Environmental Justice and Phoenix, Arizona Neighborhood Parks

The literature on urban parks and green spaces has demonstrated that these spaces in a city can have a significant and positive impact on human health, including physical, mental, and psychological health. In fact, living near parks has been shown to reduce mortality rates in residents and significantly reduce depression and stress levels. Yet, the environmental justice literature has shown that the quality of parks (measured by a variety of variables including park size) is not evenly distributed within metropolitan areas. Lower socio-economic status (SES) neighborhoods tend to have access to poorer quality parks than residents in higher SES areas. Some researchers have even shown how health disparities in cities (across a variety of SES variables) could be partly explained by reduced access to high-quality greenspace. In this article, EJSCREEN data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are merged with park data from the City of Phoenix to explore whether neighborhood parks in the City of Phoenix display these trends from the environmental justice literature. These trends are analyzed across a variety of demographic variables, including income level and percentage of under-represented residents. The results indicate that environmental justice issues are prevalent in the Phoenix metropolitan area in terms of environmental quality for neighborhood parks.