‘Dead’ Urban Parks Need Revitalization : Funds, Coalitions Can Undo Decade of Decline

Los Angeles’ park problems are all too familiar to residents of decaying East Coast cities: drugs and vandalism, shabby or outmoded facilities, inadequate staffing for maintenance or recreation and a growing shortage of attractive open space.

Instead of a community asset that enhances nearby property values, parks are all too often a source of conflict and fear. The region’s main stock of public parks has been the scene of fierce development battles in recent years, pitting environmental and open-space advocates against educational, arts and recreational interests. Yet despite a decade of decline, there are two reasons to be optimistic about a revival of urban parks: money and public involvement.

When Proposition 13 cut property taxes in 1978, parks were thrown into competition with police and fire protection for declining revenues, with devastating results. Almost overnight, the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks went from 4,000 employees to 2,000. At the same time, rampant inflation forced cutbacks in federal and state funds for land acquisition and capital improvements. With creativity born of desperation, local parks departments concocted schemes to attract private funding.

New operating procedures to raise money were created: renting out parks for film and television production and parking spaces for use by nearby businesses, as well as leasing golf courses and tennis courts to entrepreneurs. The wisdom of the drafters of the City Charter protected parks from most of the extremes of commercialization. But the county’s determination to make parks self-supporting generated such travesties as the planned development of apartments, a hotel and a shopping mall in Bonelli Regional Park in San Dimas. Confronted with vehement public opposition, the project has been scaled back to a hotel-restaurant complex only, but is still bitterly opposed by users of that park’s unspoiled trails and open meadows.

Government agencies also turned to individual recreation centers and induced them to develop local fund-raising programs. Centers were encouraged to “buy back” part-time recreation staff lost to budget cuts with funds solicited from nearby businesses and park users. Not surprisingly, centers in middle-class areas were able to restore longer hours and lost programs, while poorer neighborhoods were left with skeletal programs. Further feeding the inequity, the city’s policy of allocating funds obtained from developers under the state’s Quimby Act and zone-change fees requires the money to be spent within 1 1/2 miles of new residential development or within the same council district. Despite efforts to compensate by allocating available state and federal funds to development-poor inner-city areas, resistance to new central-city parks on the grounds that they destroy existing homes and attract bad elements has effectively blocked the city from buying parkland, even when funds were available. The hard use that older and smaller facilities receive exacerbates the inequality between inner city and suburban parks.

As the urbanized areas of the county grow more densely populated, back-yard space for swing sets or family picnics is fast becoming a memory. The pressure is growing for existing land to meet new needs, from opening up space to exercise dogs to providing classrooms for amnesty applicants to learn English. The intangible but real significance of even small patches of public green space as a refuge.

The mayor and City Council have for the past two years directed an increasing stream of funds to restore recreation and parks to pre-Proposition 13 levels. The Recreation and Parks Department has instituted an Urban Impact Parks program designed to refurbish the 66 poorest recreation centers, increase security and maintenance to keep them looking new and bring the quality of park programs offered up to the finest available anywhere in the city. The half-dozen so-called worst parks that have been targeted under this program so far are looking good and the morale of the staff has improved. And it is encouraging to see that people in the communities around these parks now are returning and using the facilities fully.

Equally important, a new citywide coalition of community groups is mobilizing support for safe, clean and attractive parks. A founding conference held in February brought together 150 representatives of groups ranging from hillside homeowners to the South-Central Organizing Committee, from the Eastside United Neighborhoods Organization to the Sierra Club-- plus parks personnel, academics and activists. Under the name People for Parks, the new coalition will help often-fragmented and disparate groups share information and strategies for park improvement and present a broad-based pressure group to confront bureaucrats and politicians.

Reclaiming dead parks, caring well for existing ones and creating new parks for the growing and changing population are a challenge worthy of such a grand coalition. People for Parks will need to be sophisticated in using the political process and persistent in opening up the Recreation and Parks Department to responsible community imput. Now, for the first time in many years, the resources and the will to restore the vitality of Los Angeles’ parks seem finally to be at hand.