Greater demand for playgrounds due to less demand for more expensive electronic entertainment, maybe?

Also, how are grocery stores, which are private, a "social service?"

Maybe because less affluent people are more likely to make use of public facilities?

When I was in high school, most of us kids went swimming at the day beach, which was public and free. I had a girlfriend who came from a well-to-do family, and she looked a little appalled at the idea of swimming there.

I think the affluent families in NYC might be less inclined to send their kids to go and play in a public park; they probably would be more comfortable sending children to privately-owned facilities.

I would think in a place like NYC where land is so valuable it's more of a property-cost issue: turning land in a swanky part of Manhattan into a park is wasting thousands upon thousands of dollars of rental money, income and sales-tax revenue, etc. But land in a poorer neighborhood is not nearly as costly, meaning the city not only looses less potential tax income, but there also aren't other developers clamoring for the space.

I think the more telling graphic would be to look at how much is spent on upkeep for the parks and/or how many municipal workers are assigned to the park. That's where I think you would find the class impact on playgrounds

I think this has a lot to do with public housing, actually -- most 'projects' or housing towers have an attached playground area as well, or a number of nearby public schools with playgrounds for the children in that housing. Looking at these maps I notice the playgroudn dense areas also overlapping with areas that I think of as 'full of housing towers' -- that two bridges area pops out RIGHT away, as well as the cluster around all the housing in the bedstuy/bushwick area, like the marcy ave projects etc.

http://gis.nyc.gov/nycha/im/AddressMap.do

Urban development that lead to playgrounds, as well as highways, parks, and other projects tended to be destructive to the neighborhoods in which they were built. Urban planners at that time, such as Robert Moses, saw their projects as improvements and were often indifferent, or even hostile, to the opinions of the local people. It's possible that these developments altered the organic structure of the communities and replaced them with a less desirable structure. Over time these areas became less valued and the income/playground correlation you noticed arose.

I don't have enough evidence to prove this is the reason here, but it seems like a plausible theory. It is definitely an effect that has been observed for other types of urban development.

My guesses:

The children of the wealthy play in private school facilities, the best of which, in addition to the usual stuff, probably offer swimming pools and squash courts. I've also read that many newer apartment buildings have playrooms (as well as movie theaters).

Housing projects tend to have a number of playgrounds.There were at least four in project I grew up in, not counting the playground across the street connected to the local public school.

I would also look at the quality of the playground, although I was walking through a housing project on the Lower East Side and the equipment looked new. But there was a time when the playgrounds in Riverside Park and Central Park were a heckuva lot nicer than those in my Staten Island project.

Well playgrounds are free! Richer families dont need free entertainment.

The answer is pretty simple... many if not most of the public playgrounds in NYC are on NYCHA public housing property.

French Algerians aren't large-scale enough?

I've noticed this too--there are a lot of playgrounds in Detroit and the less affluent suburbs, whereas the more affluent suburbs rarely have any that are not attached to schools.

My family is fairly affluent and we lived in a well-off area. I don't remember being pushed into a lot of after-school or structured activities; my mom liked to send us to play outside. But we did have a really big yard, and we did have our own play structure (complete with ladders, swings, a slide, and a little treehouse) that was as good as a public playground.

Well-off families who let their kids do unstructured play outside may have the means to purchase things like this for their kids, which would mean that there would be less of a demand for public play spaces with the same kind of equipment.

Doesn't repeatedly spouting - no less BELIEVING - this b.s. get tiring?

Although I should add, that's in Detroit--affluent families in the area tend to have larger houses in the suburbs with large yards, whereas less affluent families tend to have smaller houses and smaller yards, or will live in apartments. I imagine the situation in New York may be different.

Historically speaking, public playgrounds were first established in lower-income neighborhoods in Chicago through the efforts of settlement house women who saw a need to occupy the children whose parents worked long hours. The children had no place to play, so public parks were built to give children safe(r) places to play. This trend in modern NYC could be a carry-over from this tradition. I also offer the possibility that lower-income families are less likely to have large homes or backyards to play in, whereas higher-income families can afford larger homes and backyards.

Well, I don't know about New York, but in Dublin (Ireland) a lot of county council funding goes towards building amenities in deprived or underpriviledged areas - presumably as a means of keeping young people occupied. So that would include playgrounds and things like public swimming pools which (to the best of my knowledge) tend to be concentrated in poorer areas of the city. Might be interesting to see if New York has a similar policy?

It's also possible that the areas where people earn the most tend not to have kids living in them? I don't know New York at all, but if the Yuppies live in the over 70,000 areas, then it's likely they're both young and childless... Or it could be that the richer families entertain their kids by other means. Actually, that might explain why the playgrounds are concentrated in lower income areas - the parents there can't always afford to entertain kids otherwise? I still think policy might be the reason behind this though.

I recall reading in a history of Paris that when Jacques Chirac was the mayor of Paris, he mandated that public green spaces be distributed so that residents would only have to go a certain distance to the nearest one.

In the US, I've definitely noticed that the well-offs tend to avoid public spaces, public transportation, etc. Whereas in France, there is no stigma attached to taking public transportation.

People who are richer can afford to move out of the city when they start families, and also tend to move back in when the kids are grown. There had recently been some discussion in Boston about how there's really no children around except in poorer neighborhoods. So there is more demand in poor neighborhoods.

Another thing I'd like to bring up has to do with Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

She makes the EXCELLENT point that many well-intentioned people feel that a quick-fix to a troubled area is simply to add playgrounds. The more playgrounds, the better, right? However, if you don't think about WHERE the playgrounds are located, they end up being dangerous, isolated places. (For example, a playground near a busy intersection versus a playground in an industrial area on the edge of town). So while low-income neighborhoods might have a higher volume of playgrounds, it would be interesting to find out how many of these playgrounds are actively being used by children & parents, and how many are either empty and/or used for illicit activity.

(Sorry, that was kind of a long-winded way of saying that low-income areas might have more playgrounds because people view playgrounds as an easy solution to other problems)

A lot of those playgrounds in poor neighborhoods are not so nice while the ones in wealthier neighborhoods are. The public elementary school playgrounds generally follow this trend. The one I work in does not have so much as a basketball hoop. The kids run around in circles on a small, crumbling parking lot. This is considered a "park" by the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation.

When I was a kid, we never used public playgrounds--we justed played on school ones. I wonder if poorer schools are less likely to want to have people on them after hours for liability/vandalism reasons?

Major subdivisions and apartment complexes usually carry an open space or public recreation space requirement, and most of these uses have affordable housing requirements built in as well.

I agree with many of the observations here, and I also tend to strongly agree with New Yorker in saying that the space designated for recreation in affordable housing areas isn't comparable to the space for wealthy areas. Usually it's just the minimum required square footage in some left-over common area, with the cheapest equipment they can spare. (The lower the rents/properties are, the less revenue it generates, and public spaces are always the last things to be built.)

Just looking at my area of Bushwick: The parks are either attached to schools or are in/near housing projects, or in areas which are not exactly the safest. Moreover, except for the school areas which are populated with school children, I hardly ever see people playing on the ones in my area (in the summer. I can understand not playing in the winter :)

In the town where I grew up, which is a mix of well-to-do and poorer, public housing areas, the local playgrounds in the poorer area were I intially lived were basically just big concrete spaces with maybe a ball hoop and a few dilapidated play structures. The bigger kids used to hang around to beat up us smaller kids, and sometimes we would stage fights with them or between ourselves. and after nightfall the big kids (ie. 16-17) would go there to deal drugs.

Ah, fun times.

Lower land costs in poorer neighbourhoods?

Re, the new map, what happened to Staten Island?

Very interesting commentary here, but a big and obvious problem with visual correlations like these is that they render far more important data extraneous.

In this case, I think population density is a far more consistent factor: http://130.166.124.2/atlas.nyc/ny1_20.gif

Clusters of playgrounds appear throughout areas of all the income brackets, but their concentration in most areas closely mirrors the population density. High-density areas have a lot of playgrounds regardless of the average income. Looking at the distribution of anything without in NYC that filter is quite misleading, as the five borough contain some extremes in variance of density. For example, Midtown Manhattan shows up as a very rich area without many playgrounds - true enough. But compared to the rest of the island, hardly anybody acutally lives there.

Because the income map doesn't have any grey zones, Jamaica Bay and JFK appear as big blocks of middle-to-upper income residence, although obviously no one is raising a family in the airport or wetlands.

If anyone has a bit of time on their hands, it would be interesting to see the overlaid map re-done with the relative size of each neighborhood distorted for density, to shrink out the places without much population (y'all know the map that makes Manhattan look 20 times bigger than Staten Island). Then we might start to see if the various musings on class and playgrounds actually make more sense. My guess, though, is that the only big revelation would be that people living within six blocks of Central Park happen to have fewer playgrounds on their own street.

And I don't think anyone will be surprised by that.

Since this is a large city, it is unlikely that parents in wealthy neighborhoods would feel comfortable allowing their children to play outside unsupervised, eliminating the need for nearby playgrounds. Parents and nannies can bring children to private or farther away public playgrounds, whereas in poorer neighborhoods where parents work, children are more likely to use nearby playgrounds without adult supervision.

I'd say it's cheap real-estate, they can afford it for public use.

On a separate thought, the wealthier people would use it less due to more private events and organized activities for their children.

There are more children in the poorer areas. Some of the poorer areas are immigrant areas, and new immigrants tend to cluster within country and language groups. There's an incentive to stay, even if they start making enough money to move somewhere else.

Young affluent couples with children tend to move to the suburbs. A few move to the Upper West Side, but these are in the minority of affluent couples with younger children.

Many or most highly affluent households are composed of the middle-aged or elderly who have no young children.

Perhaps the issue is the population density. The general trend is that the wealthier families would have less children then poorer ones. Moreover it is not a stretch to imagine that upscale apartments would be larger in size so there is lower occupancy per square metre in the richer areas. If there is less population there is less demand for public playgrounds.

My speculation would be that it's one of the easiest and cheapest things a city can do with vacant lots that are being unused. You probably don't see as many in areas with more income because that property is worth more for private ownership. Developed land usually lends itself to increased property value when placed next to other private property. That's my guess. The next question should be, how many of those playground in lower income area are actually safe and maintained properly?

late to the game here, but rather than the income chart shown, I'd want to see the density of playgrounds overlaid with the income of the area at the time the playgrounds were built. The affluence, or lack thereof, of an area may have changed in the years since a playground was built, while the playground remains.

This doesn't really mean this is a good sign. Such as..more playgrounds = more drug deals..

It might be interesting to do an exploratory study on who visits the playgrounds by going certain hours throughout the day and just observe.