Equitable Park Access
in New York City
Skills/Technologies Used: R
Parks play a crucial role in urban landscapes, with widespread benefits beyond a necessary respite from city life. From establishing more coherent ecological systems, to improving quality of life with enhanced air quality and counterbalancing heat-island effect, and even providing surrounding neighborhoods with social and economic stimulation, it is clear that parks are an asset to communities. However, generally, access to parks is not equitable, and it is debated whether and how much that contributes to social and health inequalities. In this replication study, I investigated park accessibility in New York City using OpenData NYC’s most current datasets on parks and census tracts. The first portion of this study involved a spatial analysis on park accessibility, while the second half focused on a regression analysis on whether the distance from parks could be used to predict key demographic data from the 2019 American Community Survey (ACS).