The Case for Building $1,500 Parks

From Fast Company:  What’s in a fence? More than you’d think. In neighborhoods where as little as about $1,000 was spent transforming a vacant lot with some grass, a few trees, and a short wooden fence, people felt less depressed and less worthless.

“The beauty of the intervention is that it’s pretty simple,” says Dr. Eugenia C. South, one of the authors on a new study that tracked hundreds of vacant lots across Philadelphia. “Which is good for replication in other cities and being able to scale it up. Also, the cost is relatively inexpensive compared to other types of interventions you might do for health.”

The study, published in JAMA Network Open by a group of five doctors at the University of Pennsylvania including South, is the first to observe a cause and effect between access to “greened” vacant lots and improved mental health through a randomized controlled trial. Their research paints a vivid picture of how our neighborhoods impact our well-being and provides new evidence for why cities should be investing in low-cost but high-impact design interventions like lot greening in blighted neighborhoods.

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