Houston Parks Board’s next list: 50 miles of trail, 25 neighborhood parks and two regional parks
Buffalo Bayou Park and the downtown Houston skyline. Photo: Michael Barera via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Fifty more miles of bayou trail, 25 rebuilt neighborhood parks and two regional parks. That is the to-do list Justin Schultz, president and CEO of the Houston Parks Board, laid out this month as the nonprofit raised a record $1 million at its annual fundraiser. The board, founded in 1976, says its mission is the same one it started with: investing in the city’s parks and green spaces.
“Fifty years, in some ways, is a long time,” Schultz told Community Impact earlier this month. “In other ways, [it] is just a blink of an eye. What’s really exciting for me is that the mission that Houston Parks Board was founded with in 1976, and our mission today, is the same.”
Over those five decades, the nonprofit has invested about $500 million in parks and green space, according to Schultz, and has supported projects that opened access to more than 15,000 acres of parks and trails. It typically has about 50 projects underway at any given time.
The bayou trail network
The board is best known for Bayou Greenways, the long-running effort to build continuous hike-and-bike trails and linear parks along Houston’s major bayous. The program’s 150-mile core, a roughly $220 million project, was designed so that 1.7 million people would live within 1.5 miles of a greenway. Schultz said the board now works on more than 170 miles of connected trails along the region’s bayous, part of one of the largest urban trail networks in the country.
Trails along White Oak, Brays, Sims and other bayous now link neighborhoods across the city, giving people a place to walk, run and bike away from traffic.
Three priorities for the next stretch
Schultz said the board is focused on three areas: the greenway system, neighborhood parks and regional parks. In practical terms, that means:
- Fifty more miles of trail added to the existing greenway network.
- Twenty-five neighborhood parks upgraded through Let’s Play Houston, a $60 million public-private program with the city.
- Two regional parks, the Hill at Sims and MacGregor Park, built out or improved.
Let’s Play Houston, announced in the spring, covers all 11 City Council districts, with two or three parks chosen in each. The parks were picked after an analysis of more than 180 neighborhood parks to find those with the greatest need. The list includes Haden and Schwartz parks in District A, Trinity Gardens and Lakewood in District B, Montie Beach, Clark and Warren parks in District H, and Andover and Brookline parks in District I, among others. As of late March, 11 of the 25 were in design and the other 14 were in community engagement, with more than 40 public sessions held in the first phase.
Once complete, the program is expected to be the largest investment in neighborhood parks in the city’s history, according to the Parks Board.
How the money comes together
The board does not rely on a single funding stream. Its projects combine money from the city and Harris County with philanthropic and corporate gifts.
“All of the work we do are public-private partnerships,” Schultz said. “There is no project that we do that is just one source of money.” What the board brings, he said, is the ability to manage design, construction and community engagement, and to pull those funding sources together.
He was also direct about where he sees a gap. Schultz said the Houston Parks and Recreation Department is funded “at a level that is much lower than all of our peers in Texas and in most cities across the country,” and said elected officials and residents need to keep pushing for more public money for parks.
A record night
The board marked its anniversary this month with a dinner at The Revaire that raised a record $1 million, PaperCity reported. Mayor John Whitmire and board chair Cullen Geiselman Muse spoke, and Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis and Council Member Sallie Alcorn were among those in the room. The event, normally an outdoor luncheon, was switched to a dinner for the 50th.
The Houston Parks Board’s offices are at 300 N. Post Oak Lane. Project maps and updates on Bayou Greenways and Let’s Play Houston are posted at houstonparksboard.org.
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