Where to build a park? On highway
WASHINGTON» The most popular place to put a city park is, increasingly, on a highway.
Cities looking to boost their downtowns, or to improve downtrodden neighborhoods, are creating “highway cap parks” on decks constructed over freeways that cut through the urban center. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Denver and Dallas have deck parks underway. Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis and Santa Monica, Calif., are among the cities considering similar projects.
In crowded cities, highway deck parks are a way to create new acreage and provide green space that can spur downtown development. Capping a highway to create a park also can reconnect urban neighborhoods sliced apart by the expressway building boom of the 1960s and ’70s.
“There’s been a sort of a sea change in the way people think about roads and real estate in general,” said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that focuses on land use. “If you design a city around cars, you’re going to get more cars. If you design a city around people, you’re going to get more people and places and better
real estate value.”
Dallas broke ground in February on the highway project that will undergird its second deck park, to be built over Interstate 35 in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. In 2012, the city opened the 5-acre, $110 million Klyde Warren Park above a freeway that separates the downtown Dallas Arts District from the Uptown residential and retail neighborhood.
“Everyone knows the future of cities is a good quality of life and attracting folks and telling them you don’t have to live in a concrete jungle,” said Bobby Abtahi, president of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board.
Dallas began building deck parks when local officials realized that its paucity of green space was hurting the city’s competitiveness with businesses, Abtahi said. Klyde Warren Park, now run by a foundation, includes a performance space, a children’s park, a restaurant and a dog run.
Property values around the park have shot up, bringing higher property tax revenue for the city. Office rents in nearby towers have risen by one-third since the park opened. New development brought 7,000 more workers to downtown and 1,500 new apartments.
Klyde Warren Park, which draws a million visitors a year, “has kind of turned into our public square,” Abtahi said. “It’s really turned into a place where you see anyone and everyone.”
But skeptics argue that highways topped by parks are still highways, and that cities would be better off investing in mass transit.
Angie Schmitt, editor of Streetsblog USA, a news site that promotes alternatives to car transportation, said deck parks are too often used to “greenwash” highway expansion projects.
“The problem with having a park over a highway is that highways aren’t a very nice place to be,” Schmitt said. “There’s a lot of pollution and a lot of noise. Capping a highway is a very expensive way to create land. You could end up with a very expensive park that’s not a great park.”
Some deck parks have been around for decades: Seattle opened Freeway Park over I-5 in 1976, and Phoenix has had a park over I-10 since 1990. The current surge is being spurred by strong demand for development in the urban core, where there’s not much space for new parks.
“If you had plenty of other welllocated urban land, you don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make this location better,” said Jennifer Ball, vice president for planning and economic development of Central Atlanta Progress, a business coalition. “This urban land is at a premium now.”
Deck parks are expensive: Chicago’s Millennium Park, built over railroad tracks, cost $490 million and opened in 2004, four years after the millennium it was intended to celebrate.
In Denver, an elevated portion of I-70 is being torn down, the rebuilt roadway will be sunken and a 5-acre deck park will be on top. (The project is being challenged in court on environmental grounds.)