South Gate opened three new parks in the last year. How did the small city do it?

Maria Mendez walks her little white dog, named Peluche, on a wide dirt path in the city of South Gate’s newest park.

“Me gusta mucho el parque porque tenemos este sembradío de aguacates, limones y venimos a hacer ejercicio en las mañanas,” she said. She loves it for the avocado and citrus trees, and because she can exercise in the mornings, she said.

The park has sycamores and oaks too, a small wetland, a playground and throughout, winding walking paths. Mendez said she and Peluche come here most days. It’s convenient because the park is right next door to the mobile home park for seniors where she lives.

South Gate resident Maria Mendez and her dog, Peluche, walk the paths of the Urban Orchard every day.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

This park, though, is in a bit of an odd location.

“If you look around, you'll see you are in between the 710 Freeway and the L.A. River,” said Steve Costley, the city of South Gate’s director of Parks and Recreation. “Not a natural space to think, ‘Hey, let's go plant a park.’”

The park is called the Urban Orchard — 7 acres of renovated city-owned land sandwiched between the freeway and the river. To get there, you have to wind through industrial businesses. The din of the freeway is constant.

But under the new trees and next to the engineered creek and wetland, there’s the sound of birds and water.

Urban Orchard Park officially opened this summer — a brand new green space for the city and Southeast L.A. as a whole. Two other newly renovated parks also opened this year in South Gate.

So how did the small city do it?

A need for more green

South Gate is home to about 100,000 people, 95% of whom identify as Latino, according to census data. The average household income is less than $75,000 a year. And city residents have some of the least access to nearby nature — just 3% of the city’s land is made up of parks, one-fifth the national average, according to data analyzed by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land .

“We're one of the very high-needs cities in all of L.A. County that doesn't have enough park space,” Costley said. 

Lower income communities of color across the region and the country have disproportionately less access to green space than wealthier, whiter communities.

The constructed wetland at Urban Orchard Park is fed by stormwater from the L.A. River and helps filtrate and clean that water to irrigate the park.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

The new Urban Orchard Park in South Gate is sandwiched between the 710 Freeway and L.A. River.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

“Parks are what we love. Parks are what I think people need. I think parks make a city into a community,” Costley said.

Parks can also boost life expectancy , improve air quality and cool neighborhoods as climate change makes heat waves worse . The Urban Orchard will go even further, helping to address food insecurity as well.

Though the city is still working out the details, a grove of 200 citrus trees, along with vegetable beds and an avocado orchard, will be a source of fresh produce for seniors living in the mobile home park next door.

Dayana Molina, community organizer with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which helped fund and design the new Urban Orchard Park.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

“We were really trying to address and bring the vision of the community through this process,” said Dayana Molina, a community organizer with the Trust for Public Land, which helped design and fund the new park. “So we heard about food insecurity. We heard about not enough shade.”

Not only is the Urban Orchard adding green space where it’s badly needed, but it will also recycle stormwater. The 1-acre constructed wetland cleans runoff from the L.A. River and stores water in a large reservoir the city built under the citrus orchard, providing 70% of the park’s irrigation.

Any overflow will return to the river channel, cleaner than before. Eventually, the hope is that native fish can be introduced to the park’s wetland and streams.

“This is not just a South Gate park, it's really a regional project that is bringing benefits to the whole region,” Molina said.

Residents — and wildlife — are already benefiting.

Dale De Julio, a retired truck driver who lives next door to the Urban Orchard, now walks there every day and loves to observe the birds.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Retired truck driver Dale De Julio lives in the mobile home park next door to the new Urban Orchard. He remembers when the land was an empty dirt lot. He never used to go for walks near his home. Now, De Julio walks the park every day.

“ This has given me an incentive to get out and walk around,” De Julio said. “I need that now that I'm retired.”

He said after years of driving trucks all over the country, seeing countless sights but never having the time to stop and appreciate them, the park is a place he can finally do that.

Just the other day, he said, he even saw a blue heron, a bird he’d never seen in the area before.

How to build a new park

Limited space, expensive land, historic pollution, lack of funding, permitting, other red tape — there are many obstacles to building a new park in Southern California.

The Urban Orchard was no exception, and the process was not cheap or quick. The park ultimately cost more than $31 million and took more than 10 years to complete.

The funding all came through state, county and federal grants, as well as private donors. The project came to fruition via multiple partnerships between the city and the private and nonprofit sectors.

“ South Gate is not a rich community. We don't generate that much revenue on our own, so we're very reliant on partnerships,” said Vice Mayor Joshua Barron.

UCLA research has found that public-private partnerships are essential to the success of greening projects such as the Urban Orchard.

“This really requires, as the proverbial saying goes, a village,” said UCLA professor Jon Christensen, who led that research and studies equitable access to green space.

The Urban Orchard, he added, “is a real testament to the dedication and persistence and creativity that is required to build new parks in Los Angeles.”

That creativity included cobbling together funding from a variety of sources, including $3 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, nearly $8 million from the State Water Resources Control Board, more than $4 million from the state’s Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, nearly $7 million from local Measure W funds, $5 million from Caltrans, Proposition 68 funds, more than $700,000 from the Conservation Corps of Long Beach, and private donations.

Joy Chancellor, 19, of South L.A. plants lettuce in one of the vegetable gardens at the Urban Orchard in South Gate. She's a corpsmember with the Long Beach Conservation Corps, which will maintain the park for its first three years while training young people in environmental jobs.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

The first three years of maintenance will be carried out by the Long Beach Conservation Corps, training young people from the area in environmental jobs. The city will have to find a way to pick up the maintenance tab after that.

“It was not a smooth process. It never is when we have complicated pieces of land adjacent to the L.A. River,” said Nola Eaglin Talmage, the Trust for Public Land’s Parks for People program director. “We've got all kinds of different public funding streams, all with different timelines, all with different requirements.”

Eaglin Talmage said a new county motion brought by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath could help streamline the process. And state efforts such as Proposition 4 are also essential to making these types of efforts possible, especially as federal funds for environmental projects dry up under the Trump administration.

“The passing of Prop. 4 is one of the reasons why we'll be able to continue to build green space in Los Angeles,” Eaglin Talmage said.

A bigger reform idea

Places to sit and enjoy nature in the new Urban Orchard Park in South Gate.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

South Gate Vice Mayor Barron said there’s another way for small cities to have an easier time building projects that benefit the public — updating outdated tax revenue laws.

“Last year, our residents and businesses paid over $80 million in property taxes, but yet the city of South Gate was only allocated about $5 million of that,” Barron said.

Currently, South Gate receives just 6.14% of property tax revenue collected within the city — a percentage set in 1978 through Proposition 13. After Proposition 13, the state created a formula to divide that tax among counties, cities, schools and special districts, with each city’s share based on its pre-1978 property tax base – a formula that still governs allocations today and mostly benefits wealthier cities with higher property values. That hurts cities like his, Barron said.

Only the state legislature can update that formula, something Barron is pushing for.

“One of the things that I really wish that we could look at is helping cities like South Gate, like Bell, like Cudahy, Maywood — the Southeast L.A. region — be a little bit more self-sustainable,” Barron said.

“All we're asking,” he added, “is to be able to be self-sustainable and not have to always rely on grant money to be able to get projects off the ground.”