Modern Skateparks Are For Everyone
Tools to lead the charge to bring one to your community
By Alec Beck
The short history of skateparks is complicated. The first parks were retail, pay-to-play, concrete landscapes in the 1970s. A cascading insurance scare brought most of those down in the 1980s. Without many places to go, the remaining die-hard participants were forced to evolve their craft by finding artistic opportunities in an urban landscape. This led to the current adage: “If your town doesn’t have a skatepark, it is a skatepark.”
With very few places to observe skaters learning the art of clandestine access, the general public hardened its misconceptions. Growing contention and illegal use of public property made it difficult for skatepark advocates to garner local support for the creation of these recreational spaces.
Skateboarders aren’t the first group to deal with a lack of recreational access. For decades, kids played baseball in the streets, ignoring the plethora of “no stickball” signs. Eventually, baseball diamonds became a regular fixture of city-wide recreation plans, largely due to the dedicated advocacy of the sport’s governing bodies. But for a category of action sports that has no written rules, no coaches, and a self-governing ethos, the transition to societal acceptance is still a work in progress. To this day, it takes the dedication of individual enthusiasts and forward-thinking government agencies to turn the dreams of the rolling constituency into a concrete reality.
As action-sports athletes advocated for greater infrastructure support over the years and society further embraced contributions from the culture, the road to building a public skatepark within a community has only recently become more consistent. For the last 20 years, The Skatepark Project (TSP), founded by legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk, has been leading the charge to improve access to public skateparks. The organization has provided resources, guidance, and nearly 700 grants to communities and municipalities across the 50 states in support of creating safe and inclusive recreational spaces.
What It Takes To Get It Done
Thankfully, prefabricated wood and metal ramps are no longer the material of choice and have been exchanged for poured-in-place concrete, enabling greater design possibilities, minimal maintenance, and a lifespan of decades. Integrations of more visible and accessible locations, informal supervision, and free-to-use access represent a 180-degree turn in public support. However, with all of the improvements within the skatepark-development space, three things remain consistent:
The need for advocates to pull the effort forward
The responsibility to design a space for a user base
The funds to get it done.
For advocacy, you’d be hard pressed to find a more passionate and vocal constituency than that of the action-sports community. Members self-organize, value community collaboration, and are steeped in resilience. However, most of them are unaware of their role in the civic-engagement process. Reach out to your nearest skate, bike, and scooter shops to begin building multisector collaboration.
Since nearly all concrete skatepark design and build firms are staffed with skaters who use these spaces themselves, the needs of the community are in good hands when their services are engaged. They can even enshrine a sculptural nod to the local history or culture in concrete for all to see and skate. More and more communities are using their current skatepark project as a way to honor community heritage. Simply hiring a general contractor is one of the quickest ways to waste the hard-earned funding raised; an experienced skatepark builder is critical for the project.
Then there’s funding. Modern skateparks should be funded through urban-planning budgets, like all other recreation and capital-improvement projects. Gone are the decade-long, skater-led, grassroots fundraising efforts to get a skatepark built. Public skateparks should not be seen as an economic engine or a direct revenue generator, but rather as an investment for community members, with long-term mental, physical, and economic benefits. The average cost of concrete skateparks is $50 to $75 per square foot. But the first real step is authorizing soft costs for city staff to prioritize a skatepark project. For hard costs, standard municipal-funding pathways are increasingly common.
Tapping Into Resources
For those tasked with grant funding (as many park officials are), here are a few things to consider.
Seek non-traditional funding sources. Standard park-space grant-funding options will likely be in your funding prospectus. County, state, and federal grants are often most helpful with these projects, along with local and private philanthropic outreach. However, it is worth exploring other community establishments whose missions align with the impact of skateparks. For example, connect with public-health organizations focused on youth, local hospitals, and mental-health organizations, especially those with grant-making programs, since skateboarding’s mental-health benefits have been established in a study by the University of Southern California and the sport provides people of all ages the daily exercise benefits outlined by the Centers for Disease Control in another study (CSUSM). Reach out to youth-based and inclusive support organizations since skateparks have been shown to foster a sense of community among the users (according to the USC study).
Identify the tangible impact. Help funders understand how much impact a skatepark will have. It is an easier sell in a community where there isn’t a single legal place to skate (for 53-million Americans, there isn’t a legal place to skate). However, when growing a skatepark system, it’s important to understand the service needs of the skate community and estimate the improved level of service. The shorthand equation follows: 10,000 square feet of contemporary concrete skatepark for every 25,000 residents. Learn more about skatepark service need and the Skatepark Adoption Model in the resources section of The Skatepark Project’s website.
Garner community buy-in. Potential funders, including local service organizations, are often excited to see how the local skate community has become civically engaged to support the project. Reach out to public-safety and law-enforcement groups to gain support for a place that gives youth a safe place to participate in healthy outdoor recreation. In the TSP National Law Enforcement Study, 90 percent of police officers who were surveyed believed that “the skatepark is an asset to the community,” and 85 percent of respondents noticed a significant decrease in complaint calls from local businesses and property owners regarding skate-related incidents. This early interaction with public-safety groups can yield funding support, but will help stakeholders manage expectations and create alignment moving forward.
Shift the focus to equitable access. With the increasing need for accessible recreation, especially in underserved communities, it’s important to understand how to address the values in context when seeking funding. A recreational facility with no fees or schedules allows for more community members to access the space and engage in potentially life-saving, healthy activity. Skateboarding is a low barrier-to-access form of recreation and the third-least-expensive sport in the United States (Aspen Institute).
Inclusivity For The Community
The activity and the space lend themselves to community cohesion. “Our research shows that through skateboarding, skaters develop the ability to communicate and build relationships with people from diverse backgrounds,” says Neftalie Williams, one of the researchers on the USC Beyond the Board Study. The study also found that skaters of color felt a greater degree of safety from judgment within the skateboarding community than in other recreational contexts. Increasing awareness around these factors may increase the probability of funding.
As the popularity of all-wheel skateparks increases (The Skatepark Project had a 700-percent increase in Technical Assistance calls since the inclusion of skateboarding and BMX in the Olympics), more agency funding is being sought for these valuable recreation facilities. It certainly helps that skateboarding was noted as the third most commonly reported interest for high school students (24 percent girls, 17 percent boys), and that the user base increased by 34 percent since COVID-19 lockdowns. This doesn’t even factor in all of the other common users of a skatepark: BMX riders, WCMX (Wheelchair Motocross riders), roller (quad) skaters, inline skaters, and scooter riders. Modern skateparks are for everyone.
Skateparks have been described in many ways—a therapeutic milieu, a church, a third place. Whatever you want to call them, they are a free play space for self-improvement, creativity, community connection, and fun. But it takes work to get there. Reach out to The Skatepark Project for technical assistance or grant funding. And if you find yourself discouraged along the way, remember the primary lesson learned in skateparks: getting back up and trying again is all part of the game.
Footnotes:
Alec Beck is the Manager of Public Education at The Skatepark Project (formerly known as the Tony Hawk Foundation). Founded by Hawk, TSP is a nonprofit organization working to increase access to outdoor recreation and free play through the creation of safe and inclusive community skateparks. TSP provides the resources, advocacy skills, grants, and fellowship programs that guide skaters in creating their own community skateparks, from conception through construction. This collaborative process between skaters and city authorities to invest in capital improvements will enrich a community for decades. TSP’s grant programs have awarded over $10 million to help fund nearly 700 public skateparks in all 50 states, enjoyed by an estimated 6-million people annually. The organization’s International Program has provided technical and financial support to assist youth through the Skateistan educational programs in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and South Africa. To get involved, visit https://skatepark.org/.