Save the Trillium Woods!

by Elizabeth LaRance

When New York’s Central Park was being created, pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted predicted that it would greatly increase the value of the surrounding land.[1] Turns out he was right.

Now, more than 150 years later, communities recognize that open space and parks provide places for recreational activities, wildlife habitat, and cleaner air and water. But they are also beginning to recognize that these spaces provide an economic benefit as well. Since Olmsted’s prediction, more than 30 studies have demonstrated that open spaces have a positive effect on the value of nearby residential properties.[2] Here are a few of the findings:

• In 2007, the Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence found that properties in Philadelphia that were within 500 feet of parks or recreation land were worth an average of 5 percent more than properties that were farther away. The total increased value was $688.8 million dollars, which brought in additional property taxes of more than $18.1 million dollars.[3]
• In a 2002 study, researcher Paul Thorsnes compared the value of properties bordering on permanently protected forests with those near unpreserved forests in three residential subdivisions in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He concluded that the lots bordering on permanently conserved forests sold for 19 to 35 percent more than those that were more distant from the preserves.[4]

There’s lots more research that’s been done, and the data is pretty conclusive: parks and open space enhance economic values in surrounding areas.

Another way of looking at the economic benefit of open spaces is to consider how development benefits communities. For the past 15 years, economists have been assessing the net economic benefit to communities of developing lands, known as the costs of community services (COCS). These studies are a subset of a much larger field, known as fiscal analysis, which weigh anticipated economic benefits from development against the cost of delivering infrastructure and services such as fire and police protection, schools and roads.[5]

The American Farmland Trust (AFT) completed 128 COCS studies in 25 states between 1989 and 2007. In averaging the results of these studies, researchers concluded that for every dollar that communities received from residential development, they had to provide $1.16 in services. In general, the studies show that delivering services to residential development almost always costs more than the community expects to gain in taxes and other benefits.

The first comprehensive book written on land trusts, “Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America” by Richard Brewer, further supports the AFT’s findings that residential development is very demanding of community services. “If the choice for a piece of land is between 1) preserving it and removing it from the tax rolls, and 2) developing it as residential property, the community’s taxpayers are hands-down better off with the preserve,” he says.[6] Permanently protecting land “saves us from ourselves,” he adds. “We know this is true in terms of beauty, water and air quality, wildlife, and our hopes for the future.” And now we know it to be true economically.[7]

Unless otherwise noted, information for this article came from Conservation: An Investment That Pays, by The Trust for Public Land, 2009.

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[1] The Trust for Public Land. 2009 Conservation: An Investment that Pays the Economic Benefits of Parks and Open Space,p.1. www.tpl.org.
[2] Center for City Park Excellence, Trust for Public Land, How Much Value Does the City of Philadelphia Receive from Its Park and Recreation System? (San Francisco: The Trust for Public Land and the Philadelphia Parks Alliance, February 2008), p.8.
[3] Ibid., p.9.
[4] Paul Thorsnes, “The Value of Suburban Forest Preserves: Estimates from Sales of Vacant Residential Building Lots.” Land Economics, August 2002, cited in H. Spencer Banzhaf and Puja Jawahar, Public Benefits of Undeveloped Lands on Urban Outskirts: Non-market Valuation Studies and Their Role in Land Use Plans (Washington DC: Resources for the Future, June 2005), pp. 24-25.
[5]The Trust for Public Land. 2009 Conservation: An Investment that Pays the Economic Benefits of Parks and Open Space,p.1. www.tpl.org.
[6] Richard Brewer, Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America, 2003, p. 72.
[7] Ibid.