By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
Like many New Yorkers, I love New York City’s parks. I live across the street from Morningside Park, live a short 3 blocks from Riverside Park, and sometimes enjoy a 15-minute walk to Central Park. A few decades ago, my colleague Bill Eimicke and I did management consulting for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and a few years ago, a group of Columbia sustainability students developed a strategic plan for Marine Park in Brooklyn, the neighborhood park of my childhood. As much as I care about the parks, it’s clear they are starved of resources. Mayor Adams and future Mayor Mamdani have both promised to increase parks funding to reach 1% of the city’s budget. In Adams’ case, his administration fell far short of his promise. It was one of many disappointments in his corrupt and incompetent mayoralty. Our new mayor has made many promises and will face many challenges, but I hope that he comes closer to fulfilling this promise than his predecessor managed to achieve.
In 2023, New Yorkers for Parks published an outstanding report on the benefits of increased park spending, and in 2024. the Center for an Urban Future published an excellent report entitled “Paying for the Growing Needs of NYC’s Parks: 20 Fresh Ideas to Fund Parks and Open Spaces.” According to the report’s authors, John Surico and Eli Dvorkin:
“The time is long overdue for city leaders to get creative and seek out new sustainable sources of funding for parks. This report puts forth 20 concrete and achievable ideas to pay for the city’s growing park needs... This report includes the following high-priority ideas: Create new, dedicated revenue streams for parks. Even as New York City generates more than $79 billion in revenue annually, there is currently no stream of revenue solely dedicated to parks. This report proposes several new mechanisms for generating revenue—including a small surcharge on all stadium and arena tickets…that would help the parks system catch up on maintenance while providing greater predictability around budget planning.”
In August of 2024, I also proposed a dedicated revenue stream for New York City’s parks. At that time, I observed that:
“We need to get creative and develop a new way to fund our parks. My view is that we need to develop an institution like the Water Authority, built on a specific user fee. While we can’t and shouldn’t charge a park user fee, there is another approach that could work. The most logical source of revenue would be one based on a modest increase in property tax that is placed in a trust fund beyond the reach of elected officials and allocated by a quasi-governmental authority that is prohibited from diverting the resources to non-park uses. The amount of funding would be pegged at 1% of the city’s total budget, and taxes would be automatically adjusted to meet that number. Last year, New York City generated about $32 billion in property tax. A tax increase of about 3.1% would generate about a billion dollars a year, or close to 1% of the city budget, for a Parks Authority Trust Fund. This would remove parks from the budget competition and would be a tax investment that would pay off in increased property values. While no one wants to pay higher taxes, if it generated visible improvements in new parks and maintenance of old parks, people would come to support it.”
New York City has already made a huge investment in its parks, but it needs to continue to build and maintain this large and critical public good. According to the Parks Department’s website:
“NYC Parks is the steward of more than 30,000 acres of land — 14 percent of New York City — including more than 5,000 individual properties ranging from Coney Island Beach and Central Park to community gardens and Greenstreets. We operate more than 800 athletic fields and nearly 1,000 playgrounds, 1,800 basketball courts, 550 tennis courts, 65 public pools, 51 recreational facilities, 15 nature centers, 14 golf courses, and 14 miles of beaches. We care for 1,200 monuments and 23 historic house museums. We look after 666,000 street trees, and five million more in parks.”
The federal government and state government also run parks in the city, totaling about 3.5% of the city’s land. While most of New York City’s land sits beneath single-family private homes, most of New York City’s people live in multi-family buildings. For most New Yorkers, the parks are everyone’s backyard. Look in any playground when the weather’s decent, and you’ll see balloons and cupcakes indicating that a birthday party is either planned or underway. During the COVID pandemic, the parks became the 3-dimensional cure for a day with too much time spent on Zoom. The parks are the place where you see the incredible diversity and richness of our city’s people. Many languages, many ages, sharing an amazing resource; often punctuated by the cries of glee of children at play. Our parks are the physical embodiment of our community, and they need more resources than they currently receive.
Today, the city’s FY26 expense budget is $115.9 billion, while the parks’ operating budget is $627 million—or about .6 percent of the city’s budget. To get to 1%, our new Mayor and his team will need to find $532 million. Parks do better in the city’s capital budget than in the operating budget, but still fall short of even the city’s long-term plan. The City’s Preliminary 10-year Fiscal Year 26-35 capital budget is $170 billion over ten years. Parks share of that is nearly 6% or about $10 billion. However, in the September 2025 capital commitment plan, the Parks commitment was $3.4 billion from FY26 to FY29, or 4.5 percent. Walk in any New York City park, and you will see crumbling stairs, broken bathrooms, and corroded fences. In Riverside Park in my neighborhood, there are sinkholes in the pathways surrounded by metal police barriers that have sat in disrepair for years. As deep as these capital needs are, the operating needs are even deeper.
An increase of $532 million per year could be spent in many ways, but key needs include:
- Extra cleaning and trash removal at busy parks. Morningside Park on a summer Monday is the home of overflowing trash bins and plastic garbage bags left after barbecues and then opened by hungry nocturnal animals.
- Increasing tree pruning and clearing of forest brush, funding forestry crews for the 12,000 acres of NYC forestland in the parks and increasing the care given for newly planted street trees.
- Focusing on the maintenance needed to adapt to the impact of climate change. This includes planting to absorb rainwater, to reduce summer heat, and clearing brush to prevent forest fires.
- Increasing bathroom hours, upkeep, and maintenance.
- Eliminating graffiti as soon as it appears. If the “artwork” disappears soon after it is created, the creators will look for better, more long-lasting surfaces to deface.
- Ensure that every park has a manager. When I was a kid, most parks had a “Parkee” who lent kids equipment and kept an eye on danger and damage in the park.
- Increase swim and skating instruction and other services that enable New Yorkers to safely enjoy their parks.
The Parks Department always loses in the competition for resources with essential services such as public safety, food and shelter for poor people, education, and other important priorities. A dedicated revenue stream would remove it from that competition and would have the indirect impact of increasing funding for those other priorities. There are many creative ways to create such a lock-box trust fund. I hope that New York State and New York City figure this out. A New York City park is a terrible thing to waste.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
