With summer in full swing, lots of people are out enjoying Louisville’s parks -- and taking shelter from the heat under the trees and foliage that make our city beautiful. But did you ever wonder how rich in green space Louisville is compared to other cities?
According to The Trust for Public Lands’ Center for City Park Excellence, Louisville has 22 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents, which puts us right in the middle among our peer cities included in the survey. However, Louisville has 367 community garden plots – which is the highest number of garden plots per capita among its peer cities, and it’s 9th on the list for the number of park playgrounds per capita.
Those figures for park acreage don’t count the large expansion of suburban parks underway through the 21st Century Parks initiative, which ultimately will boost Louisville’s acreage per capita. Then it will truly be a City of Parks. You can view a map of Louisville’s community gardens at the Brightside web site.
Or check out the report posted on the blog for CEOs for Cities, a national network of urban leaders dedicated to building and sustaining the next generation of great American cities, on a study that concluded that having a community garden raises neighborhood property values by as much as 9.4 percentage points within 5 years. Read the study to learn more.
That’s the stuff of Quality of Place – and one of the many ways in which building a Greater Louisville will pay off.
The greenspace indicator is featured in the 2010 Competitive City Report, which will be released during a community forum on Thursday, June 24, at 10 a.m. in the Theatre Conference room at the International Convention Center. Carol Coletta, CEO and President of CEOs for Cities, will join us for this event.