Longform

Philly’s parks are huge, historic, and woefully underfunded. The future of the city depends on fixing them.

It’s high noon on a 98-degree day in early summer, but Justin DiBerardinis doesn’t seem to know it. Wearing dark blue jeans and layered T-shirts — no water bottle, no granola bars, crazy stuff — the high-energy executive director of the nonprofit overseeing Philadelphia’s Tacony Creek Park plows into its 300-acre strip of green. We enter in Frankford, and about 30 minutes later we emerge in Juniata.

In between is a bit of magic.

On the jaunt, DiBerardinis first points out a Colonial-era road turned hiking path leading up and over Fisher’s Lane Bridge, a stone arch span constructed in 1759. From this vantage point he takes a good look at the Tacony-Frankford, one of the city’s few surviving major creeks. (The others are the Cobbs, the Pennypack, and the Wissahickon.)

A short while later, DiBerardinis stops walking and starts listening. The soundscape has transformed. The beeps and vrooms of urban life have grown distant, for brief moments even nonexistent. Now, it’s the whoosh of wind and water and the songs of birds.

This is the kind of thing that people from all over the city will drive 45 minutes through traffic to experience in the Wissahickon Valley. But DiBerardinis notes that the Tacony-Frankford Creek traverses a denser and more diverse pocket of Philadelphia’s grid, immediately walkable from North Philadelphia and the near Northeast.

“This isn’t about being a C-minus Wissahickon,” DiBerardinis says of the park’s potential. “It is about this sort of urban-wilds experience that I think this park has the ability to present at a level and character that no other park in the city is doing.”

But it’s not there yet. Tacony Creek Park is emblematic of green spaces in Philadelphia, a portrait of the gap between grand visions and stark realities that has existed since the very beginning of William Penn’s “Green Country Town.” Famously, Penn established the city’s five public squares and made other efforts to improve upon the cramped confines of European cities. Less famously, he never actually found the means to publicly fund them, setting the stage for centuries of often chaotic or contentious management of public spaces.

Today, according to professionals in Philadelphia’s park space, that legacy has taken the form of inequity. It’s always helpful when there’s a report card for a civic function, and every year the national nonprofit Trust for Public Land issues its ParkScore report, grading the park systems of the country’s largest 100 cities using a variety of metrics. This year, Philadelphia jumped several spots to 28th overall. Not bad on its face. But as always, the details matter.

The city’s score is buoyed by high marks for access. More than nine in 10 Philadelphians live within a 10-minute walk of a park or recreation facility, high above the national average. The problems arise from what the city’s residents find once they get there. Parks near high-income neighborhoods have 35 percent more space per capita than the city median, while those in low-income neighborhoods have 14 percent less, according to Trust data. That tracks closely with other demographic variables showing that predominantly white neighborhoods have 41 percent more park space than the median, compared to 32 percent less in Hispanic and Asian areas.

But the real kicker is the money. Last fiscal year, the budget for the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation came out to about $104 per person, which ranks 66th nationally, according to the Trust’s data. That funding also flows out of the city’s general coffers, leaving it subject to the annual whims of elected officials, says Owen Franklin, a vice president of the Trust for Public Land and its former Pennsylvania state director.

“We’ve got great bones in our city. We have a very big and extensive park system,” says Franklin, who lives in Old City. “But unlike most cities who are very high up on our ParkScore rankings, Philadelphia does not have a dedicated source of funding for park maintenance.”

The data also reveals how reliant the city’s park system is on philanthropy. Major financial contributions from large nonprofits like the Fairmount Park Conservancy account for about a quarter of every dollar spent on parks in Philadelphia, the sixth-highest ratio in the country, according to the Trust. The impact of that dynamic doesn’t show up in the data, but local park advocates say it does in reality: Some parks get more, others get less, and which is which depends on largesse.

Over the past five years, the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership, the nonprofit DiBerardinis helms, pulled in revenues of about $4.7 million to fund its stewarding of the park, according to tax records. That’s less than half of the $10.4 million that went to the Friends of the Wissahickon (FOW), the city’s preeminent watershed group — though the Wissahickon’s acreage is significantly larger. Both figures are infinitely higher than the funding for places like Cobbs Creek, which doesn’t have an official Friends group at all.

But park experts say that also very important, and tougher to track, is volunteerism. According to the FOW, it can rely on about 19,000 volunteer hours a year to build trails, pick up trash, clear brush, and otherwise maintain much of the park’s acreage. DiBerardinis says he’s working with about 800, although he hopes to double that this year.

These discrepancies in the capacities of nonprofits are key, some park advocates say, because the city’s Parks & Recreation department is not funded well enough to provide adequate maintenance of all its vast acreage. That’s how you end up with the Wissahickon recently getting a new Instagram-worthy footbridge, while parks elsewhere struggle to keep the swings swinging, the grass growing, and the splash pads turned on.

Kevin Loughran, a sociologist at Temple University who has studied public and private investments in public spaces, says there’s nothing wrong with people wanting to improve their local parks.

“The issue is not that there’s a desire to have a nice public space,” Loughran says. “Where these things go sideways a little bit is that people aren’t looking at the city scale, they’re looking at their own back yard.”

Philadelphia requested an interview with Parks & Recreation for this story; the department countered with an offer to answer written questions. In an email, communications director Ra’Chelle Rogers said the department “acknowledges there are equity challenges across our system,” which includes more than 600 properties. However, she said the department makes a “daily commitment” to work for all of the city’s residents and pushed back on the idea that maintenance is left to volunteers.

“We recognize that maintaining such an expansive network presents real challenges, especially with limited operating dollars,” Rogers wrote. “Our Friends groups are incredibly important partners … but they are not asked to substitute for core maintenance services.”

Back in the little slice of green along the Tacony-Frankford, one’s left to wonder about that statement. From the historic bridge, the otherwise scenic view of the creek is marred by a shopping cart lodged in the creek bed, collecting algae and plastic bags. DiBerardinis says he hopes the creek will one day be stocked with sport fish. But for now, it’s too polluted, and only small panfish swim in and out of the shopping cart for cover.

Elsewhere, discarded car parts and contractor supplies collected by DiBerardinis’s group are piled up along the side of a trail. He says he is constantly playing a game of triage: Which low-hanging fruit along the park’s edges can he leave for the city’s maintenance teams to pluck, versus which deep-in-the-weeds cleanups should he round up volunteers to tackle?

The challenge of solving these problems on a citywide scale is complex. The easy, unifying answer from most advocates is more money. Even after combining all funding sources going into Philadelphia’s parks and recreation system, the city ranks 51st nationwide per capita among the top 100 cities on the Trust for Public Land scorecard.

Disagreement comes in how to generate additional funding, and if it materializes, how it should be distributed. Loughran calls for a radical abolition of all nonprofit groups in the sector, in favor of better-funded public agencies that can be held accountable for providing equitable distribution of resources. Others, like Shawn McCaney, executive director of philanthropic juggernaut the William Penn Foundation, say they also believe the city needs to increase its Parks & Rec budget but argue that public-private partnership can bring more private resources to public spaces.

“I think governance of parks should be shared between the government and communities, and they should be working together in terms of programming, operating, and public space,” McCaney says.

For the past decade, McCaney’s approach has won the day. In 2017, the city launched Rebuild, a $500 million Kenney-era initiative to rehabilitate many of Parks & Rec’s aging facilities. About 60 percent was to be paid for via soda tax revenues, while the rest relied on private sources, including a $100 million grant from the William Penn Foundation, the single largest award in its history. Baked into Rebuild’s design was a requirement that the city work directly with nonprofit or community partners to plan out the rehabilitation of scores of public spaces across the city.

Advocates hoped it would be a once-in-a-generation investment in the city’s aging parks, libraries, and rec centers, especially the ones that needed it most. Close to a decade later, the reality is more complicated.

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Mill Creek once flowed through West Philadelphia but is now long gone, buried and converted into a historically suspect sewer line that left gaping chasms and collapsed homes in the streets above.

But Anita Lewis can forget about all that for a splash pad.

A grandmother who moved to the Mill Creek neighborhood nine years ago, Lewis found herself living steps away from its West Mill Creek Park, a public space that tetrises together ballfields, a playground, a rec center, and basketball courts over the course of several blocks.

After Lewis’s grandson, King, was born soon after she moved in, she didn’t want him going near the park. There were unsavory figures there — smoking, drinking, doing who knows what in a neighborhood acquainted with gun violence. But on a hot day this spring, King, now seven, was all smiles as he raced across the playground’s monkey bars. A short distance away, a band of neighborhood children took turns plowing through the splash pad’s fountain.

Lewis was also having fun. Sitting on one of a row of folding chairs nearby, she was surrounded by several dozen people gathered to eat free water ice and watch as the nonprofit Mural Arts program unveiled a large landscape painted on the side of a Parks & Rec building that hosts summer camp and other programming for children. City staff and personnel of Rebuild, which has committed $4.5 million to West Mill Creek to build a new playground, plaza, and basketball courts — currently all scheduled for completion next year — milled nearby.

Already, some of that money has been spent on minor improvements and the vibes have shifted, Lewis says, culminating with the dedication of the mural. She feels the park is safer and cleaner, and now she and King visit just about every day.

“It’s turning out to be okay,” she says. “Now that everything is coming together, and they got them signs posted — you know, ‘No Smoking’ — it has come up and you see more and more children.”

This is unusually good press for Rebuild. The public narrative around the initiative up until this point has been dominated by stories of hiccups and delays — some self-inflicted, many not.

The city needs to think about its public spaces as infrastructure and not as nice-to-haves.” — Councilmember Jamie Gauthier

First came lawsuits over the city’s soda tax, which pays for bonds the city issues to fund Rebuild. Those legal delays also led to the holdup of the William Penn Foundation’s $100 million matching investment, which is tied to city expenditures. Then came the pandemic and its gnarling of labor and material markets, leading to both construction delays and rising costs that saw the program’s ambitions scale back from at least 150 projects to 72, according to a 2023 Billy Penn report, which also chronicled building frustration in several communities.

“Nobody wants to work for this place,” Antoinette Holliday, then-secretary of the Recreation Advisory Council at the Kingsessing Recreation Center in Southwest Philadelphia, told the outlet after growing disillusioned with Rebuild’s plans for the center.

Those familiar with Rebuild say aspects of its design, including quotas for sourcing minority- and woman-owned labor, as well as requirements that the city collaborate with independent partners, added to an excruciatingly slow rollout. Nine years after the city’s soda tax was created, Rebuild’s website currently lists 29 projects as complete (although Parks & Rec says that may be out of date and that 37 sites have “received improvements”).

However, those watching the program say Rebuild seems to be finally coming into its own. A representative of the Kingsessing advisory council didn’t respond to requests for an update. But City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, whose district contains both Kingsessing and West Mill Creek, says much progress has been made in recent years. This spring, the Kingsessing Library, a historic red brick building dating to 1919, reopened after $8 million in Rebuild funding was used to repair its roof and exterior, add new systems and classrooms, and upgrade accessibility.

“This site is particularly important to me, because that was my childhood library,” Gauthier says. “The library is done. It’s beautiful. … They’ve preserved that historic character while also infusing a modern inside.”

In late 2023, ground broke on an even larger $25 million overhaul of the Kingsessing Recreation Center, complete with a new playground, new sports fields, upgraded lighting and landscape improvements, and major renovations of its main building. That’s one of 10 Rebuild sites Parks & Rec says are currently under or preparing for construction, with another 10 in design.

Rebuild now seems to be making so much headway that Gauthier is losing track. Asked during a June interview to identify a park in her district that perhaps isn’t getting enough attention, Gauthier at first pointed to West Mill Creek, before a staffer chimed in to remind her of Rebuild renovations getting underway there. Gauthier’s office is also contributing $500,000 in discretionary funding for the project.

“From my perspective, [Rebuild] is worth it even with the challenges, one hundred percent,” Gauthier said.

Franklin, with the Trust for Public Land, agrees and says Rebuild is indeed viewed nationally as a parks and recreation “success story,” even with all the rollout headaches. Half a billion dollars for parks is half a billion dollars, after all. But he’s quick to point out that the initiative is focused primarily on capital projects, which given the city’s lack of funding for routine maintenance leaves the endgame in doubt.

“Through initiatives like Rebuild, we are seeing the kind of investment that we need in these spaces, so that they are modernized, they are new, they are places you want to go,” Franklin says. “The question becomes, what will those places be like five or 10 years from now?”

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Where Philadelphia’s park system goes from here is an open question.

Many are waiting to see what Mayor Cherelle Parker does. Parker campaigned and has governed with a focus on a cleaner and greener Philadelphia, and in 2023 she told Parks & Rec Heroes, an advocacy group, that she’d like to double the budget for the Department of Parks & Recreation by the end of her first term.

During her first year, the department’s budget ticked upward from $79.4 million to $81.5 million, and is set for a more substantial jump to $87.3 million next fiscal year, according to city records. That still leaves Philadelphia well below the national median on a per capita basis, and Parker’s administration has caught some flak from both protestors and City Council members about the continued poor conditions of Parks & Rec facilities.

There are also lingering questions about whether the department is properly equipped to make good use of any substantial increase in funding; for more than a decade now, Council members have needled leadership on its oversight. During a previous stint as a recreation official, current Parks & Rec commissioner Susan Slawson told Council members in 2013 that new standards would be implemented to help with preventive maintenance of rec centers and playgrounds. After being named to her current post in 2024, Slawson and her deputies have told Council they are working on new plans for the regular cleaning of rec centers, a new asset management system, and the first facilities assessment of libraries and rec centers in 20 years.

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When and whether such initiatives will finally be implemented remains to be seen: Parks & Rec told Philadelphia via email that the department is still in the “early research and planning phases” of a new technology solution to improve maintenance operations.

“Our goal is to implement a system that brings greater transparency, efficiency, and accountability to our maintenance process,” the department said.

Advocates are also watching closely what Parker does with Rebuild. In late 2023, Parker described herself as a leader in pushing for the original initiative and has continued to show up at its ribbon cuttings. Parks & Rec said work under the initiative remains “active and is accelerating” under the Parker administration and that nothing has changed with the initiative’s design or programming. However, advocates say it’s still unclear whether additional soda tax–funded projects will be added in the future, or whether Parker has other plans in store.

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It’s at this moment that advocates say further public support for the city’s park system is needed. Franklin, with the Trust for Public Land, says it’s a positive sign that the city previously valued parks enough to prioritize them through the soda tax. But that still leaves the city grasping for dollars for routine maintenance.

“Of the 25 biggest cities in the country, the only city that spends less per capita on maintenance is Oklahoma City,” Franklin says.

Gauthier looks to cities like Denver (top 10 in the ParkScore rankings), which she feels prioritizes parks and rec facilities as essential infrastructure, in the same vein as bridges and utilities. The exact mechanism for providing more funding for Philadelphia’s parks — a new tax, fee, or bond issuance — feels less important than building a culture where everyone agrees something more is worth doing.

“I think the city needs to think about its public spaces as infrastructure and not as nice-to-haves,” Gauthier says. “That’s where we have fallen down.”

McCaney, with the William Penn Foundation, says it worries him that the city is currently without a political advocacy group leading in the space after the Philadelphia Parks Alliance (later the Heroes Fund) dissolved in 2024. That leads him to believe there needs to be a “reinvention of public advocacy” around the issue, driven by both voters and their elected officials.

But advocates also see persistent hurdles that need fixing. Many point toward a penchant among elected officials to prioritize capital projects — and their press-friendly ribbon cuttings — over the less glamorous work of routine maintenance. In a city with a million different priorities, that can lead to funding for the behind-the-scenes work of mowing grass and fixing broken windows falling off the table come budget time. They may not be sexy, but they’re the kinds of things that are needed to ensure equity.

Several advocates said the Rebuild initiative attempted, with decent success, to address this problem by leaving many funding decisions to professional staff and minimizing the horse trading that can take place in Council. But that also reopens the debate over who is best equipped to handle any increased funding.

Loughran would like to see a major realignment toward the Parks & Recreation department, and a subsequent diminishment of the role of Friends groups and similar nonprofits. He points to New York City, where advocates concerned about the level of private control and gentrification near public spaces such as the High Line and Central Park have called for major park nonprofits to distribute some of their endowments to help fund neighborhood-level parks.

Of course, Philadelphia’s nonprofits have a different take. McCaney says the William Penn Foundation is well aware of many of these pitfalls of the current system. He too supports a sharp increase in public funding for parks, saying private dollars will always pale in comparison to what taxpayers can provide.

He also says the foundation is changing its approach. In recent years, the nonprofit underwent a strategic planning process for its grant-making in which McCaney says it heard from a collection of experts and civic leaders that improvements to existing public spaces have to be prioritized, resulting in his organization shifting its focus.

“There was a clear theme that people said to us, ‘Don’t build new parks. Take care of the ones we have,’” McCaney says, adding that the foundation has since launched an initiative to improve 100 city public spaces over the next 10 years. “Sort of like a continuation of our investments through Rebuild.”

The nonprofit has also rolled out a new grant process that enables more funding to be obtained through open requests for proposals, rather than the old dynamic of suitors making approaches privately. This new process has led to first-time recipients making up about 30 percent of grant awardees in the first years after the new process was implemented, according to the foundation, which McCaney takes as evidence that William Penn is more effectively spreading the wealth around.

Sarah Marley, interim executive director of the Friends of the Wissahickon, says the nonprofit is also sensitive to issues of equity. For most of its century of existence, Marley says, it was primarily a volunteer-driven organization; it was able to build out professional capacity only in the early 2000s, after it received funding from the William Penn Foundation. Now that the organization is well established, Marley says, she’s comfortable with groups like the William Penn Foundation shifting their grant-making priorities to other park groups, even if it comes at the cost of her own.

“The grant application process can be onerous for smaller groups that don’t have professional staff,” Marley says. “I’m glad to see there is a more transparent and open process.”

Finally, there’s the Park Friends Network, an umbrella group of the FOW and about 140 other such organizations spread across the city, administered by Parks & Rec and the nonprofit Fairmount Park Conservancy. Kevin Roche, chief of staff of the Conservancy, says the network’s Love Your Park days are its most well-known initiative, organizing as many as 4,000 volunteers a year, whom he says the organization tries to steer toward under-resourced parks.

Like everyone else, he agrees there’s no way around the city needing more money in its budget to maintain the quality of its parks. But he believes in the value of collaboration and says nonprofits play an important role, pointing to the support his organization has received from the William Penn and Knight foundations on major projects in Parkside, Southwest Philadelphia, and Strawberry Mansion.

“Our stewardship model is actually, I think, the envy of a lot of cities,” Roche says. “The difference is the funding.”

Back in Tacony Creek Park, DiBerardinis is thinking about how to piece it all together. He’s got big ideas: a fishing pond, new dedicated bike trails, a million potential uses for an old driving range currently lying fallow. He does feel he’s gaining momentum and anticipates that more philanthropic and volunteer support will arrive once word gets out about the new forest emerging in the city. He even suspects that more public money could find its way there.

Given the gap between his vision for the park and the economic realities of its neighbors, he’ll need all he can get.

“There’s not a lot of wealth right here. This is not the Wissahickon,” DeBerardinis says. “This is working-class Philadelphia.”

Published as “Green Space” in the September 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.