Seattle has one of America's best park systems. For dogs, it's one of the worst.

99% of Seattleites live a 10-minute walk from a park. 11.7% live that close to a dog park. This site is a sourced, reproducible public-data reference on Seattle's off-leash area (OLA) system — and what has gone wrong with it. Every chart links to its source; all underlying data is published openly and available for independent verification. The opinion page is clearly marked; everything else is factual.

Prefer it on paper? Download the full report as a single PDF (all five pages, regenerated automatically on every update).

The reports, in short

Each report below reopens a specific claim Seattle Parks & Recreation has made about the OLA system, checks it against primary sources, and publishes the data behind the check. In order:

• Part I — The Gap. Seattle has added one net dog park since 2009. The city's population grew 34% over the same window. Per-capita, Seattle runs at one-third of Portland and San Francisco's OLA density.
• Part II — Access. 11.7% of Seattleites are within a 10-minute walk of an OLA. (TPL says 99% are within a 10-minute walk of any park.) Seven of 14 OLAs are below the AKC 1-acre minimum. 2 of 14 have lighting; 5 have small-dog areas; water access varies by site.
• Enforcement. 4,803 off-leash citations (2014–2019). Six of the top ten cited parks have zero designated OLA. The empirical pattern is simple: citations cluster where OLAs aren't, or where the OLA that exists is too small to matter.
• Budget. SPR's total budget has roughly tripled since 2018 to $507M proposed. The dedicated OLA line peaked at 0.064% of SPR's total in 2018 and has been smaller in percentage terms ever since.
• Opinion & Recommendation. Author's policy recommendation: a time-zoned shared-use model for existing parks (NYC-style off-leash hours), with enforcement redirected to clean-park compliance. Six principles, three opinions, and seven steel-manned counterarguments — all signed.

All the reports

Primary data

All underlying data lives in the GitHub repo under /data. Plain CSVs; no database, no build step, no login required. Download any file, run your own numbers, and tell us if we got something wrong.

• seattle-olas.csv 14 existing OLAs
• seattle-timeseries.csv population / budget / OLA count, 2010–2026
• peer-cities.csv Portland, SF, Vancouver BC, Austin, etc.
• planned-olas.csv under-construction & planning
• kinnear-timeline.csv 20-year incident chronology
• enforcement-citations.csv 4,803 off-leash citations, SPR PRR C049204
• enforcement-by-park-year.csv citations aggregated by park & year
• SOURCES.md primary sources, cited

Methodology & caveats

This site favors explicit methodology over headline-friendly numbers. Every derived number on every page links back to its underlying CSV and, where applicable, to the script that produced it. The master reference is METHODOLOGY.md — the "show your work" index. A few caveats readers should also carry:

• Walkshed (now network-based). Previously a straight-line estimate of ~33% of residents; replaced April 2026 with a proper network-distance analysis: 11.7% of Seattle residents live within a 10-minute walking path of an OLA, computed via scripts/compute_walkshed.py (osmnx against Seattle's full OSM walk network) and scripts/population_coverage.py (2020 Census block-group overlay, area-weighted). SPR's published 2.5-mile standard covers 76.6%.
• Peer-city OLA counts differ in definition. Seattle counts only fully-fenced dedicated OLAs; Portland includes unfenced voice-control areas; Vancouver BC includes time-restricted shared-use areas. Direct comparison requires caveats.
• OLA-specific budget. SPR's Park District "Maintaining Parks & Facilities" line funds both OLAs and P-Patch community gardens and is not broken out. The $100K/year Cycle 1 figure is OLA-only because SPR stated it publicly; Cycle 2 figures are combined.
• Dog population. Triangulated from three independent sources: ~26,700 active dog licenses (Seattle Open Data, hard floor implying ~90–135K actual), an AVMA-derived demographic estimate of ~248,900 (364,627 Seattle households × 45.5% dog-owning × 1.5 dogs/household), and the SPR 2023 Expansion Study range of 187K–400K. The site uses 150,000 as a conservative floor for per-dog math; see Part I methodology for the full triangulation.