There are more than 2,000 public playgrounds in New York City—but according to Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office, that number isn’t adequate to serve the needs of a large portion of New York’s kids. And in fact, many of those playgrounds are in dire needs of safety upgrades and other improvements.

In a new report titled “State of Play: A New Model for NYC Playgrounds,” Stringer’s office outlines the problems with the city’s current model of maintaining and creating new play space. Even though the city has those 2,000 playgrounds—which can be found throughout the five boroughs, including at NYCHA complexes and schools—it actually ranks 48th among major municipalities for the number of playgrounds per capita, with 2.4 playground for every 10,000 residents.

According to the report, the borough where the lack of kid space is most keenly felt is Brooklyn, where the growth in the number of children has outpaced the number of available playgrounds. (This track’s with the borough’s growth in absolute numbers between 2010 and 2017, when more than 140,000 people moved to Kings County.)

In the neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Bath Beach, for instance, the number of kids under the age of nine has rose by 37 percent between 2010 and 2017. There are now just 2.7 playgrounds for every 10,000 kids in that particular area. Looking at Brooklyn more broadly, there are now just eight playgrounds for every 10,000 kids in the borough—a huge difference from, say, Manhattan, which has 15 per 10,000 kids.

Unsurprisingly, maintenance is also a big issue for the city’s existing playgrounds. Even though the number of playgrounds that are routinely deemed “acceptable” by NYC Parks Department inspectors has gone up—from 39 percent in 1994 to 85 percent in 2018—there are still challenges.

Last year, 159 playgrounds were deemed “unacceptable,” with some of those space getting dinged for having equipment and other surfaces that inspectors found to be hazardous. Again, Brooklyn fared the worst, with a whopping 24 percent of the borough’s playgrounds on the “unacceptable” list.

So what can be done to improve the state of NYC’s playgrounds? Stringer’s report offers a few recommendations, chief among them the adoption of what he calls a “pavement to playgrounds” model that would turn off-grid or dead-end blocks into dedicated play spaces. One block in Crown Heights—St. Mark’s Avenue between Albany and Kingston avenues—already has one of these in place, with parking on either side of the playground. It functions not only as a playground, the report notes, but as “a place to congregate for local residents, seniors, families, and children of all ages.” And Stringer believes there are “thousands” of blocks in the city where similar “pavement to playgrounds” could be implemented.

That idea has the support of transit-oriented advocacy groups. “[Seventeen] square miles of New York City is dedicated to storing cars on our streets—that’s 13 Central Parks that we are giving away and getting nothing communal in return,” Thomas DeVito, the senior director of advocacy at Transportation Alternatives, said in a statement. “This model is a great way to start re-imagining street space to accommodate more varied neighborhood uses, including play areas for our kids. Let’s start implementing these projects and building streets for people, not cars.”

Stringer also recommends expanding the city’s “Schoolyards to Playgrounds” program—which is intended to make play spaces available to children even when schools are closed—that launched in 2007, with the goal of expanding accessibility to 300 of those spaces by 2010. The program has still not met that goal.

Other recommendations focus on maintaining these spaces so that there are fewer hazardous conditions, and ensuring that they meet the needs of more kids.

“We can make a major impact on the lives and health of New York City children by substantially expanding the number of playgrounds in neighborhoods that are in dire need of these spaces, while also ensuring they are well-maintained and safe for every child,” Stringer said in a statement.

Read the full report here.