Boston green space per resident among lowest of major U.S. cities, report says

Boston has one of the lowest amounts of green space per resident among major U.S. cities, according to a new report from Geotab, a Toronto company specializing in vehicular fleet management.

The company analyzed the amount of green space in different cities, including undeveloped land and land accessible to the public. That latter included parks, community gardens, cemeteries, schoolyards, playgrounds, public seating areas, and public plazas.

It divided this space by the number of residents, and, based on that, declared which major U.S. cities were the “most livable” in terms of green space per resident.

How did Boston fare? Residents get 168 square feet of green space per person, one of the lowest of the cities surveyed. Only New York City (146 square feet) and Miami (166 square feet) fared worse. Atlanta led the pack with 1,023 square feet of green space per resident, followed by Dallas, Portland (Oregon), Washington, and Milwaukee.

The result is a rare black eye for Boston, which generally scores pretty well in analyses of green space available and proximity. A report that the Trust for Public Land released in May found that every Boston resident lived within a 10-minute walk—or roughly a half-mile—of a public park, for instance. The city was only the second to achieve that accessibility milestone in the Trust’s annual survey (San Francisco was the first).

And, as for dog parks, few cities beat Boston when it comes to dog parks.