Ongoing cuts in funding of Milwaukee County’s parks are well documented. Community consensus has long favored one solution to reverse this neglect: increasing the county sales tax to provide dedicated parks funding. In 2008, Milwaukee County voters approved an advisory referendum to enact such a sales tax, which the state Legislature refused to implement. Now, Milwaukee County supervisors, County Executive Chris Abele and other community leaders are pursuing several strategies to address Milwaukee County’s revenue challenges, including a potential sales tax increase.
Another approach to county parks, repeatedly promulgated by Abele, is their outright sale. That shocking notion is at odds with sound public policy nationwide.
The Abele administration’s drumbeat to sell Milwaukee County parks, relentlessly increasing since 2014, ignores widespread research about parks’ measurable benefits. Returns on investments in public parks include improved community health, increased property-tax base, environmental resilience, and opportunities for people to democratically gather in shared spaces, irrespective of income, background and status. Those public dividends are not germane to profit-and-loss statements. Potential consequences of selling or closing parks were not studied or mentioned in a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report.
Abele often fallaciously refers to parks as “business lines,” and chides them for not “breaking even.” Viewed through that myopic lens, parks everywhere come up short. As Milwaukee historian John Gurda has often proclaimed, parks are not businesses. They were established as public services. In fact, public parks efficiently improve multiple aspects of modern life.
If Milwaukee County sells parkland—whether well-known, named parks, unnamed green spaces, or agricultural land acquired for conservation and future parks—serious negative ramifications are predictable.
Threats to Public Health
Parks’ contributions to health, whether physical, mental or social, are well documented. Living within a 10-minute walk to a park allows city dwellers to easily spend time in nature, exercise, play and interact socially. To meet that well-established proximity goal, Milwaukee needs more parks, not fewer, according to Trust for Public Land mapping.
Nonetheless, since funding of parks is not mandated by Wisconsin law, it’s often said in Milwaukee County that parks are “discretionary” and thus expendable. Discretionary is a word frequently applied to pricey coffee, entertainment expenditures and vacations. For many who cannot afford such discretionary spending, free and accessible public parks are indispensable to well-being and basic entertainment. Dismissing our parks as “discretionary” is easy for people enjoying ready access to other green spaces, including private backyards.
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Inequity and Lack of Access
In Milwaukee, a major public health hazard has resulted from gradual shuttering of most county-owned deep-well swimming pools in predominantly African American neighborhoods. No pools have permanently closed on the south side or in Milwaukee County suburbs in recent history, according to Jim Goulee, president of Preserve Our Parks, a nonprofit advocacy group. Drowning deaths increase among populations lacking access to public pools and swimming lessons. Despite this starkly unequal access to pools, Abele proposed in late 2017 to permanently close Lincoln Park’s pool—one of only two remaining outdoor pools on Milwaukee’s north and west sides. Abele rescinded the plan following sustained citizen outrage.
Sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s doctoral research studied the Chicago deadly heat wave of 1995, in which survival rate in two demographically identical, impoverished neighborhoods was determined by proximity to public parks and other “social infrastructure.” His latest book, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and Decline of Civic Life, analyzed measurable public-health impacts of parks, libraries and other places open to all. Klinenberg said recently, “We’ve neglected our social infrastructure just when we need it most. We are living in it the way a prodigal child lives on their inheritance.” Without committing to designing, building, programming and maintaining our social infrastructure, Klinenberg said the personal and societal effects of its absence could have life-threatening effects.
Since only public spaces guarantee access for all, Arijit Sen warns that selling parks could have devastating consequences, especially in cities. A professor in University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Sen studies public spaces and their impacts. He said in an interview, “It’s only in public spaces that we can exercise what’s called a ‘right to the city’ regardless of whether we own property or have other assets or status. These are also the only places where we might encounter people we don’t expect to meet, where we can form bridging bonds, if only briefly, with people with whom we do not already share some type of bond.” Sen said people sometimes forget that parks are a powerful—and truly American—idea: “Selling or even privatizing parks will shred the fabric that knits our democratic society. It will not serve Milwaukee County.”
Compromised Environmental Resilience
Parks, especially heavily treed ones, literally serve as “lungs of the city,” a phrase first used in 1872 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American parks. Urban green space reduces the “urban heat island effect,” by which buildings, paving and pollution trap heat and raise temperatures. Urban forests serve not only recreation and respite, but also organically soak up pollutants and carbon dioxide, countering greenhouse-gas emissions.
Even in suburban areas, parks are ecologically crucial. In Milwaukee County, lesser-known parkland may be especially vulnerable since Abele, who dabbles as a real-estate developer, advocates selling such parkland for commercial development. About a thousand acres of agricultural land, most in Franklin and Oak Creek, was purchased last century and set aside for conservation, flood control and future parks through Milwaukee County Parks’ Agricultural Land Lease Program. Abele has acquired the power to sell such land with no county board or citizen oversight.
Holding Hope—and Space—for the Future
Parks and other public lands represent potential. Even challenged public spaces can serve community needs. Their regeneration remains possible, whether spurred through governmental allocations or initiatives by residents, community groups or businesses. Parks provide common ground for free concerts, farmers markets and other events that foster community, including across racial and ethnic lines. Selling parks would foreclose opportunities for Milwaukee County’s collective future (see sidebar).
Sales of county parks would blatantly—and irreversibly—express civic surrender. Liquidating parks ignores their intrinsic value and would demonstrate lack of political will by policy makers when much of Metro Milwaukee is rebounding. When facing severe fiscal challenges, other major cities have not thrown in the towel regarding public parks. When Detroit trudged through bankruptcy, its parks were not liquidated. Current revitalization of public spaces is part of Detroit’s revitalization. Years ago, Buffalo, New York struggled to tend its parkland, but never sold parks. Buffalo’s system of Olmsted parks, now on the upswing, is increasing its appeal to millennials. Philadelphia also retained its parks even as funding lagged. Last month, a real-estate feature in the Philadelphia Enquirer titled “Perks of Philadelphia Parks” chronicled “signs of hope” in the City of Brotherly Love, as parks finally are getting long-needed increased public funding.
Milwaukee County’s public parks were thoughtfully planned and developed to serve ever-changing long-term needs. Indeed, these parks can continue playing key roles in keeping Milwaukee County livable and productive—boosting pride in residents and appeal to visitors.
Here’s a modest but achievable goal: Resist the defeatist narrative that parks should be sold, liquidated or privatized. Doing so will make way for far-sighted and dedicated people to implement long-term strategies to appropriately steward irreplaceable public parks.
Barbara Tulipane, longtime president of the National Recreation and Parks Association, recently said in a podcast that “parks will save the world by providing social equity and combatting isolation--because everyone deserves a great park.” Parks can help save Milwaukee County, if they remain intact, public havens for all.
