Passage
PARKS AND PUBLIC HEALTH
(1)
For more than a century, the question of how much land a growing city should set aside for public parks has been debated largely in aesthetic and budgetary terms. Supporters praised the beauty of open green space; opponents pointed to its cost. Recently, however, a group of economists has entered the debate to weigh these 1 competitive claims against one another. They argue that when city councils weigh the parks 2 legislation pertains with land use, the members should consider not only construction budgets but also the long-term returns that green space can yield. 3 Because the benefits of a park are easy to see, the economists note, its measurable effects on the people who live nearby are only now being counted.
(2)
To test this idea, two urban researchers, Elena Marsh and David Okafor, conducted a 4 retrospective study of thirty American cities. Analysis of decades of records 5 pointing to a clear pattern: neighborhoods that gained a large park in the 1980s reported measurably better public-health outcomes about twenty years later. 6 The park changed the neighborhood. The mechanism, the researchers propose, is straightforward. Adolescents living within walking distance of a park exercised more often, and children raised near green space proved less 7 prone to obesity than those of children raised in neighborhoods without it. Marsh and Okafor caution that a correlation is not a cause, but 8 they observe that the pattern holds across cities of very different sizes and climates. Teenagers who 9 were sedentary, they suggest, found in a nearby field or trail a convenient reason to become active instead. However, the researchers stress, the same teenagers reported no change in diet.
(3)
[1] A single study cannot prove that parks alone produced the health gains, 10 therefore its authors present the link cautiously, as a strong correlation. [2] Still, a city that builds a park is not merely buying scenery; it may also be reducing the burden its hospitals will one day 11 provide care for. [3] For that reason, the researchers argue, park spending belongs in the same budget conversation 12 as preventive medicine, it saves money later by preventing illness now, an outcome 13 where planners rarely anticipate. 15 What began as a matter of taste, then, has become an argument 14 of economics as much as beauty.
