Q. What is the percentage of public park/green space as part of the entire area of the city of Wilmington and how does it compare to other urban areas in the state?

A. You’ve asked something of a difficult question to quantify perfectly, but we’ll get as close as we can.

The city of Wilmington has a total area of 33,856 acres. The city of Wilmington has a total of 743.52 acres dedicated to parks and athletic fields, said Amy Beatty, tthe city’s community services director. That equates to about 2.2 percent of the city’s total area.

However, it also maintains 32 miles of walking trails, which are harder to calculate as acres.

Additionally, New Hanover County owns 148 acres several parks and open spaces in the city, including Hugh MacRae Park, Airlie Gardens and smaller open spaces like at Cape Fear Museum, said county parks director Tara Duckworth.

Factoring that in, 2.6 percent of the land within the city limits, plus walking trails, is dedicated to government-operated parks and open spaces.

As far as how that compares to the rest of the state, the N.C. Division of Parks, in a 2015 report, found that New Hanover County ranked highly for per-resident access to parks when compared to other regions of the state.

Its 133 residents per acre dedicated to open spaces ranked 30th among the state’s 100 counties and was better than the state median of 200 residents per acre. But it trailed behind other large counties. Guilford ranked second with 41 residents per acre and Mecklenburg ranked third with 44 residents per acre.

Meanwhile, neighboring Brunswick County ranked seventh, with 61 residents for every acre of recreational land. Pender County ranked 78th, with 395 residents for every acre of open space.

Topping the list was Jackson County, in western North Carolina, with 33 residents per acre of recreational land, the report found.

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Date posted: April 24, 2018

User-contributed question by:
Marshall Law