Chicago Dog Park Coalition· Updates · 5 min read
Why are Chicago's dog parks paved?
The hard-surface rule traces to a two-page memo from 2000. Its safeguards never made it into policy, its rationale has vanished, and the city now pays to remove asphalt everywhere else. We think the mandate should go.
Ask a dog owner from almost any other city what surprises them about Chicago’s dog parks and you will usually get the same answer: the asphalt. Most of Chicago’s 33 Dog Friendly Areas are hard-surfaced, and to a first-time visitor that can read as neglect.
The rule
The Chicago Park District requires hard surfaces, generally asphalt or concrete, in its DFAs, with limited pea gravel relief areas allowed. The written standard is thinner than the practice: the District’s DFA development manual lists “ability to allow for hard surface area” among its site criteria and makes volunteer committees responsible for washing the pavement. Nothing in the manual says what material to use or why a hard surface is required. The manual itself is no longer posted anywhere on the District’s website.
Where it came from
The requirement traces to a two-page research summary dated July 11, 2000, written by the Dog Advisory Work Group, the volunteers who fought to establish Wiggly Field, Chicago’s first official dog park. Two veterinarians advising the group concluded that hard surfacing was the most desirable option for controlling disease, and the same paragraph records that the Chicago Veterinary Medical Association, as an organization, declined to recommend any surface. The memo cites no studies. It was a good-faith professional opinion, and it came with conditions: a light-colored coating to deflect heat, which the authors called necessary for summer safety; power-washing at least four times a year; and quarterly veterinary testing of the pea gravel. The fullest public account of that history is preserved by the South Loop Dog PAC: Why Are Chicago DFAs Hard-Surfaced?
The Park District kept the rule and dropped the conditions. The current manual requires no coating and no testing, and sets the wash schedule at three to four times a year, below the memo’s stated minimum. The disease rationale appears nowhere in it, nowhere in the 2008 guidelines that preceded it, and nowhere in the Park District Code. When dog owners at Hamlin Park reported torn and bleeding paw pads this August, after a renovation replaced the old gravel surface with asphalt, the District defended the choice on accessibility, drainage, durability, and maintenance. The rationale that created the rule went unmentioned.
What the evidence says now
The largest dog park parasite study ever conducted sampled more than 3,000 dogs across 288 American parks and did not record surface type as a variable at all. Its authors recommend regular testing, year-round deworming, and prompt waste pickup, all of which Chicago’s DFA permit already requires of every registered dog. Of eight peer park systems we checked, spanning Toronto, Denver, Seattle, Washington, New York, Minneapolis, Portland, and Boston, none mandates asphalt or concrete in an off-leash area. Toronto’s 2025 standard, written for a climate colder than ours, requires grass, engineered wood chips, or artificial turf, prohibits pea gravel, and is replacing gravel surfaces citywide. Where pavement earns its place in those standards is at gates and accessible routes, not across the ground dogs run on.
Even the memo’s one argument against grass, that no planting survives the trampling, has an engineering answer now. Permanent turf reinforcement mesh, a heavy polymer mat that grass grows through and roots into, is rated for many times the wear that running dogs produce. The Park District has quietly conceded the larger point itself: its own DFAs at Fred Anderson Park and Mary Bartelme Park are surfaced in artificial turf, a material the 2000 memo rejected by name.
The city is going the other way
Chicago’s 2022 Climate Action Plan states the principle plainly: “Minimizing hard pavement and maximizing vegetation enables stormwater infiltration and minimizes heat islands.” The Park District is a named partner in that plan. Space to Grow, a partnership of the public schools, the water reclamation district, and the city’s water department, has converted dozens of asphalt schoolyards to green space at about $1.5 million a site, with a stated purpose of “reducing heat island effects and building resilience to climate change by replacing asphalt with green space.” The Park District’s own 2025 sustainability report celebrates the porous asphalt walking track it built at Jesse Owens Park, a material it says “meets ADA standards for stability and firmness while allowing rain to pass through rather than run off.” And this July, after eight to ten inches of rain fell in 48 hours, the McCook flood reservoir hit capacity and Thornton reached its highest level ever, in a region where the water district asks residents on rainy days to delay laundry and showers to keep sewage out of the river.
Against that backdrop, the DFA standard requires a new dog park to install impermeable pavement and to sit near a sewer connection to drain it.
Where we stand
The coalition opposes the mandatory paving rule. What two veterinarians recommended in 2000 was reasonable caution for its moment. Twenty-six years on, the safeguards never became policy, the rationale appears in no Park District document, and the District’s own turf DFAs run against it. Park communities should be able to choose surfaces suited to their own park, whether that is reinforced grass, decomposed granite, wood fiber, or pavement where pavement genuinely serves. The District should publish the current basis for the requirement, or convene a real review of it.
That is the kind of question a coalition exists for: comparing notes across parks, gathering what volunteers have actually learned about surfaces, and raising it together. If you help run a DFA and have opinions about what is underfoot at your park, sign up for the coordination list.