On the national level, progress in creating park-schools (or school-parks as some call them) as well as progress in negotiating joint-use agreements was similarly slow. Today, it has almost become the norm in many communities for government agencies of all types to jointly plan co-located projects. For decades, forward-looking park and recreation professionals who thought of joining forces with their school system counterparts who had similar notions of creating park/school partnerships found the going inexplicably slow. Many chalk it up to a lack of shared vision or the ongoing turf battles of increasingly powerful and independently minded agencies, but some point out that more often than not, disincentives for cooperation outweighed the rewards of thinking out of the box. With some notable exceptions, joint-use agreements and co-location of park and recreation facilities with other government facilities--especially schools--were less the norm in large urban areas than they were the exception.

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In New York City during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the growing need for more school athletic fields and park playgrounds compelled the city to take a new look at how to provide these facilities when there was no new land available for acquisition. As the city began strategic and long-term planning for the design of the park system for the future needs of city residents, planners recognized that they were seriously deficient in play spaces and needed to add them rapidly.

The Trust for Public Land--a national nonprofit with a mission of buying land for parks, open space, conservation, and recreation--had piloted joint-use agreements for school playgrounds beginning in the 1990s in Newark, New Jersey, says Rose Harvey, a senior vice president who once ran the playground program and who has recently moved up to be the national director of TPL's urban programs. "We saw that the community groups and affordable housing advocates just had too tough of a time doing parks and playgrounds along with everything else they took on, so we stepped in to help."

"In New York, we started our partnership with a group called 'Take the Field' who were building high school fields," Harvey says. "They pioneered the concept of a 2-to-1 match of private sector to public sector funding. This group initiated a partnership with the department of education, but ultimately they deferred to TPL and facilitated introductions to the key stakeholders, and TPL began a schoolyard-to-playground program with 25 sites, in the most underserved communities we could identify."

About that time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was leading the city to adopt a far-reaching plan that became one of the signature accomplishments of his administration, PLANYC2030. PLANYC, as it is called, is a comprehensive blueprint for sustainability that calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, planning for anticipated population growth, and responding to the effects of climate change. There are 10 major goals and 127 objectives. Among them is the commitment to have every New Yorker live within 10 minutes of a park or playground.