Richmond CA Park Improvements: The Neighborhoods Getting Them

Wendell Park just reopened after a $2.3 million upgrade, and it is one of several Richmond park projects landing in the same few flatland neighborhoods. Here is which neighborhoods got the money, how they score on public spaces, and what homes there cost now.

Priya RamanPublished Sep 24, 20268 min read

A renovated neighborhood softball field with new fencing and a small restroom building in the Richmond CA flatlands at golden hour. Photo: Houseberry

The short version

The short list, before the details:

Wendell Park, at 26th Street and Wendell Avenue in the North and East neighborhood, reopened in September 2026 after about $2.3 million in upgrades paid for largely with federal American Rescue Plan money.
Local News Matters reports Richmond has put about $37 million into park and recreation improvements in recent years. The four city projects we could document add up to roughly $27 million of that.
The biggest checks went to Shields-Reid Park ($11.9 million, reopened July 2026) and Boorman Park on the edge of the Iron Triangle ($12 million, still under construction).
The three neighborhoods where the big projects landed score 2.7 to 2.9 out of 5 on Houseberry's Public Spaces measure and had August 2026 medians between about $397,000 and $588,000, below Richmond's $662,000 citywide median.

If you have a kid in Richmond who plays softball, you already know the question. Where is the nearest field with real grass, a working bathroom, and a fence that keeps the ball out of the street?

As of this month, one good answer is Wendell Park. The city finished about $2.3 million in Richmond park improvements there, with a new softball field, a new restroom, a new irrigation system, fencing and playground upgrades, and celebrated the reopening on September 15, 2026. It is the latest of several park projects that have landed in the same handful of central and north Richmond flatland neighborhoods, the ones where Houseberry's public spaces scores run lowest and home prices sit below the city median.

What Wendell Park got for $2.3 million

Wendell Park is a neighborhood park, not a destination one. It sits in North and East, the grid of mostly 1940s cottages and bungalows between 23rd Street and San Pablo Avenue, north of Macdonald Avenue and up to Bush and Moran avenues. People walk there from their front doors.

The work was practical. A restroom that runs on electricity, renovated ballfields including the new softball diamond, an irrigation system so the turf stays green past June, and new fencing. When Richmondside previewed the project in April, it pegged the ARPA grant at about $2 million. Local News Matters put the finished job at about $2.3 million.

That deadline matters, by the way. Cities had to commit their federal rescue money by the end of 2024 and spend it by the end of 2026, as Richmond staff told the council back in 2023. Wendell Park beat the clock by about three months.

Where the rest of Richmond's park money went

The recent spending is concentrated in the flatlands, and it follows a clear logic. Richmond has around 50 city parks, and a 2024 Richmondside review found the city had about 2.4 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents, below California's 3-acre benchmark. The state grants that paid for most of this work were written for exactly that gap.

Here is what we could verify, neighborhood by neighborhood:

Shields-Reid Park, Shields-Reid. $11.9 million total, including an $8 million Prop 68 state grant. New play area, bike pump track, performance stage, fitness zone, sports fields, lighting and restrooms. It reopened with a festival on July 11, 2026.
Boorman Park, Iron Triangle edge. $12 million from Prop 68 and a Caltrans Clean California grant, for a trail, skating area, athletic field, basketball court, play areas and restrooms, on a site a 2019 county assessment flagged as a high priority. It broke ground in January 2025 and was still under construction this spring.
Wendell Park, North and East. About $2.3 million, reopened September 2026.
Dirt World Bike Park, on the Richmond Greenway. A $1.14 million Prop 68 grant rebuilt the BMX track and its stretch of Greenway trail. The state lists it as complete.
Nicholl Park, Macdonald Avenue at 33rd Street. The 21-acre park a few blocks east of Wendell is just entering planning, with no budget published yet.

Add up the first four and you get about $27.3 million. We could not find a public breakdown for the other $10 million or so in the $37 million figure, so treat that total as the city's number, not ours.

Now put those locations next to Houseberry's own scores. Our Public Spaces sub-score rates the parks, plazas and open space people can actually use near home. The neighborhoods that got the checks all sit well below the ones that did not need them.

Bar chart of Houseberry Public Spaces scores for Richmond CA neighborhoods with new park projects — North and East, Iron Triangle and Shields-Reid score 2.7 to 2.9 on Public Spaces, more than a full point behind Point Richmond's 4.2.

Point Richmond scores 4.2 because it has Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline and Keller Beach minutes away. Carriage Hills North, up by Sobrante Ridge, scores 4.0. North and East comes in at 2.9, the Iron Triangle at 2.8 and Shields-Reid at 2.7. That spread is a real difference in daily life. It is the gap between walking to a shoreline trail after dinner and driving somewhere for a playground with a working bathroom.

What Richmond park improvements mean for home prices here

The honest answer is that a new restroom and a softball field do not move a neighborhood median on their own, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What they change is the daily-life column, which is where these neighborhoods have always been weakest.

Prices tell you who is buying. North and East had a median sale price of about $587,800 in August 2026, on its Houseberry page, and it has bounced between roughly $550,000 and $636,000 over the past year. Shields-Reid was about $576,400 in August, up about 6.6 percent from September 2025. The Iron Triangle was about $397,400, down roughly 19 percent over 12 months, though a neighborhood that small can swing hard on a few sales.

Bar chart comparing median home prices in Richmond CA park-project neighborhoods with the city median — The three park-project neighborhoods sold for $397,000 to $588,000 in August 2026, all below Richmond's $662,000 July median.

Richmond as a whole sat at about $662,000 in July 2026, per our Richmond city page. Point Richmond was about $1.35 million in August. So the park money is going where a family can still buy a single-family house in the Bay Area for under $600,000. That is the right place for it. And it is a strong argument for letting more homes get built within a few blocks of these parks, so more people get to use them.

Is North and East a better place to live now? It still ranks 27th of 32 overall in our Richmond neighborhood rankings, with a safety score of 1.4. A park does not change that. But it already ranks 9th on amenities, helped by a 4.3 merchants score along San Pablo and Macdonald, and a reliable park is the piece that was missing.

The catch is who mows the grass

Building a park is the easy part in Richmond. Keeping it is the hard part. The 2024 Richmondside review counted about 12 workers maintaining 45 parks on a roughly $2.9 million operations budget, and Council member Doria Robinson put it bluntly at the time: the city has a history of building new things it cannot maintain.

That is the real risk for these projects. New irrigation and new turf are only an asset if someone fixes the broken sprinkler head in year three. If you are buying near Wendell, Shields-Reid or Boorman, walk the park on a weekday afternoon a year from now. That tells you more than the ribbon-cutting did.

The shoreline piece still coming

The next big opening is not a city park at all. The East Bay Regional Park District started building a 2.5-mile Bay Trail segment at Point Molate in October 2025, running from the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge past Point Molate Beach to the old Winehaven district. The district expects it to open in early 2027. Richmondside put the combined budget at about $13 million.

That one mostly helps Point Richmond, which already leads the city on public spaces. It is a good project. It is just not the same kind of project as a bathroom at Wendell Park, and it is worth keeping the two straight when someone tells you Richmond is getting more parks.

How we would use this if we were shopping in Richmond

Start with the park, then look at the block. The same way we would with a school, we would check which park is actually within a 10-minute walk, whether it has a restroom that is open, and how it looks at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, not on reopening day.

For the flatland neighborhoods, 2026 was the year the park column got better. That does not erase the safety and school scores, and it should not. But if you have been comparing North and East, Shields-Reid or the Iron Triangle on price alone, the parks are now worth a line in the spreadsheet too. Our Richmond pages break every neighborhood down on those scores if you want to do the side-by-side yourself, and if you are weighing the East Bay shoreline more broadly, our piece on the Golden Gate Fields park plan in Albany and Berkeley covers the next big open-space change a few miles south.

Sources

Priya Raman

Longtime Bay Area resident and neighborhood writer covering schools, safety, parks, and the everyday livability details that shape where people choose to live.

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