You have to give the City of Greensboro credit for one thing: In a lot of cities, if a new ranking found some aspect of their city government to be near the bottom of the list, they wouldn’t put out a press release announcing that fact.
But when it comes to Greensboro’s parks system, the city did exactly that.
The City of Greensboro recently issued a press release announcing that Greensboro ranked 79th in the Trust for Public Land’s 2026 ParkScore rankings, which evaluate the park systems of the nation’s 100 largest cities.
At first glance, 79th place may not sound like much of an accomplishment. After all, 79th out of 100 cities places Greensboro in the bottom quarter of the cities measured.
However, there’s another side to the story.
Greensboro ranked 86th in 2025 and 83rd in 2024. This year’s ranking represents a seven-place improvement from last year and the highest ranking that Greensboro has received in the past three years.
The city understandably focused on that improvement in the press release.
And Greensboro Parks and Recreation Director Phil Fleischmann didn’t try to hide the less flattering part of the rankings.
“Our rankings near or within the lower fifth of the cities evaluated – 79th in 2026, 86th in 2025, and 83rd in 2024 – demonstrate that we have opportunities to improve in how we maintain and expand our system,” Fleischmann said in the city’s press release.
The ParkScore rankings evaluate park systems in five major categories: acreage, access, investment, amenities and park space equity.
Greensboro’s scores were:
- Acreage – 40
- Access – 44
- Investment – 31
- Amenities – 40
- Park Space Equity – 56
So the city’s strongest category was park space equity, which measures how evenly park access and park resources are distributed among neighborhoods of different racial and income groups.
That was the category highlighted in Greensboro’s press release. However, the detailed ParkScore report suggests that Greensboro’s overall ranking is being dragged down primarily by two other categories – access and investment.
The investment score was Greensboro’s weakest category.
According to the report, Greensboro spends roughly $127 per resident annually on parks and recreation when city spending, volunteer contributions and private support are combined.
The city-government portion accounts for approximately $113 per resident.
Compared to many higher-ranked cities, that level of spending is relatively modest.
The access category might be even more revealing: According to the report, more than 40 percent of Greensboro residents are not within a 10-minute walk of a park.
For many longtime Greensboro residents, that statistic may come as a surprise.
Greensboro has long cultivated a reputation as a city with abundant green space. The city has dozens of parks, miles of greenways, lakes, trails and large recreational facilities spread across the community.
The ParkScore data suggests that the issue isn’t necessarily the existence of parks.
Instead, the issue appears to be proximity.
Many residents may have excellent parks nearby that are just a short drive away, but the ranking places significant emphasis on whether residents can reach those parks on foot within about 10 minutes. That distinction helps explain why Greensboro can be viewed locally as a city with lots of parks while still ranking relatively low nationally.
In fact, some of Greensboro’s challenges in the rankings may stem from the city’s physical layout. Greensboro covers a large geographic area and is less densely developed than many of the cities that perform well in national walkability rankings.
Cities with dense urban neighborhoods often score better because larger percentages of residents live within walking distance of parks and recreational facilities.
And Greensboro’s spread-out development pattern makes that more difficult to achieve.
The city’s amenities score was somewhat mixed.
The report found that Greensboro scored lower than many peer cities in certain recreational features – including basketball facilities and some other amenities.
Overall, however, the amenities category was not nearly as significant a weakness as access or investment. One interesting finding from the report is that Greensboro doesn’t appear to have a single category that dramatically boosts its overall ranking.
While park space equity was Greensboro’s strongest category, a score of 56 wasn’t enough to offset weaker performance elsewhere.
As a result, the city finds itself in a position where several categories are below average while none are exceptionally strong.
That combination helps explain why Greensboro continues to rank near the bottom quarter of the cities evaluated despite making gradual progress.
None of this means Greensboro has a bad parks system.
In fact, a lot of residents would likely argue the exact opposite. Country Park, the Battleground Parks District, Bur-Mil Park, Lake Brandt, Lake Higgins, City Lake Park, the Greensboro Arboretum and the city’s growing greenway network are widely used and generally well regarded.
The ParkScore ranking isn’t necessarily measuring whether residents enjoy their parks. Instead, it attempts to measure how Greensboro compares with other large cities in terms of access, investment, acreage, amenities and equity.
Viewed through that lens, Greensboro still has room for a lot of improvement.
The good news for city officials is that the trend line is moving in the right direction.
After all, Greensboro climbed seven spots in the rankings this year and improved over both of the previous two years.
