I’m lucky. My neighborhood surrounds Huntridge Circle Park, one of Downtown’s few green spaces. While Huntridge Circle has its challenges (these days it’s something of an unsanctioned homeless encampment, though the city keeps the park neatly maintained), I nonetheless enjoy seeing outdoor movies there and walking its meditation labyrinth. Truthfully, I’m happy to have a park nearby, full stop. Much of the city core is without park space, because early Las Vegas was built without it.

“There was never any central planning,” says Bob Coffin, councilman for the City of Las Vegas’ Ward 3. “It was all residential, and it was ‘use every square yard for housing’—from 1905 with the first subdivision and all the additions to that first subdivision. Then all of a sudden, gee, there were no parks except for Huntridge Park in the ’40s, and then a couple on the outskirts.”

Since then, the city has tried to grab back land for park use wherever it could, and to make the most of every recovered space. Its most recent project, Mayfair Place Park—located on 16th Street, one block north of Charleston Boulevard—packs a lot of goodies onto its modestly sized (approximately six-tenths of an acre) rectangular parcel: playground equipment, a basketball half-court, picnic tables and more.

Also, nearby Baker Park is being upgraded: The trampled grass of its playfield is being replaced with a new kind of synthetic turf that stands up to frequent use and resists the sun’s heat. And a new, roughly two-acre park on the Las Vegas Wash, at Washington Avenue and Lamb Boulevard, is deep in planning; it will likely feature a soccer field, even though it’s “barely long enough” to fit one, Coffin says.

It might sound substantial, but if you look at the urban core from the air, there are hardly any parks, with little public land to accommodate new ones. That’s what the City of Las Vegas is up against—and Coffin says it has only just started getting creative. The future will see residential-sized “pocket parks,” and even park-styled greenbelts lining city streets. “I wish we could put parks on rooftops,” he says. “We’re scratching our heads for space to try to do these things.”