Forty neighborhood parks throughout Detroit will be getting new playgrounds, equipment, walkways, landscaping and more as part of the city’s Parks and Recreation Improvement Plan. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan announced last week that the city is investing $11.7 million in renovations.
Duggan said in a statement that the parks selected — none of which are larger than 5.5 acres — aren’t the city’s “large marquee parks,” many of which have already been upgraded in recent years. “These are the local parks that many families can walk to from home without every having to cross a major road,” he said.
The 40 parks were picked based on criteria such as size and which have the highest concentration of children and senior citizens living nearby. Only 10 of the parks will be repaired this year. The other 30 will be renovated next year.
The upgrades will be paid for out of $50 million in unspent bond funds discovered by Duggan’s Chief Financial Officer John Hill.
Since taking office, Duggan has made a push to improve parks. In 2014, the city and volunteers resumed regular mowing and cleaning of approximately 250 parks that had not been maintained for years due to budget cuts. Last year, the city also spent $1 million on improvements for seven neighborhood parks.
Detroit’s latest effort is similar to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Community Parks Initiative, the city’s plan to renovate hundreds of smaller parks that have received less than a quarter of a million dollars over two decades. Regarding that effort, Mitchell J. Silver, New York City’s commissioner for parks and recreation, told Next City last year, “In the past we had a metric that looked at walking distance to a park, but it’s not just about proximity, it’s also about quality. The other way of doing it is looking at demographic trends. Neighborhoods change, culture changes. The desires for amenities change in our open space and recreation, so we want to make sure that we’re being true to the emerging trends and what people expect from their open spaces in the 21st century.”
Kelsey E. Thomas is a writer and editor based in the most upper-left corner of the country. She writes about urban policy, equitable development and the outdoors (but also about nearly everything else) with a focus on solutions-oriented journalism. She is a former associate editor and current contributing editor at Next City.
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