City parks improves the health of people living near or passing by or through them. With a diminishing value relative to “exposure/day” and “quality”.
City parks raise the value of estates in the proximity
This provides both a capital gain (estate value) for some, and a cost reduction (healthcare and sick leave for example) as well as a profit (generally increased productivity due to being healthier). But creating and servicing a city park costs money.
I think well-designed and well-placed parks are enormously “profitable” to our lives, mostly in measures that don’t directly translate to dollars. Although they have secondary and tertiary effects, which do translate into dollars, far beyond the two points noted in the OP. Good parks nearby support dynamic public life, making the city healthier, more prosperous and more fun.
Unfortunately many public parks are not very well designed or placed. The classic error is to make parks too big and therefore to limit their distribution and the number of people who can get to one easily.
Why should they be? They are city parks, not amusement parks. They, like many things the government does to provide it’s citizens with services they desire, aren’t designed to turn a profit.
Based on generally accepted accounting principles, city parks are not profitable. You can not meaningfully tie revenue to most of them, most do not charge fees of any kind, most do not collect admission.
Obviously there are probably more city parks in the United States than there are cities with a population over 3,000, so we can only generalize.
If you’re talking in the strict sense that an accountant would, there is no way to link any real revenue streams, and profit is revenue minus expenses. You do not calculate profit as expenses minus savings. If you believe parks reduce costs of certain things because they create a healthier population, or that they raise property values and thus increase property tax revenues that is entirely possible but you still would not say on a balance sheet they are turning a profit.
If a company makes a capital expenditure they might state in an annual report any contracts they have signed directly related to that expenditure, which stand to bring in revenue, or they may make other statements linking potential revenue to the expenditure. However, on the balance sheet the capital improvement will be an expense and will decrease over all company net income for the period in which it is claimed. Whether or not it will drive higher revenue later is not part of the simple profit/loss equation.
Capital expenditures are a good example of why not everything boils down to the income statement, even for for-profit companies. Sometimes you are willing to do something that hurts your net income in the here and now if it stands to bring in more revenue in the future. Principles of accounting and business say you cannot claim potential future revenues against the cost of the capital expenditure though.
In later periods after the capital expenditure has been paid for, you can of course count increased property tax revenue.
State parks can be profitable, though, something worth mentioning.
Many State parks have camp sites, cabins, and other facilities (boat rentals, state-run general stores within the parks etc) that you must pay to use. In some States revenue from those sources can actually cover the costs of operating the park in question.
So if any city parks are similarly run, they could potentially return a profit.
To the OP: In the narrow sense of Profit = Revenue - Costs, no, of course not. City parks don’t make money, in general. They aren’t supposed to. Neither are other public resources, like city libraries or public schools. But, like other civic facilities, they add to a city’s quality of life, which makes more people want to live and work there, which increases city revenue from propoerty and sales taxes. But I don’t know how you’d measure the specific contribution of a city park.
I’d buy the argument that they have a net economic gain for a community though. I don’t know how you’d measure it either. Increased property values would be pretty concrete. Health benefits would be hard to quantify. So would the benefits of a public space in creating a community. But those do have economic aspects.
Are city parks generally profitable? Probably not. The government doesn’t receive taxes on that land, so whatever the land is worth is something of a drain on the city. The city also has to hire groundskeepers and landscapers to maintain the park, and if they offer supervised play, they have to hire people to do that. It also has costs for insurance and upkeep on the playground equipment, plants and bathrooms. These ain’t cheap to provide.
On the other hand, some of the cost (at least in my town) is offset by user fees for programs offered through the Parks and Rec department, and Lord knows there are a lot to choose from. IIRC, the money the borough takes in for its programs is enough to care for the pool, the community center, and at least some of the cost of the parks, so even though the parks and rec department doesn’t turn a profit (at least not in the sense of income minus expenses), it’s not a total drain. And the parks get used, so there is that, too.
That being said, parks are an example of a “public good”. Like libraries, public safety services, and road construction and maintenance, city parks are best administered by the city. Private parks are at the mercy of whoever owns them, so when the insurance bill gets too high for the church’s skate park, the park closes. On the other hand, when the city can no longer afford some park services, it can scale them back to keep some stuff available, seek volunteer assistance for some things, find alternative funding sources (e.g., more money from the state/federal government, or grants), or whatever, but there will still be parks available.
the bit about raising property values to me seems dubious, at least as a policy prescription. If you get a type of municipal government that decides to raise taxes to fund a park, that’s not a recipe for higher property values. Especially since this sort of governments, in this day and age and in this particular country, are also likely to start doing other things more directly inimical to the property values. First they will build a park (taxes raised), then they will commission some public artwork (taxes raised again), then they will bus in some kids to local high school to rectify past injustices (taxpayers start fleeing). And then they will hire a few extra commissioners to deal with the resulting problem of taxpayer flight and falling property values (yeah, more taxes).
So the problem is not so much in parks per se as it is that giving power to activist governments that don’t have the taxpayers’ interests at heart (and show me a government nowadays that has them at heart) is a bad idea. Better be ruled by lazy, thieving incompetents than by diligent, hard working malicious wreckers.