Los Angeles Recreation and Parks runs 493 separate park sites inside the city, covering 16,244 acres. Spread evenly that would be 4.2 acres for every 1,000 residents, but the land is divided very unevenly.
Council District 8, which covers a stretch of South Los Angeles, has 28 city park sites. Council District 4, which runs from the Hollywood Hills across the Valley floor, has 27. By park count, the two districts are almost tied.
District 8’s parks cover 85.1 acres, and District 4’s cover 5,105.8, sixty times the land for one fewer park.
The median park in District 8 is 0.29 acres
Ranked by acreage, the fifteen districts look nothing like the count.
| District | Sites | Acres | Acres per 1,000 residents | Median site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 (Raman) | 27 | 5,105.8 | 19.41 | 3.87 acres |
| 7 (Rodriguez) | 31 | 2,192.8 | 8.68 | 8.23 acres |
| 12 (Lee) | 45 | 2,070.5 | 7.84 | 17.07 acres |
| 6 (Padilla) | 21 | 1,609.9 | 6.32 | 3.89 acres |
| 11 (Park) | 49 | 1,403.4 | 5.29 | 4.82 acres |
| 1 (Hernandez) | 49 | 849.1 | 3.54 | 1.44 acres |
| 15 (McOsker) | 49 | 802.5 | 3.13 | 2.96 acres |
| 2 (Nazarian) | 23 | 474.8 | 1.95 | 5.70 acres |
| 14 (Jurado) | 50 | 458.8 | 1.74 | 2.31 acres |
| 5 (Yaroslavsky) | 21 | 367.7 | 1.40 | 1.23 acres |
| 13 (Soto-Martinez) | 36 | 365.8 | 1.44 | 1.30 acres |
| 3 (Blumenfield) | 21 | 248.4 | 0.97 | 6.66 acres |
| 9 (Price) | 36 | 110.5 | 0.43 | 0.74 acres |
| 10 (Hutt) | 25 | 98.7 | 0.37 | 1.03 acres |
| 8 (Harris-Dawson) | 28 | 85.1 | 0.34 | 0.29 acres |
The districts with the least park land are not the districts furthest from a park
City Recreation and Parks acreage per 1,000 residents, against the share of residents within a half mile of any open-access park
The median park in District 8 is 0.29 acres, about a quarter of a city block. Sixteen of its sites are smaller than a single acre. The median park in District 12 is 17 acres, roughly sixty times larger, and District 12 has more parks as well.
This holds across the whole system. Of the 493 sites, 161 are under an acre, and at the other end 19 sites of 100 acres or more hold 72.6% of all the park land in Los Angeles.
Griffith Park changes the district ranking
The largest of those nineteen is Griffith Park, and it’s large enough to distort every ranking the city produces.
Griffith covers 4,570 acres inside the city limits, which is 28.1% of all Los Angeles park land in a single polygon. Almost all of it sits in District 4. Without Griffith, District 4 falls from 19.41 acres per 1,000 residents to 2.38, which drops it from first place to the middle of the pack. The citywide figure falls from 4.22 acres per 1,000 to 3.03.
The distortion is worse at neighborhood scale, where four neighborhood councils divide Griffith between them. Hollywood United reports 188 acres per 1,000 residents with the park included and 0.04 without it. Atwater Village goes from 329 to 0.21. Both neighborhoods border the land Griffith J. Griffith donated to the city in 1896.
Most of what a park ranking shows depends on whether it includes Griffith Park.
District 8 ranks fourth on access and last on acreage
The headline measure in park policy, the one Los Angeles uses and the one the Trust for Public Land’s national ParkScore is built on, is proximity, the share of residents who live within a half mile of a park, roughly a ten minute walk. By that measure Los Angeles does reasonably well, with 75.9% of residents near an open-access park, and District 8 does better than that.
District 8 ranks fourth of fifteen on park access, with 90.9% of its residents within a half mile of a park. It ranks last on park acreage, with 0.34 acres per 1,000 residents.
District 9 is in the same position, with 88.7% of residents near a park and 0.43 acres per 1,000. So is District 10, at 77.0% and 0.37. Meanwhile District 3, which has nearly three times District 8’s park acreage per resident, has the worst access in the city at 51.8%.
Proximity and provision are different variables. Los Angeles routinely reports site count and proximity, and acreage produces a different ranking. Most of the quarter of a million people in District 8 live near a park, and they share 85 acres.
The gap
Park acreage is mostly a fact about when a neighborhood was built and what land was left over, and a hillside district has room a built-out flatland district doesn’t. Nobody is going to manufacture 5,000 acres in South Los Angeles. District 8 has 28 parks covering 85 acres, and 90.9% of its residents live within a half mile of one of them.
Method
Park geometry comes from the city’s Recreation and Parks layers, joined to the 2021 council district boundaries. Population is ACS 2020-2024 tract population apportioned to districts by area.
Acreage is computed as a geometric union instead of a sum, because seventy-four of the 569 park polygons sit inside other parks, and simply adding the acreage column would overstate city park land by 2,814 acres, roughly 17%. Sites split across a district line are apportioned to each district by the share of their area that falls inside it, so district acreage sums to the citywide total.
Three definitions of “park” produce very different totals, and this piece uses the narrowest one throughout. City Recreation and Parks land is 16,244 acres. Adding every agency’s open-access land, including county and state parks and beaches, gives 39,546. Adding restricted land nobody can walk into, mostly Department of Water and Power reservoir and watershed property, gives 45,168. That last gap lets a chart show Los Angeles with three times the park land it has. Encino Reservoir alone is 1,058 acres behind a fence.
The access figure uses a straight-line half mile and ignores freeways, the Los Angeles River, hills and walls, so it’s an upper bound in every district, and it is most generous in exactly the districts cut by that infrastructure. A street-network walkshed would lower every number here and would lower South and Central Los Angeles most, which would widen the gap this piece describes.
We recomputed every figure a second time from the park-level records, and the results match in all fifteen districts.