White Paper: Valuing Arlington’s Community Parks and Open Space

Historical and contemporary data support the notion that parks and open space play a central role in shaping our community, in bringing people together, in offering recreational opportunities for our citizens, in providing critical environmental services and in contributing to our quality of life. The Park and Recreation Commission seeks ways to quantify that information to inform the larger land use issues in the County and to ensure a fair consideration of the value of our parks, open space and recreation facilities. This paper shares the results of a research study and analysis on the myriad benefits of parks and open space in Arlington. The Commission’s purpose entails developing more concrete data to inform the public discussion and advise the County Board in its evaluation of budgetary decisions to support the acquisition and preservation of open space and to support continuous maintenance of parks, recreation and open space in Arlington. A strategic objective of this paper is to illustrate the possible range of benefits that Arlington County enjoys. We review literature on many of the benefits of parks and open space and describe an exercise to illustrate the possible benefits by applying a wellknown methodology to Arlington County. This project assumes that the effects of parks and open space in Arlington are similar to the effects found for other prominent communities in the United States. Under this framework, the annual, ongoing benefits from Arlington parks and open space is estimated at $155 million per year. Additionally, the existence of parks and open space may have resulted in a one-time increase in residential property values estimated at $160 million.

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Tarrant County

Tarrant County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 1,809,034. It is the third-most populous county in Texas and the sixteenth-most populous in the United States.

OTHER WHITEPAPERS
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whitePaper | December 29, 2021

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Spotlight

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