LA's parks department said the city needs 71 new dog parks by 2050. It has opened one in the last seven years.

Los Angeles Recreation and Parks has put a number on how many off-leash dog parks the city should have. Its park needs assessment counts 14 today and recommends 85 by 2050, a standard of about two for every 100,000 residents. Reaching it would mean opening 71 more over the next 24 years, or roughly three a year.

In the last seven years the department has opened one. Ross Snyder Dog Park, at the recreation center of the same name on East 41st Street in South LA, held its ribbon cutting on November 12, 2022, three and a half years after Eagle Rock's dog park opened in May 2019. Nothing has opened since, and the next one, at North Hollywood Park, has $2.09 million in county Measure A money and is planned to open in the spring of 2027. Even at the pace between Eagle Rock and Ross Snyder, 71 more would take about 250 years.

Los Angeles has fewer dog parks per resident than any other US city of a million people

Counting every public, off-leash dog park in the city or run by it, Los Angeles has 15. Rec and Parks runs 13 of them. The other two are a fenced dog run in Grand Park downtown, which is a county park, and the Arts District Dog Park, which a nonprofit runs on a lot the city lends it. In its City Park Facts report, which surveys the country's most populous cities every year, the Trust for Public Land also counts 15.

For 3.9 million people, that's one dog park for every 258,580 residents. Of the 99 cities the trust ranks on dog parks per resident, Los Angeles is 96th, and it's last among cities of a million or more. The department's assessment puts LA at 0.4 dog parks per 100,000 residents against a median of 2.0 for the six peer cities it compared, which run from 0.7 in Dallas to 5.0 in San Francisco.

Much smaller cities have more dog parks outright. San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco together have fewer people than Los Angeles and 94 dog parks between them, by the trust's count, and Boise, Idaho, with a sixteenth of LA's population, has 22. New York's count of 158 includes dozens of unfenced areas where dogs can run off leash early in the morning and late at night, but its fenced runs alone outnumber LA's dog parks roughly six to one. Riverside Park in Manhattan has five of them, a third of the Los Angeles total.

The typical Angeleno lives 2.4 miles from a dog park

We measured the straight-line distance from every populated census block in the city to the nearest public dog park, and we counted parks in neighboring cities as well, since a Westside block can be served from Santa Monica or Culver City. The median Angeleno lives 2.4 miles from one. Only 13% of residents live within a mile, while about 2.36 million people, 61% of the city, live more than two miles away.

Seven of the fifteen council districts, numbers 1, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12 and 15, have no dog park inside their boundaries, and together they're home to 1.81 million people. By the city's own neighborhood council regions, the Valley holds 1.47 million people and two public dog parks, at Sepulveda Basin and on Whitnall Highway, with Laurel Canyon's up on Mulholland falling just outside the Valley's line. That's more people than live in San Diego, which has 29. South LA's 676,000 residents have one, Ross Snyder. The Harbor has none, because San Pedro's Knoll Hill dog park, slated in 2018 for removal to make way for a 110 Freeway off-ramp, is now listed as closed.

In Sylmar the typical resident is 7.8 miles from the nearest dog park, and in Pacoima it's 7.0. Nearly 787,000 Angelenos, more than the population of Seattle, have the Sepulveda Basin dog park as their closest.

LA's dog parks are few, but they aren't small

Sepulveda Basin's dog park covers nearly five acres and Laurel Canyon's almost four, while the typical New York dog run is about a seventh of an acre. Taken together, the city's fenced dog parks cover about 19.6 acres, not counting Glen Alla, whose size isn't published. That's a little less than the 22 acres in New York's 95 city-run dog runs. Runyon Canyon adds roughly 90 acres of unfenced trail where dogs are allowed off leash.

For scale, Rec and Parks' 12 golf courses cover 1,395 acres, more than 70 times the land in the city's fenced dog parks. Woodley Lakes Golf Course in the Sepulveda Basin alone is about 12 times their combined size.

Method

Our count starts from Rec and Parks' dog park list and adds the public dog parks it doesn't run. Privately owned parks that let the public in, at L.A. Live and two in Playa Vista, aren't counted, and neither are apartment runs or pay-to-enter clubs. Veterans' Barrington, on the VA campus just past the city line, is included because Rec and Parks runs it. Distances are straight lines from each 2020 census block, so actual trips are longer. Two neighboring parks, in Burbank and Santa Clarita, couldn't be confirmed as open public parks and were counted anyway, so if anything the distances here run short.