Seattle added zero net off-leash areas in seventeen years.
The city's population grew by roughly 208,000 between 2010 and 2025. Its parks budget rose 37% on an apples-to-apples baseline. Two new off-leash areas open in late 2026 — the first net increase since 2009.
Finding 01Residents per off-leash area, over time.
Dividing Seattle's population by the number of off-leash areas: in 2010, one OLA served about 43,500 residents. In 2025 the figure is 58,329 — a 34% increase while the OLA count held at 14.
With the two 2026 openings factored in, residents-per-OLA projects to ~52,000 — still above the 2010 figure of 43,476. Returning to the 2010 ratio at Seattle's projected 2026 population (~832,000) would require 19 OLAs total, three more than the 16 projected for fall 2026. Full calculation in data/seattle-timeseries.csv.
The 1997–2009 build-out added Seattle's 14 existing OLAs. No new OLAs opened in the 16 years between 2010 and 2025. Over the same window the city's population grew from ~609,000 to ~817,000. SPR's 2023 Expansion Study acknowledges demand "has grown since the pilot program was launched in 1997."
Finding 02The peer-city comparison.
Trust for Public Land's 2025 ParkScore measures dog parks per 100,000 residents across the 100 largest U.S. cities. Seattle sits below every major West Coast peer; Portland is at roughly 3.2× Seattle's per-capita supply.
Seattle's West Coast peers cluster near 5 dog parks per 100,000 residents; Seattle is at 1.82, adjacent to Austin (1.28, ParkScore rank 54). Boise (7.6) has led TPL's dog-park-per-capita category in recent years. Counting rules differ across cities — Portland counts some unfenced voice-control areas, Vancouver BC includes time-restricted shared-use areas — but normalizing for those differences narrows the gap without closing it. Per-city data in data/peer-cities.csv.
Finding 02bThe allocation question: how much of each city's parkland is legal off-leash.
Per-capita supply is one frame; allocation within an existing park system is another. The "Seattle is land-constrained" defense argues against building more parks; the allocation cut asks how much of the parks the city already operates are legal for dogs. Of Seattle's 6,662 acres of municipal parkland, 30.7 are legal off-leash — about 0.46%.
Vancouver allocates ~5× the share of its parkland to off-leash use that Seattle does (2.27% vs 0.46%). San Francisco allocates ~4×. Even Portland, with most of its sites unfenced voice-control rather than dedicated acreage, still allocates a higher share. Austin sits at 0.43% on a fenced-comparable basis — comparable to Seattle. The framing matters because it isolates the policy choice (how much of the existing park system is legal for dogs) from the system-size argument (how much park land the city has overall).
Finding 03Park investment versus dog-park density.
Seattle is one of the best-funded municipal park systems in the country, with $418 per resident per year in TPL's investment category. The chart below plots each city's three-year average park investment against its dog-park density.
San Francisco spends more per resident than Seattle ($561) and has roughly 2.8× the dog-park density. Portland spends less ($274) and has 3.2× the density. Seattle's position on this plot is high investment, low dog-park density. See Budget for Seattle's OLA-specific allocation.
Finding 04Seattle's parks budget, versus its OLA budget.
Seattle Parks and Recreation's total budget has grown substantially since 2016. During Park District Cycle 1, SPR publicly stated the dedicated OLA improvement line was $100,000/year. The combined OLA + P-Patch line item (which the city has reported as a single number since 2019) has grown sharply; the OLA-only share inside it is not separately disclosed for 2025–2026. A public records request for that split has been filed and is awaiting SPR's response; this page will be updated when SPR responds. See Budget for the full picture.
SPR's total budget rose from $156M in 2016 to $506.9M proposed in 2026. Every OLA-related series on the chart sits two to three orders of magnitude below it. The combined OLA + P-Patch line rises in part because P-Patch funding has grown. The OLA-only markers that SPR has publicly confirmed are $0.100M in Cycle 1 and $0.126M / $0.129M in Cycle 2 years 1–2. The $3.46M Cycle 2 one-time capital line funds two new OLAs plus Ravenna design. A public records request for the 2025–2026 OLA-only share has been filed and is awaiting SPR's response.
Finding 05Cycle 1 vs. Cycle 2 improvement funding.
The Park District's "Maintaining Parks and Facilities" budget line (Budget Summary Level [BSL] BC-PR-50000, which funds OLA and P-Patch community-garden improvements) has grown roughly 11× since 2019, and Cycle 2 added $3.46 million in capital for new OLA construction. See Budget for chart-level detail.
Cycle 1 of the Seattle Park District (2015–2020) allocated a flat $100K/year for OLA improvements. Cycle 2 (2023–2028) added both operational funding and $3.1M for two new OLA construction projects. SPR has acknowledged that additional OLA construction will require future funding requests.
Finding 06Dedicated facilities: playgrounds vs. OLAs.
Seattle famously has more dogs than children. Estimates for Seattle's dog population range from 150,000 (conservative floor cited by Seattle Humane and Cascade PBS) to over 400,000 (per the SPR 2023–24 OLA Expansion Study). Using the low estimate and the most recent child population, dogs outnumber children under 18 roughly 1.4 to 1.
The ratio of dedicated facilities to constituents is roughly 14.6× more favorable for children than for dogs (1 playground per ~733 kids vs. 1 OLA per ~10,714 dogs using the low 150K dog-population estimate). At the 400K SPR Expansion Study estimate, the ratio is ~39×. See Budget Chart 03 for per-dog spending calculation.
Finding 07Acreage, not just count.
The four largest parks hold ~79% of total OLA acreage, and half of Seattle's OLAs are under one acre. The two smallest (Denny at 0.105 and Kinnear at 0.124) are roughly a tenth of an acre each. The dog-park size standards in Part II quantify what "too small" means.
Magnuson alone holds nearly a third of the city's total OLA acreage (9.0 of ~30.7 acres per seattle-olas.csv). The bottom ten OLAs, combined, hold about a fifth. Seven of the 14 sites sit below the AKC 1-acre minimum. See Part II: size standards for per-dog capacity math.
AppendixRaw comparison data & methodology.
All values below are the exact figures from Trust for Public Land's 2025 ParkScore methodology, except Vancouver BC (not in the U.S. dataset).
| City | Population | Parkland acres | % city area | Dog parks | Per 100K | $/capita | ParkScore rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle, WA | 816,600 | 6,662 | 12.6% | 14 | 1.82 | $418 | 8 |
| Portland, OR | 660,000 | 13,029 | 15.8% | 38 | 5.74 | $274 | 9 |
| San Francisco, CA | 870,000 | 6,398 | 21.4% | 42 | 5.03 | $561 | 6 |
| Vancouver, BC (est.) | 662,000 | ~3,000 ha | ~11% | 36 | 5.44 | n/a | n/a |
| Austin, TX | 1,025,000 | 18,437 | 9.0% | 13 | 1.28 | $211 | 54 |
| Boise, ID | 240,000 | ~3,400 | ~10% | 18 | 7.60 | n/a | n/a |
Seattle time series: population vs. OLA count
| Year | Population | OLAs | Residents / OLA | SPR budget (all funds) | OLA improvement $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 608,660 | 14 | 43,476 | — | — |
| 2016 | 704,400 | 14 | 50,314 | ~$156M | $100,000 |
| 2017 | 724,745 | 14 | 51,768 | $163M (ops only) | $100,000 |
| 2019 | 753,700 | 14 | 53,836 | $247.7M | $160,757 |
| 2020 | 737,015 | 14 | 52,644 | $261.9M | $338,000 |
| 2021 | 733,400 | 14 | 52,386 | $228.1M (COVID) | $346,680 |
| 2023 | 779,200 | 14 | 55,657 | $328.2M | $475,142 |
| 2024 | 797,700 | 14 | 56,979 | $320.7M | $614,343 |
| 2025 | 816,600 | 14 | 58,329 | $339.4M | $1,829,717 |
| 2026 (proj.) | ~832,000 | 16 | 52,000 | $506.9M (proposed) | $1,845,706 +$3.1M capital |
Data notes
Dog park count methodology. Trust for Public Land and City of Seattle both count 14 OLAs. Definitions of "dog park" vary slightly between cities — Portland counts unfenced designated off-leash areas, Vancouver BC counts 36 including time-restricted unfenced areas, and Seattle counts only fully-fenced or clearly-delineated sites. Adjusting for these definitional differences does not close the per-capita gap.
OLA improvement budget. The Park District's "Maintaining Parks & Facilities" Budget Summary Level (BC-PR-50000) funds both dog off-leash areas and community P-Patch gardens. The exact OLA-only share is not broken out in the budget books. During Cycle 1, SPR publicly stated the OLA portion was $100,000/year; the post-2023 OLA/P-Patch split is not disclosed separately.
SPR budget comparisons. Seattle's 2016–2018 SPR budgets of ~$156M–$168M are General Fund + core operating only; from 2019 forward the published figures are all-funds (operating + capital). To avoid methodology drift, the stat tile at the top of this page uses the 2019→2025 all-funds comparison ($247.7M → $339.4M, +37%). The log-scale budget chart in Finding 04 plots both eras on one axis with the methodology shift noted.
Dog population estimates — three independent sources bracketing the same range. Seattle does not universally license dogs, so dog-population figures are estimates. This site triangulates three:
- Licensed floor: 26,652 active dog licenses as of the April 1, 2026 snapshot of Seattle Open Data dataset
jguv-t9rb(published by Finance & Administrative Services [FAS] / Seattle Animal Shelter). A hard lower bound — every dog counted is a real paid license. Widely estimated to represent 20–30% of actual dogs, implying ~90K–135K total. - AVMA-derived demographic estimate: AVMA's 2025 Pet Ownership Sourcebook reports 45.5% of U.S. households own a dog, averaging 1.5 dogs per dog-owning household. Applied to Seattle's 364,627 households (ACS 1-year 2023): 364,627 × 0.455 × 1.5 ≈ 248,900 dogs. Limitation: AVMA publishes state-level data in the paywalled Sourcebook, so the rate used here is the national figure as a Seattle proxy.
- SPR upper bound: the SPR 2023–24 OLA Expansion Study cites estimates ranging from ~187,000 to "upwards of 400,000."
All three estimates cluster between ~90K and ~400K. The site uses the AVMA-derived ~248,900 as its canonical dog-population number and names the 150,000 conservative floor whenever a claim benefits from understating. A public records request to Seattle Animal Shelter (PRR #6) has been filed and is awaiting response; it will add historical licensed counts and any SPR-internal compliance estimate when answered.
Vancouver BC. Because Canada is not in the TPL ParkScore, Vancouver's data comes from its own Park Board documents (36 OLAs per the "People, Parks & Dogs Strategy") and current population estimates. Vancouver does not publish OLA-specific budget data in a format comparable to Seattle's.
Boise. Boise has led TPL's dog-park-per-capita category in recent years (7.6 per 100K in the 2025 ParkScore). It is not a true peer city in size or density, but is included as the national-best benchmark.
Playground count. Seattle's 157 playgrounds is from the TPL 2025 ParkScore data. This includes playgrounds in parks and schoolyards with joint-use agreements.
Primary sources
Seattle Parks & Recreation budget books (2021, 2023–24, 2025–26 proposed) · Seattle Park District Cycle 1 (2015–2020) and Cycle 2 (2023–2028) financial plans · SPR "People, Dogs, and Parks Plan" (2017) · SPR "Off-Leash Area Expansion Study" (2023–2024) · Washington State OFM April 1 official population estimates · Trust for Public Land 2025 ParkScore Index (city-level PDFs) · Vancouver Park Board "People, Parks & Dogs Strategy" (2017) · Citizens for Off-Leash Areas (COLA) Seattle · Parkways (SPR blog) · Seattle Dog Spot · Cascade PBS · KUOW · The Urbanist · West Seattle Blog