Parks Are Economic Engines. Here's the Proof.

How parks and recreation drive local jobs, attract businesses, fuel tourism, and build the kind of community people want to stay in.

Parks Are Economic Engines. Here's the Proof.

How parks and recreation drive local jobs, attract businesses, fuel tourism, and build the kind of community people want to stay in.

Published: Thursday, August 13, 2026.

When most people think about the economic drivers of a community, they think about employers, tax incentives, workforce development, maybe the local business district. Parks and recreation rarely make that list. They should be near the top of it.

Over the last decade, a body of research has accumulated from federal economists, university researchers, and national nonprofit organizations, that reframes parks not as amenities communities fund when they have money to spare, but as core economic infrastructure that generates jobs, attracts investment, drives tourism spending, and makes a community the kind of place businesses and talented workers actually want to be. The numbers behind that case are substantial.

The Direct Economic Engine: $201 Billion and 1.1 Million Jobs

Let’s start with the headline figure, because it’s one most people have never heard and almost nobody believes the first time they hear it.

According to research conducted by the National Recreation and Park Association in partnership with the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, local public park and recreation agencies in the United States generated more than $201 billion in economic activity and supported more than 1.1 million jobs that paid salaries, wages, and benefits totaling $63 billion in 2021.

That figure, $201 billion is the direct, indirect, and induced economic impact of park and recreation agencies’ operations and capital spending alone. It doesn’t count tourism. It doesn’t count property value increases. It doesn’t count the healthcare savings documented in Article 1 or the productivity gains from the mental health benefits covered in Article 4. It’s just the operational footprint of parks and rec, measured by the same economic modeling tools used to assess any other major industry.

For context, the outdoor recreation economy as a whole, which includes parks and everything they enable, from hiking and biking to outdoor concerts and recreation equipment purchases, accounted for $454 billion of GDP in 2021, representing 1.9 percent of the entire U.S. economy and supporting 4.5 million jobs.

Parks aren’t a line item in a budget. They are an industry.

Tourism: Visitors Spending Real Money in Your Community

One of the most direct ways parks generate economic activity is by bringing people in from outside the community and those visitors spend money on lodging, food, transportation, and retail in ways that circulate through the entire local economy.

The pattern plays out at every scale. At the national level, in 2023, local economies benefiting from national park tourism supported approximately 415,400 jobs and collectively generated $19.4 billion in wages and salaries, with nearly 60% of those positions being direct jobs in hotels, restaurants, and tour operations that serve park visitors. The National Park Service has documented that national parks return more than $10 for every $1 the taxpayer invests, a return ratio that any business would be proud to claim.

At the city level, the Trust for Public Land’s comprehensive economic analysis of New York City’s park system found that domestic travelers who visit NYC at least in part to participate in outdoor activities spend an estimated $17.9 billion in a typical year, and NYC residents spend an estimated $681 million annually on sports, recreation, and exercise equipment.

For smaller communities and regional park districts, the mechanism is the same even if the scale is different. Trail systems draw cyclists and hikers from across the region. Recreation centers attract program participants from neighboring communities. Events hosted in parks bring visitors who stop for lunch, buy gas, and pick up groceries. Every dollar generated by park visitation circulates through the local economy as wages, purchases, and tax revenue, the classic economic multiplier effect.

Attracting the Workforce and the Businesses That Follow

Here’s the shift that has fundamentally changed how economic developers think about parks: in an era of remote and hybrid work, where knowledge workers have genuine geographic flexibility, communities are competing for residents in ways they never had to before. And parks have emerged as one of the decisive factors in where people choose to plant roots.

Cities that invest in parks and open spaces attract a diverse workforce and, in turn, businesses, employment opportunities, and visionary real estate development that contribute to improved quality of life. The Trust for Public Land and economic development firm HR&A Advisors studied five cities; Boise, Plano, Minneapolis, Boston, and Atlanta, that had invested heavily in parks. The finding was striking: cities where parks investment outpaced the national average boasted notable concentrations of highly educated residents and greater labor force participation among prime working-age adults, compared to other populous U.S. cities.

Boise is the clearest current example. The city has seen 60% growth in firms five years old or younger, compared to 12% nationally, a surge in young businesses that accompanies Boise’s commitment to developing and maintaining high-quality public spaces. Tech startups and established firms are locating in office spaces that overlook public parks, specifically because those parks help them recruit the talent they need.

This isn’t a coincidence or a soft correlation. Quality of life in a community increases the attractiveness of a job by 33%, according to research and 57% of potential homebuyers say they would choose a home close to parks and open space over one that was not. When companies choose where to locate or expand, they follow their workforce. And their workforce follows quality of life.

“Companies are appreciative of long-term thinking from local governments, and that includes investment in parks,” as one city mayor put it. “Parks definitely boost quality of life, and that’s important for retaining and attracting employees.”

Local Businesses Feel It Too

The economic impact of parks doesn’t stop at the park entrance. It extends into the commercial corridors, restaurants, and shops that surround and connect to park systems.

People who visit parks patronize nearby businesses before the trail run, after the rec center workout, on the way home from the playground. Restaurants, outfitters, lodging, and retail shops often cluster near trail access points, generating new jobs and expanding the local tax base. This effect is most visible in communities with well-connected trail networks, where a single trail can drive consistent foot and bike traffic through commercial districts that previously struggled to attract customers.

The evidence shows up in property values too. The value of office buildings adjacent to the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston is significantly higher than those in Boston’s central business district which is a direct measure of the premium that proximity to quality green space commands in the commercial real estate market, not just the residential one.

The Multiplier: Every Dollar Invested Comes Back Several Times Over

What makes parks uniquely powerful as economic infrastructure is the multiplier effect. Unlike a one-time expenditure, park investment generates returns across multiple channels simultaneously and those returns compound over time.

A dollar invested in park operations supports staff jobs that generate wages, which get spent locally. That same dollar maintains trails and facilities that attract visitors, whose spending supports more local jobs. The park raises surrounding property values, generating more tax revenue. It improves community health, reducing employer healthcare costs and absenteeism. It attracts residents and businesses who might otherwise have located elsewhere, expanding the tax base further still.

The economic impact of local parks is a conservative estimate that does not capture parks’ other economic benefits, including higher real estate values, health and wellness benefits, conservation and resiliency benefits, tourism, and other economic development activities, according to NRPA’s own methodology notes. In other words, even the $201 billion figure understates the full picture.

The National Park Service’s oft-cited figure, that parks return more than $10 for every $1 invested, reflects this multiplier reality. While local park district ratios vary by context, the directional finding is consistent across study after study: well-run parks generate more economic value than they cost to operate.

What This Means for Trails Park and Recreation District

Every trail mile maintained, every rec center program offered, every park kept clean and welcoming generates economic activity in this community and region. The direct jobs our district supports, staff, maintenance crews, program instructors, pay wages that circulate locally. The visitors our facilities attract from neighboring communities spend money here. The quality of life our parks provide is part of what makes this a place people choose to live, work, and invest.

We’re not just a parks and recreation district. We are economic infrastructure; the same as roads, broadband, and water systems, just less visible in the typical economic development conversation.

The communities that understand this are the ones investing in their parks even when budgets are tight, because they’ve done the math and they know that the return justifies the investment. The communities that treat parks as a luxury (the first thing to cut and the last thing to restore) are the ones that find themselves losing ground in the competition for residents, talent, and businesses. We know which kind of community we want to be. And we have the data to back it up.