Supporting Our Parks: A Guide to Alternative Revenue Strategies

"Supporting Our Parks: A Guide to Alternative Revenue Strategies", a study carried out by New Yorkers for Parks during 2008 and 2009, presents a flexible strategy for addressing the chronic maintenance and operations budgeting shortfall in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) system. This study offers "reforms in action": a menu of strategies that exist in various parks across the country and can be mixed and matched to develop a broader portfolio of revenue sources than is currently available to DPR. These strategies are suited to the system level, to categories of parks, and can also be creatively and meaningfully applied to individual parks

Coastal Stormwater Management Through Green Infrastructure: A Handbook for Municipalities

Coastal Stormwater Management through Green Infrastructure: A Handbook for Municipalities (Handbook) is designed to assist coastal municipalities within the Massachusetts Bays Program (MassBays) area to incorporate green infrastructure into their stormwater management planning as they respond to MS4 stormwater permit requirements, review development proposals, and retrofit existing municipal facilities and sites. The MassBays Program can assist those municipalities in using this Handbook to facilitate the use of green infrastructure and address stormwater runoff

The Open Space Index

This report establishes the 15 Index standards and provides a detailed methodology for assessing open space in New York City neighborhoods. We piloted the OSI methodology on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which was chosen because of its variety of open spaces, rich residential diversity and vibrant history of park and garden advocacy. The pilot found that the Lower East Side performs very well with regard to community gardens, acres of active recreation, and access to parks. It also found, however, that the neighborhood has an urban tree canopy cover of only 14%, far below the US Forest Service's 44% recommendation for that community. And the assessment found that the Lower East Side parks have very little green, natural ground surfacing within its parks

The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values

Cities across the United States that have considerable vacant land are debating whether to foster community gardens on that land, while cities with land shortages are debating when to replace gardens with other uses. Meanwhile, many cities are looking for new ways to finance green spaces. Little empirical evidence about the neighborhood impacts of community gardens is available, however, to inform the debate or to help cities design financing schemes. This article estimates the impact of community gardens on neighborhood property values, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find that gardens have significant positive effects, especially in the poorest neighborhoods. Higher-quality gardens have the greatest positive impact. Copyright 2008 American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association