Friday, February 06, 2009

Things They Should Invent: dog parks for apartment buildings

There are notices up in my building telling people not to walk their dogs on this one patch of grass because it belongs to the building next door. There are a lot of dogs in my building because it's actively pet-friendly, but there isn't really a good place to walk them.

However, I think if they re-arranged the landscaping a bit, replaced some of the purely decorative bits with grass and consolidated the driveway into a more sensible arrangement, we could have a grassy area that could serve as a suitable dog park for our building. Maybe not for the German Shepherd or the guy with two Rottweillers, but it would be fine for the terriers and Shih Tzus that make up the majority of dogs living in our tiny apartments.

My old apartment building had a lot of stuff on the grounds. We shared a sort of courtyard area with several other buildings, and in it there was an outdoor pool and tennis courts and a grassy patch with picnic benches (just metres from the dumpsters!). They could totally have fit a small dog run in there, taken out the tennis courts and pool and had a decent-sized dog park. The vast majority of the time the tennis courts and pool would be empty, but there was always someone out there walking a dog!

I really think this could be desirable amenity in high-rise buildings. It would be almost as good as having a backyard! It would hardly require any maintenance - just put up a fence and maybe cut the grass once in a while - and it would have far fewer liability issues than a pool.

1 comment:

laura k said...

Totally great idea. In fact, it's kind of surprising that it doesn't already exist.