Parks and safety: a comparative study of green space access and inequity in five US cities

•There is a striking lack of, and inequity in access to, “safe” green space.•Future park access assessments should consider crime in their measures of quality.•Strategies should target park safety to improve access and environmental justice. Safety is an important dimension of access to green space. When parks are perceived as unsafe, people are unlikely to derive the health and community benefits from them. In this study, we examine inequities in green space access in five medium-to-large US cities using parcel-level, network-based analysis. We quantify access using three measures: proximity, congestion-weighted acreage, and crime-constrained proximity. We find that, in the five US cities studied, there is a striking lack of access to safe parks. In addition, inequalities between socioeconomic subgroups are substantially exacerbated when considering access to safe parks, with racial/ethnic minorities and low-income communities fairly consistently worse off. The results suggest that interventions to improve park safety could result in large and immediate improvements for access and environmental justice. However, even once these inequalities are addressed, there remains significant work to provide all residents with sufficient and proximal access to green space and the wide array of benefits that it has to offer.