Do Niles and Morton Grove Need More Parks?

Parks are in high demand during sunny months, when children are out of school. But do Morton Grove and Niles have enough of them?

According to standards set forth by a regional planning agency, residents of both communities may be underserved when it comes to open space.

In Niles and Morton Grove, there are roughly 3 acres of park for every 1,000 people. Those figures fall short of recommendations from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), which suggests that cities around the area should have between four and 10 acres of parks per 1,000 people within the next 40 years. CMAP recommends 10 acres of parks per 1,000 people, but four acres is adequate in dense areas. 

Morton-Grove is home to 14 parks, according to the Morton Grove Park District, for a combined total of almost 74 acres. Park space makes up 2.2 percent of Morton Grove’s area of 3,360 acres or 5.25 square miles.

Niles has 17 parks, according to the Niles Park District, totaling almost 90 acres. Of Niles’ 3,756.8 acres or 5.87 square mile area, 2.4 percent is parkland.

In its “GO TO 2040,” plan, CMAP uses the NRPA (National Recreation and Park Association) standard of 10 acres per 1,000 people to assess the state of parkland throughout the Chicago area. CMAP found that only about 49 percent of people in the region have “adequate access to park space,” as defined by the NRPA standard.

“Meeting the park accessibility targets will require approximately 5,200 acres of new parks,” the agency’s plan states. 

Bill Beckner, NRPA research manager, said the original development of the acreage standard came from a study done by the federal government that was published in 1964.

The report recommended where parks should be located and determined 10 acres per thousand people as a standard.

“The standard of 10 acres per thousand [people] kind of became a goal… but they weren’t saying that it couldn’t be more and it couldn’t possibly be less,” Beckner said. “You have jurisdictions there in the Chicago area … that are considerably less.”

He added that less acreage in some areas does not, however, mean that those area’s parks offer a lesser quality of service or fewer programs.

Every 10 years, the NRPA reviews and adjusts its park standards; today, the agency simply issues “guidelines.”

Morton Grove’s population is 23,500, according to a 2012 population census estimate. If Morton-Grove were to meet NRPA’s guideline, it would need 235 acres of public parkland—more than three times the roughly 74 acres of parkland Morton Grove has now. Niles population is 30,068, according to a 2000 population census, meaning it would need about 300 acres of park space to meet the same standard.

In contrast to Niles and Morton Grove, surrounding communities have slightly more parkland. Skokie has 3.8 acres of park space per thousand people, while Evanston has four.

The median for all Illinois jurisdictions is 13 acres per thousand, which is close to the national median of about 13.1 acres, according to Beckner.

Niles, Morton Grove, Skokie and Evanston all fall below the median of the lower quartile (25 percent mark and below), which is seven acres per thousand people in Illinois, and about five and a half nationally.

Beckner said that there is no longer a rigid standard for park acreage, but more than half of the jurisdictions in the country still use 10 acres of park space per thousand people as their standard. 

But, he noted, “The standard can be whatever is best for your community.”