SAFEGROWTH® BLOG
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GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC · ANNA BRASSARD
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC · ANNA BRASSARD
Arriving in my email this week was the above asset map of a neighborhood in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was provided by a talented community development worker in a neighborhood embarking on a SafeGrowth program we started last month. It portrays the positive assets in a place rather than the negative liabilities, like a crime hotspot map. What a great first step to a better future. I'm always mystified when I watch a crime prevention or police problem solving strategy that starts out by outlining the dimensions of some problem but neglects the positive assets on those same streets. It's not surprising. After all, that is how all scientific endeavors begin: observe the problem, hypothesize the cause, measure and test the data to prove or disprove the hypotheses. Very logical. It helps solve nagging problems so things can move forward. Sadly, too often that approach doesn't really move things forward because that's not how a community grows and flourishes. A VISIONING WEEKEND In neighborhood planning the first step for building or rebuilding a community is the visioning process, a kind of deep dive into the wishes and desires of residents for the future they want. How can a place move forward if it doesn't know where "forward" is? Asset maps are one way to get a concrete idea of all the positive things a place has to offer. Another is a community visioning weekend workshop. The video below shows a Philadelphia neighborhood, led by the Philadelphia Local Initiative Support Corporation, and it reveals how communities can envision where they want to go in the years ahead.
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Nowhere do lessons of urban safety, CPTED, and SafeGrowth apply more than to the half billion residents of Latin America. Amid one of the world's most dynamic and expanding regions, it has some of the most beautiful geography on the planet. It also contains three of the worlds most violent countries. In September, International CPTED Association vice-president Macarena Rau-Vargas gave an impassioned presentation at the (now global) Ted Talk in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Students of Latin American culture know very well the long list of social reformers who have worked and written about positive change in that region over the decades. Macarena is the latest in that impressive progeny. As her Ted Talk illustrates she is as imminently practical as she is unwavering, a fact she illustrates when she describes having a gun pointed at her head by a gang member. Macarena's Ted Talk video is below (english captioning is available on the menu). I have worked alongside, and been impressed by, Macarena for years. I am also lucky to call her a friend. Watch the Ted Talk and you'll see why. Date: Tues, Feb 22, 2011 Location: Christchurch, New Zealand's second largest city Time: 12:51 pm Event: 6.3 magnitude earthquake Result: 185 dead, thousands injured, $40 billion damage, 80% downtown destroyed Three years later Christchurch is still rebuilding and recharging. Emerging from the collapsed buildings, destroyed roads, ruined homes and considerable personal loss, the city is making some discoveries. I spent the past week introducing SafeGrowth in this beautiful country with its magnificent countryside and easygoing people. Four teams from the Phillipstown neighborhood of Christchurch are the first to try it. Yesterday Christchurch TV covered the training in a newsclip. Turns out they have a few cards up their sleeve. Three aces First, police use Neighborhood Policing Teams throughout the city with experience in CPTED. Clearly there are some progressive police leaders who see their value. Second they are experimenting with innovations. One is hundreds of temporary shipping containers to house everything from banks and stores to offices and coffee shops. The containers are painted bright colors and positioned in interesting configurations. They are rarely vandalized. Their ace in hand is an outstanding CPTED planning team. Led by experienced CPTED practitioner Sue Ramsey, they are advised by renowned CPTED architect Frank Stoks. It was from Stoks' doctoral dissertation on rape in Seattle 30 years ago where the Toronto METRAC organization drew many of their survey questions for the famous Women's Safety Audit. Sue described the work in Christchurch at the 2013 International CPTED Association conference. Christchurch is well positioned to start a whole new SafeGrowth transformation up from the rubble of disaster. Judging by recent e-traffic, my last blog struck a chord! Especially the contention that community engagement in policing has been a dreary failure. I conclude that, except in problem-oriented policing or when mentored by non-profits (see below), it seems a lost cause. Truth is, aside from trite historical footnotes (“the police are the public, the public are the police”) most police-community engagement today is little more than political optics. Of course, as in all polemics, that isn’t true everywhere. I was impressed to discover the Dallas Police Community Engagement Unit. Then I read it is three policing teams who do evidence-based analysis, work with apartment owners to deal with crooks, and attend community meetings where they "gather information first-hand that can be relayed to other teams in the department." MORE THAN REPORTING CRIME There’s nothing wrong with asking the community for information on criminals. That’s good police work. But let’s not pretend it is community engagement. Ultimately I don’t think any of this explains our engagement flop, at least not the version where residents take an active role planning and working towards their own public safety. Perhaps police are not the best agency to do that anyway. Governments hardly do any better. National Crime Prevention Councils rely on national "night outs", neighborhood watch schemes, or education about existing crime prevention programs. In other words walk around at night, watch out for crooks and call the cops. I know I’m simplifying and yet a critical thinker must ask, Who is really "engaged" when that engagement amounts to little more than walking around, calling the cops, or going to meetings? CPTED history offers some hope. Consider Oscar Newman’s dictum in Creating Defensible Space; Always include grass roots participation in prevention planning! We use a similar approach in SafeGrowth though our message is conveyed in a different way. For example, one lighthouse shining brightly on community-policing partnerships is the LISC - CSI SafeGrowth programs. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE When the message is engagement we need a messenger who is appropriately staffed, resourced and most of all, trained in engagement tactics. The last time I checked the Engagement Toolkit I counted over 60 tactics. That messenger must master them all. Who is that messenger? Probably a non-profit like LISC or AARP, a philanthropic organization, a municipal planning department (as in Saskatoon), and an active community association. It will require municipal executives, particularly police chiefs and city managers, who know how to advocate for and implement such a model. They must be properly trained how to do that. Every time I’ve seen successful engagement in places like San Diego, Milwaukee, Saskatoon, and Philadelphia I get the feeling that is the shape of the future. At least I hope it is. Trashing media crime reporting is my past-time of late. I've complained how difficult it is to find articles that resist racing to the bottom of the sensationalism pool. One exception from an earlier blog: Joe Schleshinger's writing on the decline of violence. As if on cue (and dishing me up a welcome plate of humble pie), I've just received two more examples of great journalism - a news article by reporter Ashley Luthern and an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel following our SafeGrowth LISC - CSI training. The opinion piece titled "Hiring 100 more police officers will help, but more is needed" concludes, "hiring 100 more police officers in Milwaukee won't by itself curb crime…[they] have to be part of a smart strategy…" Exactly right! Suppressing any self-respecting humility, I admit my favorite part is the final paragraph: "The SafeGrowth Initiative, aimed at creating neighborhood solutions to crime, can help, too. Sponsored by the Milwaukee branch of the Local Initiatives Support Group, SafeGrowth participants have come up with ideas for fighting crime in such places as a residential block, a parking lot frequented by drug dealers and a commercial corridor with a rarely used park and a troublesome tavern. One proposal was to create a better way for police to work with taverns during the design and permitting process to create a safer environment." Could not have said it better! Even more important is their suggestion for moving forward. A prevention strategy in 4 parts The Journal Sentinal opinion piece suggested 4 strategies for prevention: 1. Deploy cops strategically 2. Neighborhood activation 3. Municipal and grass-roots leadership That 3rd one is key. In fact (DISCLAIMER: humility suppression alert) teaching city executives how to activate grass-roots leadership isexactly why we developed our new program - Citizen Cities. The only slip I see is their 4th strategy: "Bring in more help from the state". True, government has an important role. Funds may be useful to purchase new (and proven) technologies and that can help. But new technologies and tactics hack at the branches, they don't dig at the roots. Plus, government funds come with strings, politics, and snags. Not to mention the risk of funding-addiction - when the money dries up, as it often does, so does the program. Much better to work with governments, launch an initiative with a police/community angle and then use a portion of those funds to help local groups organize their own independent funding. Aside from that, the article and the opinion piece are journalistic gems. Best humble pie I've tasted in ages. To Ashley and the Journal Sentinel…well done! In Clint Eastwood's film Gran Torino, a widowed and bitter Walt Kowalski, Korean War veteran, watches street life from his Detroit porch as his Hmong immigrant neighbors become the victims of gang persecution. Confounded by the fearful Hmong's unwillingness to help police, Kowalski confronts the baddies, unites the Hmong against the gangs and ends up dead. It's the classic story of a declining hero who fights injustice, in this case from that very American security blanket - the porch. Our fading hero might be a worn metaphor, but how can you not love the odd pairing of ancient Greek tragedy with Clint's stellar film direction? This week, during my Milwaukee SafeGrowth class, I saw Gran Torino come to life (sort of) only in reverse. Embedded within the remarkable and successful projects from team members there was a story of young men hanging out on neighborhood porches, drinking beer and smoking dope. Nothing strange in that except these porches did not belong to those young men. They just picked a porch somewhere on the street (where they may or may not live) and then just took it over. MILWAUKEE EXPERIENCE Sometimes those homes were abandoned, sometimes not. As in Gran Torino, residents often don't ask the squatters to leave, presumably due to fear! Residents seldom call the police. Police have made arrests and cracked down but the problem continues. I'm told it has been ongoing for years. It is Gran Torino in reverse. SafeGrowth team members didn't think the squatters were gang members or drug dealers (my first thought), but they were not sure. Squatters didn't move into those abandoned homes nor ask residents to join them on the porch. They simply picked a porch and hung out. I know of dealers who launch open air drug markets and take over abandoned buildings. I know gang members intimidate neighbors by claiming porch turf. But SafeGrowth team members didn't think any of that was the case here. Why don't squatters stay on their own porches (they were not homeless)? No one knew. A few team members thought this was common across Milwaukee. Others disagreed. Another thought this was common in all low income, troubled neighborhoods. I could not think of any other community with such random, and obnoxious, porch squatting. In CPTED this is what Randy Atlas calls offensible space. We will never reclaim neighborhoods and prevent crime unless we can mobilize legitimate behavior. Porch squatting is not legitimate behavior! And there is no Clint Eastwood coming to the rescue. The good news? Based on the high quality SafeGrowth projects and the exceptional team-work I saw this week in Milwaukee, we won't need him. Social media = social cohesion? Today during the LISC sponsored Twin Cities SafeGrowth training we heard some terrific planning projects to enhance safety on the new light rail Transit Oriented Development in St. Paul. Among the presentations was an idea to incorporate social media and Facebook into one of the neighborhoods as a 2nd Generation community cohesion strategy. Cool. Then I came across this: The City 2.0 crowdsourcing project from the 2012 TED Prize. It's a new website with a platform to "surface the myriad stories and collective actions being taken by citizens around the world. We draw on the best of what is already being discovered by urban advocates and add grassroots movers and shakers into the mix." I especially found the City 2.0 Safety part of the website fascinating. It expands to show Gallup's new poll on quality of life conducted over the past 3 years and mapped with categories like nighttime safety, community satisfaction, and stress. The future is being written as we speak. Simulation of Saint Paul's new Transit Oriented Development light rail Few CPTED or community development types think about Global Warming or climate change when they do their craft. That is a mistake. Plan B tells us why. Plan B is an axiom in environmental studies meaning we cannot afford to wait before airborne carbon - a greenhouse gas - destroys our ability to sustain cities. Global Warming triggers food shortages, diminishing freshwater, extreme weather, and water and air pollution with all the associated illnesses like emphysema or cancer. Crime matters little if we cannot eat, drink, breathe or walk without fear of some threat to our mortality from the environment. In fact, desperation for those things might trigger more crime (as we saw in New Orleans during Katrina). Plan B suggests that doing nothing is suicide. Plan B recommends making changes to our urban growth and transportation habits like reducing car dependency. This means Smart Growth planning (after which Safe Growth is fashioned). Introducing: Transit Oriented Development. TODs are one type of Smart Growth and they may be our future. They connect mixed use high density residential and commercial land uses and then cluster them within a half mile of a transit node, usually light rail. This encourages easy access to transit use at all times of day, high quality pedestrian connections, and amenities like local grocery stores. That reduces car dependency, increases walking, and builds social connections. At least that’s the theory. The truth is that high urban densities, TODs and Smart Growth neither promotes nor prevents crime. The devil is in the details. Where do people walk and recreate? Do they have local opportunities to know each other as friendly neighbors? How does the design treat lighting and sightlines. And what about security and safety? We’re running a SafeGrowth program in Saint Paul, Minnesota (shown in the simulation video above). Participants are working on SafeGrowth plans on that city’s first TOD development, a light rail in a city that does not have one. Safety and security on and near that line will determine the economic success of the system. Success in safety will increase transit ridership, decrease car ridership, and provide one more tiny step to save the planet and our children. A win-win. Not much pressure! Who said CPTED and SafeGrowth was simple? I get great ideas from friends. Here are two. Walking around Winnipeg Manitoba this past weekend a friend pointed out the irony of this building mural. The beauty of the former building front on the mural; the sad reality of failed expectations on the actual building front. The idea of placemaking has made regular appearances on this blog. Placemaking is about creating positive social life in public places. How does one do that? The fellow who pointed out the irony of the Winnipeg mural was Gerry Cleveland, my colleague and co-creator of 2nd Generation CPTED. Second Generation CPTED promotes placemaking by activating residents, getting them involved, helping them learn how to take action and teaching basic organizing skills. That's the future. GUEST BLOG I just received an interesting link to a recent article published on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. It offers strong contrast to Wendy Sarkissian's experience in New Haven CT reported here last month. In this excerpt from their article, Julia Ryan and Andrea Pereira, community developers extraordinaire of the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC), offer a remarkable story of success in Newhallville after our SafeGrowth training. **** A collaborative approach to addressing crime can yield remarkable, sustained reductions in crime. It also can produce new housing, businesses, and parks in places where such investment was previously unthinkable, transforming troubled places into vibrant, connected communities. The strategy is quite straightforward. To tackle crime from multiple angles, you need a team and a plan, preferably one founded on solid information about the genesis of a problem and the conditions keeping it alive. As team members act on the plan, they need to hold each other accountable. NEWHALLVILLE TURNAROUND Historically, the Newhallville neighborhood has seen some of New Haven’s worst violence. In early 2011, four of the city’s 10 homicides occurred there. Local leaders recognize that the crime challenges stem from the interconnected problems of blight, fear, drug dealing, and gang activity, so they are pursuing an array of mutually reinforcing solutions. To guide their diagnosis of Newhallville’s problems, the New Haven team has drawn on training provided by international crime prevention expert Gregory Saville, with support from LISC. SafeGrowth champions a process by which neighborhood leaders, planners, police officers, and others work together to weigh how factors in the physical, social, and economic environment might be altered to make places safe and vibrant. As part of SafeGrowth, NHS team members have conducted multiple safety audits of problem spots. They have convened residents to talk about persistent issues and have invited input from a journalist familiar with the area. The information complements traditional crime data in painting a picture of problems, including hints at why crime in Newhallville has not yielded to prior interventions. Using that framework, NHS and its partners are focusing on Lilac Street, a particularly troubled block. The team’s actions have already contributed to a 50 percent drop in crime by improving lighting and sight lines on Lilac Street. Recently members secured an agreement with the City to add another 230 lights—a sign of how well joint community-police plans are received by municipal decision makers. In addition, members are exploring new organizing strategies, including a neighborhood watch and walking groups that increase “eyes on the street” and on properties slated for NHS rehabilitation. New Haven Police are backing the effort with beat officers assigned to Newhallville. To those who might say that such approaches are too complex to be realistic in resource-strained times, LISC’s response is: Can we affordnot to leverage each other’s strengths, especially given the interconnected nature of safety and revitalization? CPTED pioneers never imagined how crime works in a winter city. Local practitioners figure that out themselves. Case in point: Our SafeGrowth training last week in Saskatoon, Canada, about 250 miles north of the US border. Saskatoon now leads the municipal pack for CPTED implementation. I've blogged before about Saskatoon, especially regarding bus terminals. Like many forward thinking communities it has online design guidelines and CPTED policy. Like other places Saskatoon reviews new developments for CPTED. Unlike other places Saskatoon is the first-ever city to incorporate 1st Generation CPTED, 2nd Generation CPTED, and SafeGrowth into their design guidelines. Many CPTED practitioners still don't know the difference between the concepts (explained in the guidelines). Saskatoon does this by embedding SafeGrowth into Local Area Plans in dozens of neighborhoods across the city, each with their own plans and steps for moving forward We've now trained over a hundred city staff, police and community members. Last week city planner Elisabeth Miller and myself continued the training with outdoor safety audits and CPTED reviews of parking lots. Newman, Jacobs, Jeffery, Angel, and Gardiner wrote nothing about CPTED and streetlights in snowbanks at -20 Celsius. We'll see how the project teams from class figure it out. GUEST BLOG Jacques Roy is the Mayor of Alexandria, Louisiana. In 2010-2011, Mayor Roy and staffers Lamar White and Daniel Smith began working with SafeGrowth. Following the staffers attendance at a SafeGrowth workshop they brought concepts back to Alexandria. Later in the year I presented SafeGrowth at a development summit and was asked to tailor a program with the Alexandria administration. This became the Safe Alex initiative. In this guest blog Mayor Roy offers thoughts about where SafeAlex is today. **** Neighborhoods are the lynchpin for sustainable success in preventing crime and tackling blight. A few years ago, a bold editorial in a local paper declared that our SafeAlex program would not take root unless it was police led and police dominated. While I do not want to simplify this complex issue to an absurdity or add meaningless clichés, holistic approaches that make communities take responsibility, I suspect, will beat out the belief that some single government organization or actor can provide all the answers. The idea that someone else must resolve “my problem” is dangerous on many levels. It is counter to everything we teach kids about self-reliance and how to sustain a successful marriage, job, family, and life. Indeed, society’s overweening belief in “Minority Report,” “Robocop,” and “Judge Dredd,” as what we seek from governments is misplaced. I am not even sure it should be desired. BOOTS ON THE GROUND Reactive enforcement, saturation, and plain old boots-on-the-ground — to be sure — have a place. Crime is multi-faceted and its reduction, roots, sentinel causes, and its responses seem to work one day and then become inexplicably unresponsive the next. Holistic, neighborhood-based programs, supported by police and city departments, are the way forward. This is the essence of SafeAlex, which not only has taken root, but is showing reduction in several benchmark categories. We are now expanding the program. The newspaper editorial said: “The idea is laudable, but it will not take root under current conditions. When a house is on fire, you call firefighters and pump water until it’s out. The police should lead the crime prevention effort, not the community.” Yes, you do. But, when you want to teach fire prevention, you use neighborhood meeting halls and senior organizations to explain the dangers of unmonitored space heaters in older homes. You educate citizens about checking on their elderly family members in cold winter months. You create a strong neighborhood because the fireman cannot be at every house, every minute. I am a pragmatist; I am suspicious of programming unless you can reproduce results and attach metrics that are reliable. We are doing this right now. As with many of our programs, this was born of necessity, the mother of invention. During the summer of 2009, the city saw six shootings on a particular street (a lot for my city). LAUNCHING THE PROGRAM The program started with two very bright assistants, Lamar White Jr. and Daniel Smith, and me wanting to address development and knowing we had to address obstacles to development in these areas. That “hot summer” just gnawed at the staff. I met with those two assistants often to discuss new policy formulation, and then we rolled into a planning and develop summit, SPARC, in December of 2010. By that time, we were working with CPTED and SafeGrowth concepts. Our policy statement remains the position of the Administration:confronting and reducing crime requires difficult decisions, bold action, and challenging many of our preconceived notions and practices. It requires us to confront some hard truths, not only about the efficacy of law enforcement practices, but also about the responsibilities of parents; the role of teachers, schools, churches, and the courts; and the effectiveness of neighborhood watch groups and other community organizations. We invite other communities to have a look at what we’ve done. We believe this could be tweaked and used in other communities and we believe your experiences will help all of us promote evidence-based programming in our cities. We can be a lighthouse for 21st Century American cities. I've just gorged myself on a raft of books about the future; The World in 2050, The Great Reset, Crawling from the Wreckage, and The Post-American World. All excellent reads. All a bit unnerving.
The utopians have us flying to floating gardens in Jetson flying cars. The dystopians claim Big Brother will steal our memories. The catastrophe-crowd, soaked with doom, imagine a Mayan apocalypse. [I must admit, whenever I hear apocalypse stories I'm reminded of Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges observation: "We are in the throws of a giddy intoxication with illusion. That's how you end up with demagogues and tyrants who promise magic."] Here's the thing - the future isn't here yet! There is no Matrix. And until some giddy, Daisy-singing, Hal 9000 computer takes over, there is no sure way to know the future. There are many futures and any one of them is possible. Lately, though, I admit I've been swayed by the dystopians. Consider these worrying trends:
Last month I said to my students in Connecticut I believe SafeGrowth is one possible and positive future. Today I found another in Connecticut. This one was by some young people in New Haven. They are, after all, where our future really unfolds. The Future Project: http://vimeo.com/41265738 The folks at the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) just launched our latest SafeGrowth training, this one in Connecticut. New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman gave the introductory remarks and reminded us how today's world is primarily an urban place. Cities are the thing and we better get them right. It could have been Jane Jacobs talking! Before the training I spent time revisiting old haunts in New Haven, including a peek at my old neighborhood in Westville (still vibrant, still thriving). Then the training. This week four teams of class participants have begun fanning out in three different Connecticut cities to start the hard work of creating safer spaces where there is none. In 6 weeks they will put together their preliminary plans which we assess in November. Exciting times. New Website While there I learned my talented friends at LISC's Community Safety Initiative have created an exceptional tool for practitioners - a new SafeGrowth/CPTED website. After leading SafeGrowth initiatives and training in a dozen cities over the past five years, LISC-CSI has again outdone themselves. Have a look. A few months ago we completed SafeGrowth training in Rochester. Many of those projects are still underway. During our training we describe the importance of community art, what planners call place-making, as one step for creating positive neighborhood culture. We highlight Portland's famous Intersection Repair project that I blogged about a few years ago. One of the exceptional SafeGrowther's in Rochester, Rachel Pickering, just sent me this fascinating link to the BoulveArt project now happening across Rochester. Painting an intersection is so simple, colorful, and remarkably fun, it's a wonder it doesn't happen everywhere. I'm told it is a daunting process to organize it and sell it to the city. That's not the case in Rochester, who actually host this site. Good ideas, apparently, can spread. Readers of SafeGrowth know certain high crime properties are incubators for gangs and violence. That isn't destiny, it's reality. If SafeGrowth (and approaches like it) prove anything, it proves residents are not doomed to a life of mayhem. Environment can be changed and streets transformed. It also proves we can do it with coherent planning, mobilized neighborhoods and intelligent anticrime strategies like hotspot policing. Case in point: crime declines in New York. I recently read Frank Zimring in the New York Times: "The 40% drop in crime that occurred across the U.S. from 1991 to 2000 largely remains an unsolved mystery. Even more puzzling then is the crime rate drop in New York City, which lasted twice long and was twice as large. This 80% drop in crime over nineteen years represents the largest crime decline on record." A mystery? I'm not big on mysteries that aren't. It's like watching a Hollywood flick and expecting some magical, non-formulaic finale. Not going to happen! That 40% drop nation-wide followed a decades-long demographic metamorphosis that swept North America more than anywhere else since WW2. Since the 1990s crime-prone cohorts aged out of crime in record numbers. Those crime declines continue today. Then New York built on that perfect demographic storm as NYPD added crime suppression tactics like proactive street stops and controversial (but clearly effective) quality-of-life enforcement. Intensive street stops increased the risk of getting caught with an illegal gun. That led to a 39% drop in gun toting criminals from 1993-1995. Is it really a mystery that kind of informal gun control cut violence? FEWER PRISONERS? It's what Greg Bergman calls A Thousand Small Sanities (another excellent read). During the peak crime declines fewer arrestees went to prison. Why? Bergman describes the vast network of incarceration alternatives evolved in New York - drug courts, mental health courts and community courts providing meaningful community alternatives like drug treatment and restorative justice. Says Bergman "there needs to be a continuum of non-incarcerative interventions for offenders with the most intensive options reserved for populations that are both high risk and high-need." Hotspot policing, neighborhood justice courts, and targeted suppression. Anchor that with permanent SafeGrowth planning and neighborhood capacity building and voila - a finale that makes sense. I'm back in Toronto this week pondering recent shootings and how things have changed in this city. Like everywhere, crime is down here too. Is shifting demographics or the economy the cause? Better policing? Crime prevention? In 2005 Toronto experienced the "summer of the gun" - rampant shootings and gang killings. The government responded with a $200 million social development program, the so-called neighborhoods strategy. From what I can see it was implemented on a wide range of social programs, focused on high crime hotspots. No doubt some great individual stories and anecdotes arose. Today a Toronto Star news article reports the program is running out of government cash. So local politicians just decided to refund it. Incidentally, without hard evidence. That's right: After 7 years of operation the Toronto Star says "hard data on the campaign’s impact does not exist...They are working on a plan to track progress this time around." What? Almost a quarter billion dollars and no hard evidence? It took them 7 years to figure out evidence is not a trivial matter? TORONTO'S SAFEGROWTH LESSON: IGNORED Ironically (or more to the point, intentionally) our 2000 - 2011 San Romanoway SafeGrowth project in that same city was intensely researched and tracked. We saw crime declines, minimal displacement, and neighborhood capacity building. Results were published in scholarly journals and released for scrutiny. Now 12 years later, residents there run and fund programs themselves. Yet, in the same city a few miles away no one thought to track nearly a quarter billion dollars for a 2005 anti-crime social program? Next blog: A better way. Frank Zimring's book "New York's Lessons for Crime and it's Control." A year ago we completed SafeGrowth training in Fairmont Village, a neighborhood in San Diego. We set up neighborhood leadership teams to tackle neighborhood problems. I'm thrilled to say they're still at it! Coordinated by Jessica Robinson from San Diego State University's Consensus Organizing Center and assisted by nationally renown crime analyst Julie Wartell, project team members are still doing the hard work to make their neighborhood a better place to live. Project sponsor, Price Charities has a long history of neighborhood philanthropy involving revitalization and safety in the larger area called City Heights, the region encompassing Fairmont Village. City Heights has overcrowded schools, parks and streets in disrepair, and 37% of residents below the poverty line. In the 3 years prior to 2010, Fairmont Village suffered 63 robberies and 94 burglaries. CPTED theory predicts robbers and burglars are emboldened when streets are empty and neighborhoods in disarray. The SafeGrowth leadership teams tackled those concerns. Their SafeGrowth projectsreflected that:
They were able to enhance city development work that spruced up the business area and revamped a local school. Leadership teams extended that into livability and walkability. In fact Price Charities has now hired a full-time crime prevention coordinator and Jessica continues to help organize. She has created a great new website to describe the initiative. Check out their City Heights Safety Initiative website. My focus on North American cities results from my current travel agenda, not because cities elsewhere are very different when it comes to crime. Recent news about the French presidential election provides a reminder that we are all very much alike.
Consider France. To experienced travelers France is known as the place for exceptional cuisine, wine, and enviable high speed rail. France is celebrated for progressive social programs: eight weeks paid vacation for most employees, the world's best public healthcare. Yet as elsewhere French cities too have high crime neighborhoods where misery outweighs civility. One is Chichy-sous-Bois, a so-called Banlieue (what Americans disparagingly call "the projects"). Chichy is a poor, run-down suburb of Paris. Some writers describe Chichy as a nondescript suburb without a center, wedged between high-rise apartments and four-lane highways. No public transit means two hour commutes downtown, only 10 miles away. Residents feel isolated and ignored. Except for public transit, that is also an apt description for Toronto's Jane/Finch corridor where San Romanoway is located. Journalists describe Chichy as a "high crime area where police rarely bothered to venture". Crime and violence seem endemic. Until recently, that was an apt description for Hollygrove, the New Orleans neighborhood featured earlier. There is discrimination against Chichy's immigrant residents. When two Chichy teen boys were accidentally killed while running away from police in October 2005 it erupted into three weeks of violence, looting and arsons that later spread nation-wide. Over 9,000 cars burned, 3,000 arrests. Ironically, last year the same thing happened in Tottenham, UK. Referring to the Tottenham riots I wrote that festering poverty and deprivation dries up collective goodwill, what sociologists call community efficacy. The French in Chichy, Canadians in San Romanoway, Americans in Hollygrove, or British in Tottenham. Same lesson: If you respond to (but don't prevent) crime, underfund public transit, ignore repairs to dilapidated homes, fail to address racism...you get a tinderbox. The French are pinning their hopes on $500 Billion urban "renewal" in areas surrounding Chichy (completely ignoring Chichy) and a new police station in a nearby neighborhood. Hopefully they'll discover throwing cops and money at nearby neighborhoods seldom works to tamp down tinderboxes. Meanwhile, Hollygrove is coming back from the brink and San Romanoway was the first SafeGrowth success. They don't have to reinvent the wheel to fix Chichy. Reminiscing always gives me the willies. Are memories exaggerated? Ignored? Still, now and then, a memory surfaces worth shouting aloud. I recently came across this one. Disclaimer: Some of this is probably not even my memory - at least not latter parts of it - but rather stories of others doing remarkable work. I doubt many of them even know my name. It's doesn't really matter. It's a fantastic story for turning troubled places back from the brink. It's also probably one of the birthplaces for tactics that later became SafeGrowth. Yesterday I discovered a recently posted YouTube (see below). It shows another success at the San Romanoway apartments in Toronto's infamous Jane/Finch corridor. I have written about San Romanoway elsewhere. Here's my memory of the project: 12 years ago myself and Ross McLeod assembled a team to review and recommend ways to reverse endemic violence in some high crime apartment towers. In late 2000 we wrote the San Romanoway Revitalization plan. The plan had steps for research surveys, a community association, gardens, and lots of CPTED. Community organizer Stephnie Payne was then hired to start outreach, raise funds, administer the association, and get things going. She did that magnificently. McLeod's security company worked with her to tackle crime. The rest, as they say, is history. The video tells the latest chapter in this story. Last week was a very good week for SafeGrowth. Fort McMurray, a city of over 100,000 is hub of the world-famous Alberta oil sands project. Established in 1870 as a Hudson's Bay trading post, today's Ft. Mac (officially the Municipality of Wood Buffalo) is ground zero for the world's biggest modern Gold Rush (...oil rush)! As in times of old, Rushes lead to incredible population growth, crime and disorder. (Projected growth is over 230,000 in 15 years). Unlike times of old, Ft. Mac is taking steps to deal with it. For the past year, myself and urban design specialist Megan Carr have been working with senior planner Tracey Tester and her talented crime prevention team to institute a new development plan. Our goal: create a neighborhood-based, collaborative plan based on crime prevention science. In other words, SafeGrowth. This past week the city council voted that crime prevention and reduction plan into life. Even the media, it seems, has caught the excitement. News reports describe the plan. Congratulations to Tracey and her team. Back in New Orleans this week talking at a crime summit hosted by Louisiana AARP. The topic is how SafeGrowth and the Hollygrove success story might work throughout the city. The highlight was meeting old friends from Hollygrove and watching them tell their story to groups from throughout the city. A 78% decline in crime rates this year is quite a story, especially when crime elsewhere in the city is plateauing. Recently there has been an increase in New Orleans homicides. Hollygrove's homicides have declined from 20 to 4. HOW DID THEY DO IT? How, they were asked, did they turn things around? Difficult to spell out in clear steps. Certainly plenty of early steps were underway soon after Hurricane Katrina. A garden center was reinvigorated by volunteers (see photo). The city began a program of condemning and demolishing blighted properties (over 35% of all homes were condemned when we did our first SafeGrowth session 3 years ago. Today that's down to just under 20%). Then AARP Louisiana came to the table with their Livability Academy and training. Change sped up considerably. For me this neighborhood continues to improve due to the soul and gumption of some local residents. They started their own non-profit organization and now claim ownership for making changes themselves. Here's a few things the residents did: 1.Installed their own street lighting when they could not get the city to do it 2.Could not get official street signs so used politicians signs from the last election to make their own (see…politicians can help troubled neighborhoods!) 3.Quadrupled attendance at Night Out Against Crime walks 4.Cleaned and swept their own streets. 5.Absent landlords refused to move lawns, local residents did it 6.Partnered with police and the city to shut down a drug house 7.Created a seniors walking group - the Soul Steppers - to take back their streets. Soul Stepper groups are now throughout New Orleans 8.Got a problem bar to get rid of drug dealers 9.Bus department would not repair a bus shelter so they built their own with recycled materials And so on. That's how you start to turn a place around. To my friends in Hollygrove, congratulations! It's a great way to start the new year. SAFEGROWTH DEFINED: Crime prevention and community building is best achieved within the neighborhood by harnessing the creative energy of neighborhood change agents and functional groups. I'm on a roll with good news stories lately. Here's another one demonstrating the above. Hurricane Katrina hammered it. Fifteen to 20 murders annually vexed it. Even homegrown rapper L'il Wayne once sang "Hollygrove ain't no muthaf**kin melrose". No longer. Hollygrove in New Orleans is born again. Not in the religious sense…though, maybe. SafeGrowth training through Louisiana AARP is part of this story (eg: read The Hollygrove Story and Bus Shelter Madness). Fast forward… Only four murders this year. What's down? Crime, by 78%. What's up? Community events, garden centers, and Night Out Against Crime. AARP-sponsored strategic planning sessions with residents charted new urban designs for elder-friendly places. The Hollygrove Walking Club now walks for health and peace. Two weeks ago Hollygrove won a national MetLife Foundation award from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Watch this new videoon their success story. Here's another video, this one about their garden program. The rappers are right. The hood's where it's at! Last blog was about cohousing as a way out of a Wire-esque future. Here's another. I love winning stories, especially in places with special challenges. Winning stories have power; cynics are exposed with winners under their nose. Wins in Philadelphia have appeared here previously in the Semillia arts initiative and the city's vibrant South Street. Eastern north Philadelphia however has special challenges. At a policing conference last week I spoke to a participant from a 2010 SafeGrowth training. Sarah Sturtevant is a talented member of Philadelphia's LISC team and shared some wonderful stories with me. One was about a redeveloped Rainbow de Colores park. See Sarah's blog HERE. A few other wins are described HERE. Then I came upon a great video of their visioning sessions. Says one person in the video: "When you build a plan to fix problems you might be wildly successful and fix all the problems, but still not create a good community." How true. The video Our Community, Our Vision. Thanks Sarah to you, your fellow LISCers, and especially those community members and local organizations committed to wins. You all remind me of another Sarah I wrote about a few years ago. She too was remarkable. Thanks for your inspiration. "If it wasn't for the recreation programs, where would the kids be other than hanging out on the corner, selling drugs?" [Daniel Clark, neighborhood recreational organizer, Philadelphia] Exactly right, Daniel! Eastern north Philadelphia is a "community service desert" with few recreation centers or playgrounds. With a quarter million residents, it is less a neighborhood and more a mini-city of rich and poor. For much of it, years of divestment have left few services for kids and families. Handball courts are rare and parks, obsolete. One community worker claims there are 40,000 vacant and blighted properties. The asset map below shows only 5 community asset hotspots (in black). They are surrounded by large swaths (in grey and white) where few community services exist anywhere within walking distance. In such a place it can be easy to lose hope. Unsurprisingly crime flourishes in such places. Last year, as part of a larger neighborhood redevelopment project underway, I worked with LISC and ran a SafeGrowth training. I met remarkable community development workers in the training. They chose field projects to improve the quality and safety of depleted services in northeast Philadelphia, particularly a local handball court. The LISC Community Safety Initiative website describes what happened next. Click HERE. Local playgrounds, shown above, were in need of care and repair. This month they released a video describing how their work is turning the desolate to dynamic. In the video you'll note that the transformation unfolds during a time of stark budgets. According to program officers the city has "a capital-spending program that is barely large enough to maintain existing facilities, much less build new ones." Still, they find paths forward. If you want to see them, check out their video from Desolate to Dynamic HERE. The best part of the video was Kiki, listening to this charming young lady and watching her amazing basketball skills. I've said it before about youth in the city - it's kids like Kiki who will show us the way forward. |
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