THE HEALTH BENEFITS OF PARKS AND THEIR ECONOMIC IMPACTS 5 Park Characteristics Parks and green spaces affect health outcomes in many ways. Understanding their impact on health requires an understanding of the variety of parks and park contexts. Park size, quality, amenities, and composition all have implications for how parks affect health. Whether the park is rural or urban, is easily accessible or difficult to access, or includes amenities that the surrounding community desires are important inputs to any analysis of the health impact of park space. These factors can change who reaps the benefits of park spaces, how those benefits accrue, and level of the impacts. A substantial amount of literature is available on accessibility and amenities in parks and how those factors affect outcomes such as physical activity, and the body of literature on the racial and economic disparities in park access is growing. In other areas, such as mental health impacts or environmental impacts, there is less focus on the park context. As this document reviews the literature on health equity impacts of parks, keep in mind that the park context described in the research might impact the findings. Quality and Accessibility Access to high-quality park space in the United States is inextricably tied to the country’s history of racism and white supremacy. Many of the health benefits we will discuss are contingent on community access to park space and on the quality of that space. Unfortunately, park spaces are inequitably distributed. Policies, procedures and decisions for parks and green space have been designed to concentrate quality parks and park programming in predominately white and higher-income neighborhoods, leaving people of color and low-income residents lacking the same quality of amenities as white people (Yañez et al. 2021). Research comparing present day green space with the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation maps that formed the basis for redlining show that formerly redlined areas have less green space (Nardone et al 2021). Using propensity score matching, Nardone and colleagues (2021) controlled for other demographic and economic factors and compared areas one grade apart. They found a statistically significant decrease in green space as grades decreased. This research builds on prior evidence connecting the legacy of racism and segregation with lack of access to urban green space and urban heat islands. One study found that formerly redlined areas have less green space and more nonpermeable surfaces and are on average 2.6° C (36.68° F) hotter than nonredlined areas (Hoffman,
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