A Racial Equity Case Study of the Provision of Parks and Other Amenities in Arlington County

Overview

We examine the landscape of the provision of parks and their amenities by the Parks and Recreation Department in Arlington County from a racial equity lens. Combining data from the American Community Survey, Arlington Open Data Portal, CoreLogic, and scraped web information, we characterize the extent to which Arlington County is providing services that align with various communities’ needs and desires. In addition to racial (and other demographic) breakdowns, we consider other factors that may influence one’s needs for certain amenities such as car ownership, presence of young children, and type of housing (e.g. single family home or apartment building) and their intersections with race. We then calculate isochrones to determine how long residents of each neighborhood must travel to get to various parks and access certain amenities and overlay the factors described above to determine varying levels of access.