Fact Pack

Natural Resources Provide Invaluable Services for Cities

• New York City saved $5 billion in construction costs by purchasing conservation lands around its reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains instead of building new water filtration and treatment plants.(1)
• Public agencies in San Antonio, Texas, have protected thousands of acres of open space to ensure that the Edwards Aquifer recharge zones are not developed. Failure to do so could have contaminated the drinking water for more than a million of the city's residents.(1)
• When over 10 percent of a watershed’s area is developed, rivers and streams within the watershed become seriously degraded.(2)
• An Urban Ecosystem Analysis conducted by American Forests revealed that, in Atlanta, trees remove 19 million pounds of pollutants each year, providing a service valued at $47 million.(3)

Conservation Strengthens Local Economies

• In the early 1980s, Chattanooga, Tennessee, was facing rising unemployment and crime, polluted air, and a deteriorating quality of life. To lure middle-class residents back, local government, businesses, and community groups decided to improve the quality of life by cleaning the air, acquiring open space, and creating parks and trails. As a result, property values rose more than $11 million, an increase of 127.5 percent.(4)
• Portland, Oregon, which adopted extensive growth management practices beginning in the 1970s and invested in an extensive park system, has attracted numerous new companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Hyundai, which picked the city because its quality of life would be able to attract an educated workforce. According to Bill Calder, a spokesman for Intel, the computer chip manufacturer that has nearly 9,000 employees in Oregon, “Companies that can locate anywhere they want to will go to places that attract good people.”(5)
• According to a study conducted in 1997, access to open space/parks/recreation was the highest ranked factor used by small businesses in choosing a new business location.(6)
• In the San Francisco Bay Area, the presence of the East Bay Regional Park District is estimated to stimulate about $254 million annually in park-related purchases, of which $74 million is spent in the local East Bay economy.(7)
• A 2001 survey by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) revealed that 57 percent of voters would choose a home close to parks and open space over one that was not.(4)(8)

Parks and Open Space Are Vital to Public Health

• A telephone survey conducted for the American Public Health Association found that 75 percent of adults believe parks and recreation must play an important role in addressing America's obesity crisis.(3)
• Land conservation helps prevent sprawl. Sprawl worsens traffic and air pollution. Air pollution is linked to lung(9) and heart(10) diseases and is responsible for thousands of deaths in America every year.(11)