Population Research Center, has just finished studying Portland-area parks and green spaces from a perspective a little different than the usual.

Traditionally, the measure of a city park system was how much park acreage the system maintained per resident. But members of the coalition, and many national experts, think there are more important factors to consider, starting with who in a city has access to parks and nature and who doesn’t. And the coalition’s recently completed study, called the Regional Equity Atlas Project, claims to show a wide disparity between who gets to enjoy parks in Portland and who doesn’t.

“Not everyone in the city has the same level of access to public parks and green spaces,” Labbe says. “While there are high- and low-income neighborhoods that have poor access, low-income neighborhoods are more likely to have poor access to neighborhood parks.”

Among the coalition’s findings:

• Just under half of the Portland metropolitan population lives within a quarter-mile walking distance of a public park.

• Out of 231 metro neighborhoods, 103 have more than half of their population living more than a quarter-mile from a park.

• Poorer neighborhoods have less access to parks and nature than wealthier ones. According to the atlas project, 44 percent of neighborhoods that do not have good access to a park rate high for poverty.

• Neighborhoods with a higher percentage of what the study calls “people of color” have poorer access to parks and natural areas.

The Cully neighborhood, according to the coalition study, is possibly the city’s most neglected. Only 24 percent of Cully’s residents live within a quarter-mile of a park or green space, compared with a citywide average of 50 percent. Cully has 2,780 residents per acre of park; the city average is 40 residents per acre. Cully has 5 percent of residents within a quarter-mile of a natural area, while the city average is 34 percent.

According to Labbe, most of the Cully neighborhood lacks good access to parks. Other neighborhoods the atlas found to be underserved include King, Humboldt and Parkrose.

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