Mayor Eric Adams has laid out an ambitious goal: to make New York City the best place in the nation to raise a family. He has touted meaningful progress – on reducing crime, building more housing and implementing tax relief. But if New York is to truly become a place where families can thrive, the mayor must address one glaring omission: our public parks.
Parks are essential to a family-friendly city. Unlike the suburbs – where houses often have backyards or front lawns – most families in New York City open their door to concrete. For children growing up in New York, the city’s parks serve as their backyard. From Van Cortlandt to Crotona to Pelham Bay Park, our green spaces provide year-round refuge; kids can play and be active, connect with nature, socialize, access free community programming and more. In most neighborhoods across the Bronx and all five boroughs, parks are the only safe and accessible outdoor spaces available to children and families. Your local park makes an immeasurable difference in being able to raise a family here.
Beyond day-to-day quality of life, parks are also critical to our city’s fight against climate change. As New York adapts to rising sea levels and extreme heat, parks and natural areas play a crucial role in the city’s resilience. They reduce high temperatures, prevent flooding by diverting stormwater and defending coastal communities and improve air quality across the city. In the Bronx, residents suffer from some of the country’s worst air pollution and highest asthma rates, and many Bronx neighborhoods are disproportionately vulnerable to extreme heat. If we want families to continue choosing our city as the place to raise their children, we must have the infrastructure to guarantee it will be a quality place to live for generations to come.
Despite acknowledging the value of parks and repeatedly promising to meaningfully invest in the Parks Department, Mayor Adams has yet to deliver. His most recent budget proposal once again falls short, and continued disinvestment has its consequences. Underfunding and understaffing has left our more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreation centers under-resourced and in disrepair. As a result of roughly 800 essential parks staffing lines being cut, basic maintenance and safety are nearly impossible to uphold. And when parks are neglected, the families who rely on them pay the price.
Families arrive at parks to find trash-strewn fields, broken playground equipment or bathrooms locked or unusable. In some neighborhoods, parents are forced to leave early because there’s nowhere safe for their children to go to the bathroom, or because drug paraphernalia litters the grass where their toddlers should be playing. At St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx, the NYC Parks Department collected more than 34,000 syringes last year alone – a clear signal of a system in crisis.
This neglect sends a clear message: families are not a priority. With the number of young children in New York City down by almost a fifth between 2020 and 2024, and households with young children being twice as likely to move out of New York City, it’s clear that we’re moving
away from being family-friendly – not towards it. But it’s not too late to reverse the trend and continue building a city where families can prosper.
The path forward is not a complex one. For years, park advocates, community boards, environmental justice groups and everyday New Yorkers have asked for the same thing: a sustained commitment to funding and staffing our parks. This year, the call is for $79.7 million to restore the nearly 800 lost critical union parks positions. This funding and these positions would restore essential staff to expand programming, care for the millions of trees in our parks, ensure playgrounds and lawns are maintained, better steward the natural resources that keep our air clean and our neighborhoods livable…and keep our parks safe. It would allow the city to plan for growth and meet the needs of a changing climate, rather than constantly triaging crises.
Our City Council members are stepping up – demanding increased funding, pushing for restoration of lost positions and fighting to make parks a priority in this year’s budget. But they can’t do it alone. If Mayor Adams truly wants to make New York the best place to raise a family, he must put his money where his mouth is. That means treating parks like the critical infrastructure they are – not discretionary spending. It means delivering on his broken promises. And it means listening to the families across the city who are pleading for something simple and urgent: clean, safe and welcoming parks.
The Bronx deserves better. New Yorkers deserve better. It’s time to restore staffing. Increase funding. And finally, make good on the promise of a family-friendly city.
Vanessa L. Gibson is the Bronx Borough President. Adam Ganser is the Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks.
