Could Building Thousands of Parks Fix the Real Estate Market?

Emptiness is a recurring condition in America's urban areas. The crash of the housing market has left homeowners underwater, and developers with evaporated financing and stalled projects. But while homes may have earned most of the attention as the real estate market’s crash continues to reverberate through cities, thousands of commercial sites have also been left empty in its wake.

Empty parking lots, boarded up storefronts, dirt plots waiting for development. For cities these pieces of land blight their surroundings and drag down property values. But they don’t all have to. A new initiative aims to work with cities to reimagine empty plots of commercial land as a network of open spaces, taking commercial properties in the red and turning them into parks.