PS 17-129
An assessment of residents’ satisfaction and short-term visions for urban yards in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Urban residential green areas afford multiple ecological, economic, and social benefits, yet in tropical urban environments green infrastructure remains understudied regarding its potential to provide future environmental services, in part because of a lack of data concerning management preferences. In heavily urbanized San Juan, Puerto Rico, aggregate green cover has declined in recent decades, a pattern that is consistent with decreases observed throughout many US cities. Much of this loss has occurred at the neighborhood level, where increases in total housing units as well as residential density and footprint area of individual homes has resulted in significant green area loss from private residential and public areas since the 1950s. The accumulated loss of green cover and concomitant increase in impervious surfaces represents a diminishment of environmental services and amenities. Successfully modeling scenarios of future land cover configurations and associated service provision requires an understanding of socio-economic trends and likely land management decisions. In conjunction with the San Juan ULTRA Project we surveyed 430 single-family homes in six neighborhoods distributed throughout San Juan in order to assess residents’ satisfaction with the current state of their yards, and their intentions to make alterations within the next five years.
Results/Conclusions
A total of forty-three percent of survey participants indicated that they planned on making changes to their yards in the next five years, and people who were satisfied with their yards were twenty-nine percent more likely to favor alterations than dissatisfied respondents. Satisfaction was associated with abundance of vegetation, use of the space for domestic activities, and recognition of various ecosystem services. Dissatisfaction was linked with limited yard area and maintenance difficulty. People who intend to make changes were forty percent more likely to propose improvements/expansions to current vegetative cover over conversion to gray areas. These results suggest that alterations in total residential green infrastructure in San Juan are expected to increase in the short term, in contrast with a reduction in yard green space observed over the last 60 years. This finding correlates with positive relationships recorded between age of residents who manage their yards and the degree of yard vegetative cover, in the context of a city that currently exhibits an aging demographic profile. Accordingly, the suite of ecological services afforded by these residential yards, including stormwater retention, contaminant filtration, biodiversity conservation, carbon absorption, and mental health benefits, may vary at temporal scales not previously examined.