The Case For Public Tracks
America used to build public places to move. We can do it again.
I often gazed through the fence and wondered about the track. A beautiful oval, glossy tarmac of gun-metal grey, tracing the football field’s edges in the color of naval ships that once rested in the nearby bay. I would jog past the wire, squinting through metal diamonds of chain link, and yearn to stride over that steel-tinted rubber—empty, unused, immaculate.
This is the running track for Laney College, a community college in Oakland, California, across the street from where I lived for seven years. It’s a nice stadium, home to Laney’s plucky football program, featured in the Netflix series Last Chance U.
Tucked along the slope leaning toward the Oakland estuary and shielded from the worst of the frigid Pacific fog, the track has held high school championships and Tracksmith Twilight meets. It is clean, proximate to BART and Lake Merritt, and has multiple bathrooms.
It is also inaccessible to the public.
Towering fences ring the facility, its entrances bolted shut and only open during autumn football games. Otherwise, the perimeter is policed by private security and public access forbidden, except for groups who pay to use the space.1
The result is that there is no track available for all of downtown Oakland and most of East Oakland with the nearest one a few miles away in a neighboring city.
I’m not trying to dunk on Laney College. Educational institutions shouldn’t shoulder the burden of recreation costs for the public. Opening the stadium to the public, even for limited hours, means a budget-constrained community college would pay to staff security and janitorial services in an area particularly hard hit by the homelessness crisis.
We should instead read the enclosure of the Laney College track not as an indictment of any one institution, but as symptomatic of a broader austerity of movement: public space, fenced off from the actual public.
Why do we only build tracks behind the fences of schools?
The privatization of movement
We live in an era of sporting paradox: it’s never been easier for Americans to buy decent kit or gear online, even as it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to find safe places to use it.
Public pools have been disappearing for decades—there’s now only one outdoor pool for every 38,000 Americans—for tangled reasons tracing back to desegregation, suburbanization, and shrinking municipal budgets.
There’s less research on running track access, but scarcity is the norm in many American cities, Phoenix and Minneapolis among them, that lack dedicated public tracks. A 2024 piece in San Diego Magazine notes there is a single 400-meter track available to the public in San Diego, a city of 1.4 million people.
By only building recreational facilities for high schools and colleges, we’ve rendered essential public spaces inaccessible and inequitably distributed. Naturally, this scarcity hits hardest in working-class neighborhoods, precisely where residents have fewer private options. However, the squeeze is felt by everyone, shunting Americans toward increasingly dangerous streets and expensive gym memberships.2
Lack of attention to our aging and deteriorating public recreational infrastructure is another aspect of our sporting paradox: we’re buried in an avalanche of content about the material stuff of sporting gear, product design, and branding—much of it thoughtful and well-written—with little commentary about the material infrastructure of the places and neighborhoods we inhabit.
So consider the following as my clumsy and inexpert attempt to contribute toward some balance. Because there’s an abundance of interesting history about recreational development that could inspire new visions for outdoor sport, urban movement, and community.
The age of public recreation
If you drive to the San Francisco Zoo and park along the Great Highway, you might notice an isolated facade, strangely ornate, sitting at the edge of the parking lot.
This fragment was once the entrance to the pool house of Fleishhacker Pool, the largest public swimming pool in the United States. The massive pool measured 300 by 50 meters and contained 6,500,000 gallons pumped, filtered, and heated to accommodate thousands of swimmers at once.
Such scale, now shocking, was once common. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, recreational infrastructure was part of a bipartisan political effort to improve the material quality of Americans’ lives.
The best-known examples come from Republican Fiorello La Guardia’s New York City mayoralty in the 1930s and 1940s. Under La Guardia, New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, villain of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and largely responsible for New York’s bloated highways and broken transit systems, was also the architect of vast recreational improvements.
Say what you will of Moses; the man loved a good swimming pool.
As Parks Commissioner, Moses opened eleven enormous pools in New York City alone. Funded by the Works Progress Administration, the pools, part of nearly 750 developed or remodeled by the federal government between 1933 and 1938, were built during the largest burst of recreational spending in American history.3
Of course, it wasn’t just pools, and it wasn’t limited to New York City. The WPA funded construction of nearly 2,300 stadiums and grandstands around the nation. It helped build 1,700 parks, 3,100 playgrounds, 250 golf courses, and other recreational facilities.4
Public running tracks were funded and treated as public recreational infrastructure, not specialized facilities locked inside schools. In Chicago, the Park District lists twenty-seven public running track facilities across the city, most developed between 1930 and 1970. These spanned the metropolis from Riis Park, on the northwest side of town, improved with WPA funds to include a running track, to the South Side, where the district developed Rowan Park with athletic fields and a running track to serve nearby residents living amid the steel mills and manufacturing plants.5
In Los Angeles, WPA work included the athletic center and running track at the Rancho Cienega Playground. In Seattle, the West Seattle Stadium, built in 1938 with WPA funds, included an oval cinder running track. In the Bronx, Van Cortlandt Stadium’s running track and grandstand were built with WPA funding between 1936 and 1939.6
These tracks weren’t perfect. Many were simple cinder and attached to multi-purpose stadiums and fields. Access was often twisted by racist laws, neighborhood politics, and municipal bureaucracy. However, they were built at scale as part of a broader civic bargain: live and work in American cities, and get pools to swim in, playgrounds for your kids, ballfields for your company softball team, and tracks to run or walk. No gym membership, or even a car, required.
It was the greatest democratization of recreation in American history. This could have continued as America continued to grow and cities became denser. Instead, it just sort of … ended.
We can just build things
The story of why the United States stopped building sits at the center of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, published in 2025, which argues that solving the challenges of the 21st century requires re-embracing a builder’s mindset.
Klein and Thompson outline how, starting in the 1930s with the New Deal, Americans rebuilt the physical world to address material scarcities: homes, transportation, schools, and scientific institutions. But in the 1970s—in response to both conservative skepticism toward state-planned development and liberal concerns around environmental protection, good governance, and consumer protection—both state and market capacity to build steadily diminished.
The results? Housing prices out of reach for most families, hellish commutes, deteriorating public infrastructure, reduced faith that democracy can solve material problems. Oh, and tracks locked behind school fences while new pools are reserved for the backyards of the wealthy.
Our core problems are those of scarcity, argue Klein and Thompson. Their proposed solution is a pro-growth, supply-side politics. We need a liberalism that builds, they argue, one that allows us to solve climate change, urban dysfunction, and the sclerosis of American democracy.
The abundance agenda, but for play
While housing and transportation will remain top priorities for most Americans, the vision for an abundant future must extend to recreation—that should include building more public tracks.
Abundance doesn’t speak much about recreational infrastructure—its case studies focus on housing, transportation, and technology—however recreational infrastructure not only supports the health and well-being of Americans, they also afford communitarian thickness. Folks of all ages use tracks and pools, so people of different generations and socio-economic backgrounds tend to intermingle, building relationships and the foundations for healthier neighborhoods.
As much as I love run clubs, they self-select their members, usually catering to younger, urban, college-educated folks. What’s needed are spaces anyone can use, from small children to retirees. Tracks are accessible: they’re flat; they afford space free from cars; they complement multi-use playing fields and can be safely used with little oversight; they cater to differing abilities—from fast runners to children to folks in wheelchairs to anyone who wants a safe place to move.
The social benefits of public tracks were evident when I lived for a few weeks in Kilburn, a dense working-class neighborhood in northwestern London. Just off the bustling high street was Paddington Track, six lanes of tarmac that anyone can use. In the 1950s, Roger Bannister trained there as he prepared to break four minutes in the mile. Elite runners still use the space, as do children practicing football on the infield, pensioners walking on the outside lanes, and whatever beautiful array of humanity feels compelled to amble along the lanes.
Do public tracks mean people are more likely to bump into each other? Sure. Will conflicts arise around who can use the space? Almost certainly. Will new recreational space require funding and the streamlining of municipal decision-making? Yes. But such are the politics of basic civic interaction, of learning to live together as embodied citizens. It’s a politics we’ve let wither, retreating toward privatized exercise that’s lonelier, frictionless, and atomized—a thousand people in a Peloton class, pedaling alone in a room.
A better world is possible. Imagine recreation spaces within walkable distance of every American, open spaces that bring generations together—fathers and mothers chasing toddlers on the infield, seniors rounding the bend as teenagers vibe along the inside lanes.
This is abundance, too: not just the grand machinery of housing and transit, but the humbler civic mechanisms of an open gate, a painted lane, and a public willing to meet one another again in that old democratic rhythm, around and around, together.
Related stories
If you’d like to support my work with an upgraded subscription, you’ll get bonus posts of recs and reads I’m loving. Here’s the latest bonus:
You can also support the newsletter by nabbing a Footnotes Fractel cap—25% OFF right now with free shipping in the US.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!
For the past few years, a local Oakland running store has paid hundreds of dollars each month to use the track on Wednesday evenings. It’s the brainchild of Victor Diaz, owner of Renegade Running, and an expression of Diaz’s ethos to build running spaces for brown-skinned people. By all accounts, the track night is a smashing success. A recent San Francisco Chronicle piece by culture critic Peter Hartlaub captures the vibe: diverse, energetic, with folks of varying athletic abilities and athletic backgrounds. Given a fee increase, Victor is asking for donations via Venmo to sustain the weekly workouts.
Renegade’s track night is exactly the sort of ‘third place’ that political sociologists consider essential to civic society. Now, forced to pay up to keep the track night going, it’s also a case study for novel frictions facing communities: a local group crowdfunding on a for-profit tech platform (which takes a transaction fee with every donation), to use a track that’s maintained with public tax dollars.
Pedestrian fatalities have increased 80% in the United States since 2009, according to NPR.
Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 93. Under La Guardia, Robert Moses built recreation infrastructure at a scale almost impossible to imagine today. Caro writes that Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930s alone. By the time Moses resigned as Parks Commissioner in 1960, he had added 22,000 acres to city parkland and developed 751 new playgrounds, 673 baseball diamonds, 218 tennis courts, 13 golf courses, and 18 large swimming-pool complexes. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 510, 930–31.
“The Development of Organized Recreation in the United States,” Social Security Bulletin 20, no. 5 (May 1957): 12. This wasn’t just a matter of federal spending. In the postwar period, recreation infrastructure was produced by city parks departments, philanthropists, civic clubs, and local booster organizations all at once. In Charlotte, North Carolina, my mother used to bring my brother and I to play in Freedom Park as small kids, which was developed after World War II as a civic project of the local Lions Club in 1949
Chicago Park District, “Rowan (William) Park,” “Riis (Jacob) Park,” accessed April 27, 2026.
Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Office of Historic Resources, Survey LA Citywide Historic Context Statement: Public and Private Institutional Development/New Deal Programs/WPA, 1935–1943 (Los Angeles: Department of City Planning, 2016), 27–29; “Van Cortlandt Park—Van Cortlandt Stadium,” The New Deal in New York City; Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, “Summary for 4432 35th Ave. / West Seattle Stadium,” Historic Sites database, accessed April 27, 2026.
This rules. Thanks for writing.
The atomization you describe is rampant in well-to-do suburbs where many homes have their own gyms, their own batting cages or soccer pitches, instead of having everybody gather in the public versions of those spaces. Your piece, generally, makes me think of Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. There'd be some connection there, no?