Lower Woodland neighbors urge for sex on benches.

This well researched article explores how site selection has affected the behavior observed in many South Puget Sound skateparks. The News Tribune looks at skateparks built in the South Sound over the last ten years, and delivers a decent post-mortem. It’s quite a remarkable read.

The takeaway: don’t hide your skatepark or bad things might happen there.

“At the time, city officials thought it a good idea to seclude the park so it wouldn’t be destructive to neighbors.

(Puyallup Mayor Mike) Deal now thinks that decision has a lot to do with the high number of police calls generated by the park.

“Probably we made a mistake of building it in an isolated location,” he said. “In retrospect, if we could build it in a location where it’s more visible, we would have.”

It’s too bad this article didn’t come out a year ago when the neighbors across the street from the proposed Lower Woodland skatepark site fought successfully to push the skatepark away from the highly visible Greenlake Way location, and back into the unseen cranny next to the tennis courts.

Those neighbors sited behavior as one of their main concerns for moving the skatepark away from the road. Now we have solid evidence that bad locations, like the one they strong-armed the city into settling on, actually increase the chances of the behavior they are concerned about. Oops.