Neighborhood privilege and environmental conditions in urban parks: an analysis across the 24 most populated urban areas in the United States

Abstract Urban parks provide mental and physical health benefits by mitigating harmful environmental exposures, including heat and air pollution. Urban parks often cluster in more privileged neighborhoods. Health burdens from harmful environmental exposures are highest in less privileged ones. Using Trust for Public Land’s ParkServe database of publicly accessible parks, sociodemographic data from the American Community Survey, and high-resolution satellite-imagery, we compared park size and environmental conditions by neighborhood privilege. To ascertain privilege, we calculated the combined race and income index of concentration at the extremes (ICEs) in each census tract of the 24 most populous urban areas in the United States (U.S.). We found that parks in the least privileged neighborhoods (i.e. bottom quartile of ICE) had on average 1.24 ppb higher concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) and 1.00 μ g m −3 higher fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) than parks in the most privileged neighborhoods (top ICE quartile). Parks in the most privileged neighborhoods were significantly larger and cooler in more than half of the included urban areas and significantly greener in over a third. Our results reveal disparities in the environmental conditions, and thus expected health benefits, between parks in the most and least privileged neighborhoods in the most populous urban areas in the U.S.