Urban Park Redevelopment: Neighborhood Benefits and Leisure-Time Physical Activity Engagement

Abstract

Population-level engagement in adequate leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) can improve mental and physical health and potentially save billions in health care costs. Despite these potentially positive outcomes, inadequate LTPA engagement is prevalent in the United States with urban residents’ living in poverty when compared to residents not living in poverty. The joint effects of the built and social environments, as they relate to LTPA, is a growing area of research and advocacy. Related to this, multiple urban neighborhoods across the United States are redeveloping parks and anticipating various health promotive co-benefits for neighborhoods. However, assessment of post redevelopment impacts on characteristics such as crime, physical disorder, and property values are infrequent and a current research gap. This dissertation uses spatial and quantitative statistical methods to address the question of, “Is park redevelopment associated with changes in leisure-time physical activity (LTPA), blight crime, and property values, in neighborhoods with at least one redeveloped park?”

Specifically, this work studies Detroit, Michigan, United States of America which recently released a redevelopment plan to improve 163 of its 308 parks with 36 done in the first phase (2016 – 2017). Using the 500 Cities: Local Data for Better Health dataset, this dissertation will assess differences in LTPA prevalence in census tracts that had parks redeveloped 2006 – 2015 (n= 99) compared to tracts without redeveloped parks (n= 62) (Paper I). The following two papers compare census tracts (n= 31) with at least one park completed in Phase 1 to matched census tracts without a redeveloped park, to assess changes to physical disorder (i.e., blight) and crime (Paper II), and property values (Paper III).

There were several key findings across these studies. The neighborhood percentage of LTPA was not associated with park redevelopment. While the crime rate per 1,000-population is increasing in the City of Detroit, neighborhoods with at least one redeveloped park had non-significant changes in rates of reported crime following park redevelopment compared to neighborhoods without redeveloped parks. This same research study found that neighborhoods with at least one redeveloped park had non-significant changes in violent crime rates per 1,000-population compared to neighborhoods without any redeveloped park. The final question of this study found that total blight fines per parcel were significantly higher in neighborhoods with at least one redeveloped park; however, the confounding of total park acres in the census tract made the association insignificant in the full repeated measures model. Finally, valid arm’s length (VAL) sales price did not change following park redevelopment. However, the effect of park redevelopment on VAL differed based on additional greenspace (i.e., greenway) where there was a higher VAL sales price in neighborhoods with redeveloped parks and additional greenspace. In addition, neighborhoods with at least one redeveloped park and more than five acres of total park space reported a lower VAL sales price compared to neighborhoods with more than five acres of total park space and no redeveloped parks.

These findings more broadly provide urban neighborhoods nationwide with methods to measure health-related changes in their neighborhoods following park redevelopment and respond to questions from Detroit residents and decision-makers. Further, decision-makers should be cautious before making up-front assertions in publicly available published plans that changes will occur following park redevelopment without first testing the associations.