Substitution Between Privately and Publicly Supplied Urban Recreational Open Space

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Abstract
Traditional recreation planning has relied heavily on standards for deciding how much and which public recreational services to supply. This is particularly true of urban recreational planning which has ignored existing private recreational space in planning for public supply of recreational open space. Not accounting for the relationship between these two important sources of open space supply can lead to serious misallocations of capital, human, and land resources. A key finding of the research reported in this paper is that public and private recreational space are substitutes. This means that a change in the supply or price of one directly affects the demand for the other. As a result, reliance on traditional space standards as a stand-in for reliable demand data must be strongly challenged. Public open space planning should consider existing neighborhood private space if social welfare per tax dollar spent is to be maximized. Another important finding is that privately supplied space seems to be preferred to publicly supplied space. Middle-income and upper-income neighborhoods expressed less demand for public space because they could afford to substitute the more preferred private space. Demand for public space in densely populated, lower-income neighborhoods was greater because they could not afford the private space alternative. Income level and existing supply of private recreational space emerge as essential considerations in urban open space planning. In addition, these are important considerations for many other public policy decisions such as land-use zoning, transportation planning, urban renewal, and taxing policies.

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