The mission of Community Greens is to catalyze the development of shared green spaces inside residential blocks in cities across the United States. We call these green spaces community greens. We believe that the Community Greens approach presents the best opportunity to add usable green space to our cities by converting underutilized backyards and dysfunctional alleys into functional and beautiful shared green spaces that are owned, managed, and enjoyed by the people who live around them.

Community greens can be developed in a few different ways: residents of existing blocks can merge portions of their backyards to create a shared green space; community greens can be incorporated into new developments; or dysfunctional alleys can be transformed into verdant green pathways. Click here to learn more about how to develop community greens.

We promote and facilitate the development of community greens by:

• Providing examples of successful community greens. We have found many excellent examples in different kinds of neighborhoods that include detached single family homes, townhouses, and apartment buildings, in both market rate and affordable housing developments. See our Existing Greens page to read profiles of some of these community greens. Also, visit our Resources page to find links to sites that have information about many other examples of community greens across the country.
• Providing educational resources that explain how to develop community greens - both for existing neighborhoods and new construction. Go to our Resources page to see these materials.
• Working with cities to help them put the systems in place that encourage residents to develop community greens inside their blocks and developers to incorporate community greens into new construction. Through our work with individual local governments we look at how to make it easy for residents to create community greens with their neighbors. We explore such issues as zoning, financing, incentives, design, management, and maintenance. Cities that we are working with or that have expressed an interest in working with us include Baltimore, Hartford, Cleveland, Pasadena, Detroit, and Oakland.
• Providing advice and technical assistance to developers who would like to incorporate community greens into their work.

Little Venice in London, U.K.