Assessing Income-Based Spatial Inequities in Playground Accessibility: A GIS-Driven Approach toward Inclusive Urban Planning in Oklahoma City

Walkable access to public playgrounds supports early childhood development and equitable public space use, yet coverage can be limited and uneven [1]. In Oklahoma City (2020), accessibility was quantified and its association with neighborhood poverty and the share of children under age 5 was evaluated. Public playgrounds were mapped and 0.25-mile (≈402 m) Euclidean buffers were generated and dissolved; population-weighted counts inside buffers were derived via ArcGIS Tabulate Intersection for each census block group (GEOID stored as 12-digit text). Outcomes were proportions in [0, 1] for all residents, residents at or below 150% of the federal poverty level (≤150% FPL), and children under age 5. Associations with poverty rate (≤150% FPL/total) and under-5 share (under-5/total) were estimated using OLS with HC3 robust errors and a fractional-logit GLM with denominator weights. Citywide access is uniformly low: 24.1% of all residents (156,864/649,821), 25.7% of ≤150% FPL residents (41,312/160,691), and 24.8% of children under age 5 (11,847/47,842) live within 0.25 miles. The in-buffer population is 26.3% low-income (24.8% citywide) and 7.5% under-5 (≈7.36% citywide). Regression effects are small in magnitude with near-zero fit; statistical significance depends on estimator (OLS vs. GLM), indicating that composition explains little relative to the spatial distribution of playgrounds; maps show clustering in the core and north-northwest, with coverage gaps in the south/southeast and fringe. Although accessibility is low citywide and warrants system-level expansion, equity efforts should explicitly prioritize residents at or below 150% FPL and children under age —especially where these populations co-locate and experience the most pronounced shortfalls.