Public spaces have long been shown to enhance community well-being—producing positive health, environmental, economic, and social outcomes for residents who can access them. The COVID-19 pandemic made these benefits increasingly obvious, as public spaces provided critical places for people to gather and access social services, served as refuges for small businesses to safely operate, and even helped reduce racial disparities in COVID-19 infection rates.

But the positive outcomes associated with public spaces are not evenly distributed. A robust body of research demonstrates that within cities, people of color and low-income residents are more likely to live in neighborhoods with fewer public spaces or with public spaces that are small, poorly maintained, lack programming, or have limited play options. Even in neighborhoods that do have quality public spaces, their benefits may still be unevenly distributed, as many of the traditional economic outcomes correlated with public space investments (such as higher land and property values) may fail to serve low-income residents and businesses, particularly those renting and leasing. In “hot market” neighborhoods, such outcomes may even fuel displacement.

Given these issues of access and equity, there is growing recognition among public, private, and civic sector leaders that it is necessary to look beyond traditional indicators of economic value and neighborhood-level change to examine: 1) who is benefiting from the value that public spaces produce; 2) how such benefits are allocated across residents of different races, incomes, ability statuses, and tenures in a community; 3) whether public spaces produce additional benefits that traditional measures are not capturing; and 4) how to harness the power of public space investments to benefit more people in more places.

Read the full article about public space investments by Hanna Love and Cailean Kok at Brookings.