LOS ANGELES — Steps away from an aging playset, Los Angeles City Council Member Kevin de León announced Tuesday that 18 new playgrounds will be built over the next 24 months in Northeast LA.
Parks in Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Highland Park, Lincoln Heights and Eagle Rock are slated to get the new play areas.
“It doesn’t take an urban planner to tell us that LA faces a tremendous equity problem with regard to the quality of parks throughout the city,” de León said at Ramon Garcia Park in Boyle Heights.
Located half a block from Interstate 5, the park’s current play structure is at least a decade old and showing signs of wear and tear, with crumbling padded landings and scratched metal railings. The first to be upgraded as part of de León’s plan, Ramon Garcia Park will get new slides, swings, a jungle gym, shading and wheelchair-accessible padding.
“When we look at city parks through the lens of green space, tree canopies, open space or the quality of recreational equipment, the disparities are very, very clear,” de León said. “Working neighborhoods of color have the least green and open space, the fewest tree canopies and, quite frankly, very old rickety equipment for our children.”
De León noted that he has secured $12.4 million in funding to upgrade 18 parks in Council District 14, which is receiving a total of $17 million in grants resulting from a bill he authored while serving as leader of the California Senate. Senate Bill 5, also known as the California Drought, Water, Parks, Climate, Coastal Protection and Outdoor for All Act, resulted in the Prop 68 ballot initiative voters passed in 2018.
About $800 million of the $4.1 billion Prop 68 provides is allocated to the Statewide Park Development and Community Revitalization Program that is helping fund parks and green space in disadvantaged areas, including LA.
“What I’m doing here, I want to do for the rest of the city,” said de León, who is a candidate in this year’s election to replace Mayor Eric Garcetti, whose term ends in January.
In addition to the groundbreaking at Ramon Garcia Park, de León announced a motion at Tuesday’s LA City Council meeting, calling on the LA Department of Recreation and Parks to create a multi-year plan to replace older playgrounds citywide.
“We have been coming down here to try to find a great project for the people of this community for more than a year,” said LA Parks Foundation Executive Director Carolyn Ramsay, citing Jill Werner of the Werner Family Foundation nonprofit as helping fund the Ramon Garcia Park project.
“The playgrounds that are in our parks are [an] essential path for our children to develop physically and to develop their imagination,” said LA Recreation and Parks District Director Anita Meacham.
Children aren’t the only people to benefit from having a place to play outdoors. Research has shown that community playgrounds also benefit the community as a whole by enticing adults to be active.