25%
less park space
Low-income Boston neighborhoods have 25% less park space per capita than high-income ones
Trust for Public Land, 2025A WR152 Investigation · Boston University · April 2026
Boston is the
greenest city
in America.
For some of us.
The Trust for Public Land gives Boston a perfect 100 / 100 park proximity score. Here is what that number does not tell you.
Begin
100
/100
Park Proximity Score
Trust for Public Land ParkScore, 2025
Every Boston resident lives within a ten-minute walk of a park. No other major American city can say that.
But proximity is not access. And access is not equity. Boston's equity score — the measure of whether those parks are actually usable, safe, and sized appropriately — sits at just 81 out of 100.
Nineteen points separate the city Boston claims to be from the city lower-income and minority residents actually inhabit. That gap is where this story lives.
"Low-income neighborhoods have 25% less nearby park space than high-income neighborhoods, and neighborhoods of color have 12% less than white neighborhoods." — Trust for Public Land, 2025
A park exists near you. That is not the same as a park that serves you.
What the score hides
12%
less park space
Neighborhoods of color have 12% less nearby park space than majority-white neighborhoods
Trust for Public Land, 20251.4
acres median park
Boston's median park size ranks 8 out of 100 nationally — smaller than 92% of comparable American cities
Trust for Public Land, 202518.9%
weekly park visitors
Only 18.9% of urban residents nationally visit a park at least once per week — despite near-universal proximity
Young et al., 2024Two different Bostons
Both neighborhoods satisfy Boston's perfect proximity score. The similarity ends there.
Boston Common & Public Garden
Back Bay / Beacon Hill
485 acres
[ Author photo ]
Nubian Square Open Space
Roxbury
~1.2 acres
[ Author photo ]
Both locations satisfy the Trust for Public Land's proximity criterion: a resident is within a ten-minute walk of a designated park.
Neighborhood by neighborhood
Four Boston neighborhoods where the gap between proximity score and park quality is most acute. Each location tells a different version of the same story.
Boston Common
Roxbury
Dorchester
Mattapan
East Boston
Interactive map · Activate StoryMapJS embed (see HTML comments)
The numbers behind the narrative
Park space shrinks as income falls
Sorted by income quintile, Boston's park acreage per capita drops steadily from the wealthiest to the poorest neighborhoods. The bottom quintile has 25% less space than the top.
Source: Trust for Public Land ParkScore equity data, 2025. Values indexed to highest-income quintile = 100.
Who actually visits parks
Smartphone visitation data across 22,735 U.S. urban census tracts shows park usage falls sharply as the share of Black residents rises — independent of proximity.
Correlation with % Black residents: r = −0.44. With median income: r = +0.43.
Source: Young et al. (2024), national dataset used as a proxy. Boston pattern confirmed by Danford et al. (2018) observational study. Scatter is illustrative of reported correlation; raw microdata not public.
The parks that do not
appear on any map
Walk down Dudley Street in Roxbury on a summer afternoon and you will find green spaces the city does not count. Vacant lots where neighbors have planted vegetables. Chain-link-fenced corners maintained by community organizations. Strips of grass between buildings where children play anyway.
Researchers call these informal green spaces — IGS. They are not parks. They have no maintenance budget, no staff, no benches. But for residents in neighborhoods where the formal parks are too small, too unsafe, or too underserved, they function as parks.
"Minority users visited intentional and unintentional informal spaces at equal rates — while white users concentrated in the maintained ones. This is not a preference difference. It reflects what is available."
Danford et al., 2018 · Behavioral observation study, Boston
A 2018 study systematically observing green space use across Boston's inner-city neighborhoods found that white residents visited maintained informal spaces at higher rates than unmaintained ones. Minority residents showed no such preference — they used both equally.
The researchers' conclusion was direct: minority residents are not choosing informal spaces. They are using whatever is available. When the nearest maintained formal park is small, under-resourced, and perceived as unsafe, informal spaces fill the gap — whatever their condition.
The practical implication matters for policy. Informal spaces are not a community asset to celebrate in lieu of investment. They are evidence of a structural debt the city has not paid.
Informal Green Space, Roxbury
March 29, 2026
[ Author photo ]
An informal green lot in Roxbury: spontaneous vegetation alongside community-tended raised beds. Spaces like this do not appear in the Trust for Public Land's proximity calculations — but are used daily by neighborhood residents.
A case for change
Invest in Nubian Square.
Recognize the rest.
Nubian Square in Roxbury sits at the center of everything this research describes: a neighborhood with high informal green space use, a formal park that is undersized and underfunded, and a community that has compensated for the gap for decades. Three changes would begin to close it.
Fund Nubian Square Open Space
The city should increase the maintenance and programming budget for Nubian Square Open Space to match the per-acre spending of comparable parks in Back Bay and the South End — meaning regular maintenance staff, seasonal programming, improved lighting, and accessible facilities, not just mowing.
Recognize community-managed lots
Boston Parks and Recreation should formally recognize community-managed green lots along the Dudley Street corridor as supplemental green infrastructure, making them eligible for city maintenance support and liability coverage — without displacing the community organizations that built them.
Create a small-grants program
Modeled on Philadelphia's LandCare program, the city should establish competitive micro-grants for community organizations managing informal green spaces in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and East Boston — with preference for organizations led by neighborhood residents and anti-displacement protections built in.
Nubian Square Open Space — Today
Roxbury, Boston
[ Author photo ]
Nubian Square Open Space as it currently stands. The three-part proposal above would transform both this site and the surrounding informal green infrastructure into a funded, recognized community anchor.
Get involved
These organizations are doing this work in Boston right now.
GreenRoots
Chelsea & East Boston
Environmental justice organizing focused on green space, clean air, and waterfront access for frontline communities.
Visit GreenRoots →ACE
Roxbury
Alternatives for Community & Environment: environmental justice law and advocacy for Roxbury and surrounding neighborhoods, including green space campaigns.
Visit ACE →Boston Parks & Recreation
City of Boston
Submit comments on the Open Space and Recreation Plan, report maintenance issues, or contact your district parks supervisor.
Contact Parks Dept →Sources
This project draws on peer-reviewed research, municipal data, and the Trust for Public Land's 2025 ParkScore report. All statistics are cited inline throughout the site.
- Danford, R. S., Strohbach, M. W., Warren, P. S., & Ryan, R. L. (2018). Active greening or rewilding the city: How does the intention behind small pockets of urban green affect use? Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 29, 377–383.
- Rigolon, A. (2016). A complex landscape of inequity in access to urban parks: A literature review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 153, 160–169.
- Rupprecht, C. D. D., & Byrne, J. A. (2014). Informal urban greenspace: A typology and trilingual systematic review. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 13(4), 597–611.
- Trust for Public Land. (2025). ParkScore for Boston, MA. parkscorereport.tpl.org.
- Wen, M., Zhang, X., Harris, C. D., Holt, J. B., & Croft, J. B. (2013). Spatial disparities in the distribution of parks and green spaces in the USA. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 45(Suppl 1), S18–S27.
- Williams, T. G., Logan, T. M., Zuo, C. T., Liberman, K. D., & Guikema, S. D. (2020). Parks and safety: A comparative study of green space access and inequity in five US cities. Landscape and Urban Planning, 201, 103841.
- Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J., & Newell, J. P. (2014). Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities "just green enough." Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 234–244.
- Young, M. T., et al. (2024). Quantifying urban park use in the USA at scale: Empirical estimates of realised park usage using smartphone location data. The Lancet Planetary Health, 8(6), e564–e573.