In this four-exposure image, MacArthur Park and Lafayette Park are layered on top of each other, symbolizing a connection between the two public spaces in Koreatown-Westlake.
Neighbors Magazine
• 9 min read
• 06.24.2026
In the Space Between Parks: A Walk Through LA’s Missing Green
A new report ranks L.A. park access among the country’s worst. Writer Alissa Walker explores her neighborhood on foot to imagine where new parks could thrive.
Essay by Alissa Walker
Alissa Walker has been writing about L.A.’s parks and public spaces for two decades.
I’m an L.A. mom of two without a park nearby, so I’ve become an expert in urban improvisation. Is this median’s grass good enough for a picnic? Can an overgrown vacant lot stand in as monarch habitat? Where we live, the closest “local” park is 20 minutes away on foot. In a city that prioritizes cars, any opportunity to engage with the living world is shoved aside. Where is the nearest spray of native poppies or splash of flowing water? Simply out of reach in a city of pavement, pavement, and more pavement.
This is the daily reality for the 1.5 million Angelenos who don’t live within a 10-minute walk of a park. And the problem is getting worse. A new report ranks L.A. parks among the country’s least accessible. But I don't need the data to tell me this—I see that reality everywhere I go. I also see opportunities: the cracked asphalt sprouting California buckwheat, the alleys riddled with puddles after a rainstorm. Every time I take that long, hot walk to the park with my kids, I envision the possibilities for living infrastructure.
Residents often find overgrown empty lots like these west of MacArthur Park. Even abandoned expanses of concrete can sprout life if they’re allowed to. Imagine what more could thrive here if properly tended.
Unpacking the problem
Los Angeles has long lagged behind cities like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago in the Trust for Public Land's annual ParkScore index. By ranking U.S. municipal park systems by acreage, amenities, access, and more, the land-conservation nonprofit has built the gold standard for measuring equitable park investments. But starting a decade ago, L.A.’s rankings began to decline. In 2016, L.A. ranked 65th out of 100 cities. Last year, 90th. The newest report, released in May, shows a city sliding toward catastrophe—this year, L.A. ranked 93rd out of the 100 most-populous cities.
The numbers get even worse. In the second-largest city in the U.S., neighborhoods of color have 79 percent less park space than white neighborhoods, and low-income neighborhoods have 85 percent less park space than high-income neighborhoods. Those inequities are also reflected in the findings of a complementary report that determined parks deliver, on average, a $3 economic return for every $1 in investment. Neighborhoods that don’t receive park investments will never reap those benefits: lower costs for healthcare and improved public health.
In 2025, L.A. conducted a citywide park needs assessment—the first in nearly 20 years—that included a new tool, which divided the city into square-mile tracts to evaluate where new parks should go. By applying a range of metrics from household income to environmental hazards, the city highlighted 25 highest-priority sites—including, just as I'd suspected, the Westlake-Koreatown square mile adjacent to my own home.
“With so much demand, L.A. simply has to make more room.”
Just looking at a map, Koreatown and Westlake do have some parks and waterways. Historically, these neighborhoods’ sloughs and swamps are one reason they have any parks at all: Property owners donated what was then seen as undevelopable land to the city a century ago. But these tiny green squares are deceptive. “That's one of the top areas in the city where the most people live with the least park space,” says Jon Christensen, adjunct assistant professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, who helped build the tool.
Too many people using too little green space creates another phenomenon: park pressure, where parks become overcrowded. In addition to more maintenance and repair costs, that type of overuse can degrade the few living landscapes we have. With so much demand, L.A. simply has to make more room.
Landscape architect Esther Margulies agrees. The founder of private architecture firm The Office of the Designed Landscape, she worked on the 2009 city parks assessment. "With all the increases in density,” she says, “where is the proportionate increase in open space to make sure that we are creating healthy neighborhoods, not just denser neighborhoods?" In search of answers, I set off to walk every street in the Westlake-Koreatown square mile to find the places where living infrastructure could take root.
Lafayette Park was once dotted with oil wells. Now, it’s a place where the living world converges with L.A.’s iconic skyscrapers.
Walking in search of green
My ground-truthing started near MacArthur Park and Lafayette Park. These well-used properties—which house rec centers, sports fields, playgrounds, and all the urban challenges that confront stressed parks—have become essential for families in overcrowded apartments and unhoused neighbors alike. On a spring Saturday, these parks echoed with the squeals of kids on scooters and whistles from a pickup soccer game. Vendors sold meticulously diced fruit showered in lime and Tajín.
MacArthur Park is also home to a huge lake where, on this particular morning, quite a few people were clustered along the edge, fishing for bass. Soon enough, the lake’s southern banks will be home to a $40 million stormwater capture project that will collect and treat local runoff. This new addition is funded by the county’s Safe, Clean Water Program, which taxes landowners for impermeable surfaces on their private properties (think parking lots or concrete driveways).
MacArthur Park was a swampy trash dump until the late 19th century, when the city revitalized the space. The park is now nestled in one of L.A.’s most culturally rich neighborhoods.
MacArthur Park is split by busy Wilshire Boulevard, which the city is considering closing to cars to reconnect the park’s two halves. During this summer's World Cup, as the park hosts soccer viewing parties, a two-day open streets event will serve as a kind of pilot program to see what's possible. The space will connect MacArthur Park all the way to Lafayette Park, envisioning a future where this street transforms into one contiguous green space.
“We’re going to have to think big—like box-store big—because tiny spaces won’t cut it.”
Just three streets past Lafayette Park, the Southwestern Law School transformed a section of Westmoreland Avenue into a grassy mini-park between its two main buildings on campus. The plantings could use some native biodiversity, but as I sat under a canopy of jacarandas, I was treated to both refreshing shade and an escape from the insistent rattle of vehicles. Kicking cars off just a few more blocks would start to reveal the possibilities of not just reconnecting parks, but re-wilding Wilshire.
On another warm afternoon, I walked all the way to Shatto Park, the poster child of park pressure. I eyed a former hospital atop orphaned oil wells, just begging to be remediated. That Monday, three different sports teams were all practicing on the same baseball diamond, boxed in by a strip mall. Yet, as I rounded the corner, the Rite Aid next door was abandoned, its empty parking lot the exact size of the baseball diamond. Imagine L.A. taking a cue here from the nearby city of Glendale, which is turning a vacant strip mall into a park.
My city’s untapped potential
We’re going to have to think big—like box-store big—because tiny spaces won’t cut it. "A whole bunch of pocket parks doesn’t move the needle as far as connectivity and habitat needs for other species," says Margulies, who is also the director of the University of Southern California’s Master of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism program.
She points to another opportunity: schools. "The acreage is there,” she says. “It's just about being able to use it."
Across my community, schoolyards are frightfully consistent—and dangerously hot. Just outside my square mile, SALT Landscape Architects is completing a project with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust to transform Esperanza Elementary School. "This one is the model," says founder Allen Compton of the plan to replace nearly 40,000 square feet of asphalt with sage and sunflowers. "It sets a really high bar." Students have spotted willow flycatchers, peregrine falcons, and at least one burrowing owl. Across L.A., the design studio has greened 18 public schoolyards, planted nearly a thousand trees, and removed over 775,000 square feet of paved surfaces over the last five years.
Lafayette Park comes to life in the fields where children play soccer or pop a kickflip on their skateboards.
The key is opening schoolyards to the public in the off-hours—something L.A. is just starting to do after struggling in legal limbo for years. If the nearly 600 Los Angeles Unified School District schoolyards located within city limits were greened and opened as parks, the number of Angelenos within a 10-minute walk would skyrocket to 87.7 percent.
I ended my final walk outside our elementary school and tried to imagine everyday access. A place so close, my kids can walk there by themselves. I visualized the possibilities: a microforest shading the hottest corner, a rocky garden filtering local stormwater. I envisioned families and teachers working together—a future where my neighborhood's full potential is finally unearthed.
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Alissa Walker writes about L.A. transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy. She is the editor of Torched, which reports on the civic investments and policy decisions that Los Angeles is making for its megaevent-hosting era.
Alejandra Martínez Cortes is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on film and digital photography, including darkroom prints, archives, and mixed media. Her art is a direct response to her confusion about discrimination against her family and herself as a Mexican girl born and raised in Los Angeles. Martínez’s work pays homage to her city and the people living in it. It's her form of creating a narrative of appreciation for what her community has to offer and what privileged folks are constantly misconstruing. Martínez currently resides in Los Angeles and is completing her undergraduate degree at UCLA.
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