Nearly 70K Tacomans don’t have ready access to a park. This project hopes to change that
It can mean playing tag in the apartment complex parking lot.
It can be seen in makeshift soccer or football games on city streets, with kids pausing the action for oncoming cars.
During a pandemic, it can result in families stuck inside, with nowhere to go for the fresh air and peace of mind the outdoors provides.
Asked about how a lack of public park access impacts her constituents, Mayor Victoria Woodards spoke from experience as a Lincoln High School graduate who grew up in Tacoma and knows firsthand how important parks can be.
Like far too many things, Woodards said, access to parks and open spaces in Tacoma is largely determined by your address, your socioeconomic status and — given the city’s disgraceful history of redlining and systemic segregation — the color of your skin.
That’s the long-standing problem local leaders are hoping a new pilot project will begin to correct in the coming years, the mayor said.
This week, with guidance from the national nonprofit Trust for Public Lands, the city, Tacoma Public Schools and Metro Parks Tacoma announced a plan to transform five Eastside and South End elementary school yards into neighborhood parks by 2023.
By adding amenities and features at Stafford, Reed, Mann, Whitman and Larchmont elementary schools — like lights, fields, additional playground toys, shelter structures and art installations — the pilot project aims to provide thousands of Tacoma residents who live near those schools with the adequate public park access.
According to Tacoma schools strategic planner and policy manager Alicia Lawver, the project will improve learning opportunities for students at the five schools while adding to the quality of life of all residents, young and old.
The upgrades, attention and upkeep from Metro Parks will ensure that the school yards don’t need to be locked during daytime hours, according to district spokesperson Dan Voelpel.
While all Tacoma Schools’ playgrounds currently offer public access after school until dark, in the past, Voelpel noted, that some schools — like Whitman — were forced to temporarily close to public access after problems with issues like discarded needles and drug paraphernalia.
On Monday, Woodards — who served on the Metro Parks Board of Commissioners before winning a seat on the City Council in 2009 — described the overarching impetus for the program.
In a word, equity is the goal, Woodards said.
“It’s really sad, because … we don’t need statistics or data to tell us that (a lack of park access) is disproportionately going to affect a certain group in our community, or marginalized members of our community,” ‘Woodards explained. “The reality is we know that it does.”
Though we might not need data and statistics to illustrate the lack of park access, that’s not to say it doesn’t exist. According to an analysis by Metro Parks Tacoma, 31% of Tacoma residents don’t have a park within a 10-minute walk of their homes, the largest park access gap of any major city in Washington.
Overall, the disparity affects some between 60,000 and 70,000 Tacoma residents, according to Joe Brady, Metro Parks Tacoma’s chief strategy officer.
The problem is most pronounced on Tacoma’s Eastside and in the South End, two areas of the city with the largest minority populations.
All told, the five-school pilot project will provide access to a park to roughly 25,000 Tacoma residents who currently don’t have one within 10 minutes of their homes, Brady said.
Making sure that all Tacoma residents have a park within 10 minutes of their home is a goal that the Metro Parks board included in its 2018 strategic plan and also aligns with the city’s previous endorsement of the same goal, Brady said.
Part of the challenge, Brady explained, is that a lack of open land makes creating new parks from scratch difficult and costly.
That’s one reason the new pilot project is so exciting, he said.
“Free and uninhibited access to an open space is one of our values, and we’re just trying to make sure that we equitably distribute those opportunities to as many people in this city as we possibly can,” Brady said. “Whether or not we call it what it is, in terms of systemic racism or anything along those lines … we have portions of our town that haven’t seen the same level of investment, and that’s a trend Metro Parks is very much interested in reversing.”
According to Brady, the five elementary schools included in the pilot project were chosen strategically, taking into consideration the known service gaps at Metro Parks and utilizing the city’s equity index, an interactive tool that tracks other disparities.
Eventually, Brady — who credited the history of collaboration between Metro Parks and Tacoma Schools for helping to launch the project — hopes other Tacoma schools will undergo similar transformations.
Stafford Elementary will be first up, according to Cary Simmons, who serves as program director for park design and development at the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.
Simmons said the community near Stafford will guide the design process, deciding exactly what local residents want to see from the new park, and the same will hold true at the other elementary schools involved in the pilot project.
All told, Simmons expects the three-year pilot project to cost roughly $1 million per school, which will come from a mix of public and private investment.
Roughly $3 million has already been raised, Simmons said, including contributions from Kaiser Permanente and the Russell Family Foundation.
Across the country, the Trust for Public Land has already helped to similarly transform 250 schoolyards, Simmons said.
“When you’re talking about 60,000 people who can’t walk to a park, your options are really different (in a city like Tacoma),” Simmons said. “That’s why we were really excited to start a conversation about … about opening up access to school properties, which actually are distributed fairly evenly throughout these neighborhoods and are underutilized for the potential they would provide as open spaces.”
Woodards said she expects the pilot project to make a big difference for Tacoma neighborhoods that have often been ignored over the years.
The time for talk has ended, the mayor believes.
“There continue to be neighborhoods who, disproportionately, aren’t getting the same kind of services and resources,” Woodards argued.
“When we’re making investments, we should use them to benefit the entire community.”
