Douglas Lamdin
2008-04-24 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

The single-statistic approach to ranking things, like cities, is frequently an accurate and entertaining indicator of the quality of what’s getting ranked. These can be positive indicators, like the number of movie screens or Starbucks in a city. These can also be negative indicators, like the homicide rate or the percent of high school dropouts in a city.

I have a new positive indicator of the progressive nature of a city and its quality of life: The number of dog parks. Adding dog parks is a low-cost policy to improve quality of life that Baltimore should consider.

For the unfamiliar, dog parks are areas set aside and maintained by the users for dogs and their human companions to interact off leash (the dogs, and the humans). In recent years they have become recognized as part of a vibrant urban scene that encourages responsible dog ownership, recreation and the interaction of residents across the city. Most frequently these are city-owned parcels of land, but they can be donated by private entities as well. When city-sponsored, either these are carved out of existing park space or from vacant city-owned property. Once the land is provided, donations provide the biggest chunk of financial support for the parks, so the cost is truly minimal.

My casual empirical research on this found that cities generally recognized as growing, thriving and progressive have numerous dog parks. For example, Austin has 12 dog parks, Salt Lake City nine, Minneapolis five, San Diego 12, Seattle 11, Albuquerque, N.M., 10, Denver seven, and San Francisco 17.

Where is Baltimore on this? We have one. Yes, one. We are tied with Buffalo, N.Y. In 2001 the board of the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks voted to create dog parks. The one dog park in Baltimore is quite small and tucked away in Canton. Its small size, and being the only one in the city, also makes it overburdened — a victim of its popularity.

A community can download the instructions from the Baltimore City Web site to apply for a dog park to be considered. But the instructions seem to have been written by a team of lawyers and exiles from the Soviet Union planning bureaucracy. There are six application steps, 10 criteria, and 14 rules and regulations on the three-page document. This probably helps explain why we are stuck on one park. A process that is inherently set up as reactive (waiting for applications) and not a proactive (seeking and encouraging applications) is a recipe for inaction.

There are numerous “unofficial” off-leash areas in the city parks, so perhaps this is really not a problem that needs attention. In a sense this may be true; however, dog-owning residents should not feel like lawbreakers when they let their dogs off the leash to enjoy a run in the park. Nor should those without dogs feel that the lawbreaking dog owners are encroaching on their space. Dog parks developed primarily to eliminate this issue. Moreover, the existence of “official” dog parks sends a clear positive message: This city is a dog-friendly environment for current and prospective residents.

The mayor, City Council, and the Recreation and Parks Department need to be proactive. They should set a modest goal of opening three new dog parks over the next six years, preferably putting to good use vacant city-owned land, or using areas on the edge of some of the city parks. If we achieve this goal, that would get us up to four by 2014. That would put us only three behind Cleveland, assuming it does not add any more. Perhaps adding dog parks could also be done in concert with the mayor’s “clean and green,” and public art murals initiatives. Meanwhile, perhaps we need to seek advice and learn from those cities that are so far ahead of us. What we are doing now is not working.

 

Douglas Lamdin is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and can be reached at lamdin@umbc.edu.