Crime-Friendly Neighborhoods

How "New Urbanist" planners sacrifice safety in the name of "openness" and "accessibility"

Stephen Town & Randal O'Toole from the February 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Zelinka and Brennan are the authors of Safe-Scape: Creating Safer, More Livable Communities Through Planning and Design, published in 2001 by the American Planning Association. As the subtitle suggests, the authors believe the right sort of town planning can reduce crime. Unfortunately, the planning principles they advocate were borrowed from the New Urbanists--a group whose philosophy, Zelinka and Brennan have written, "clearly plays an important role in eliminating fear of crime and the perception of crime."

New Urbanism combined two movements in the architecture and urban planning communities. The first, sometimes called neotraditionalism, focused on using urban design to give people a sense of community. The loss of community in "placeless suburbs," the neotraditionalists believed, caused all sorts of social ills, ranging from crime to teenage suicides. Neotraditionalists recommended design features such as sidewalks, front porches, parks, community centers, and other common areas, all aimed at getting people to interact with one another.

The second movement focused on the relationship between land use and transportation. Modern suburbs had made people "auto dependent," planners said, which led to pollution, obesity, and other social ills. To remedy this, planners recommended higher-density "compact cities" that mixed housing with retail and commercial uses so that people could walk to the grocery store or places of employment.

There clearly is a market for New Urban�style communities, mainly among young singles, double-income-no-children couples, and people who appreciate bohemian lifestyles. Families with children, empty nesters, and people who prefer a quieter neighborhood are not so interested.

For many New Urbanists, it isn't enough to build to the market. The Congress for the New Urbanism, founded in 1993, declares on its Web site that "all development should be in the form of compact, walkable neighborhoods." New Urbanists eagerly helped write zoning codes that forbade things that had previously been mandated--broad streets, low densities, separation of residential from commercial uses--while mandating things that had formerly been forbidden, such as narrow streets, high densities, and mixed uses.

To promote this crusade, its advocates oversold New Urbanism, promising it would solve every urban problem. Do you commute to work? New Urbanism will reduce congestion. Suffer from asthma? New Urbanism will clean the air. Are you a parent? New Urbanism will improve schools. (In fact, there is no evidence that New Urbanism can do any of these things, and plenty of evidence that it does the opposite. Denser development did not significantly reduce per capita driving; it just increased driving per square mile and thereby increased congestion. Since cars pollute most in congested traffic, New Urbanism also contributed to air pollution. Since New Urban developments mainly attracted singles and childless couples, residents had little interest in improving schools.)

With SafeScape, Zelinka and Brennan added one more urban malady to the mix. Their book asserts, without substantial evidence, that mixed uses, pedestrian paths, and interconnected streets (as opposed to cul-de-sacs) reduce crime. The book's publisher, the American Planning Association, has 30,000 members who work for city and county governments throughout the country, many of whom are New Urbanists eager for support for their preconceived notions. Police, lacking their own experts, often assume that planners know what they are doing: At least one police chief, Mark Kroeker of Portland, has taken it seriously.

The book relied heavily on Jane Jacobs' notion of "eyes on the street." Single-use residential suburbs, the writers claimed, are easily preyed upon by criminals because they "display clearly identifiable behavioral routines and patterns"--that is, most people leave for work all day. Mixed-use neighborhoods "contribute to a safer, more vital public realm" because shopkeepers and shoppers have eyes on the street at all hours of the day.

It might sound persuasive, but there are a few problems with this position. One, as we've seen, is that Jacobs was writing only about cities, not suburbs. Another is that this was one area where Jacobs wasn't even right about cities. Jacobs' claims were based solely on qualitative observations, not on any actual crime data. When the architect Oscar Newman took a look at those data, a quarter century before SafeScape was published, he found a more complex story.

Defensible Argument

A teacher of urban design at St. Louis' Washington University, Newman watched the decline of Pruitt-Igoe, an award-winning high-rise housing project that had closely followed Le Corbusier's vision of a Radiant City. Completed in 1956, the project suffered so much crime that it quickly became unlivable. Despite offering essentially free housing for many poor people, its high vacancy rates led to closure, and its 1972 demolition has come to symbolize the failure of government housing projects.

Newman noticed that there was a low-rise housing project across the street from Pruitt-Igoe whose residents were in the same socioeconomic class but that "remained fully occupied and trouble-free throughout construction, occupancy, and decline of Pruitt-Igoe." What, Newman wondered, were "the physical differences that had enabled one to survive while the other fell apart"?

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Newman carefully compared crime rates with the design features of thousands of blocks in hundreds of urban neighborhoods that collectively housed nearly half a million people.

The result was his 1972 book Defensible Space, which showed that the safest neighborhoods maximized private space and minimized common zones. Safe areas also minimized "permeability," that is, the ease of entry to and exit from the neighborhood or housing area. Cul-de-sacs are thus a crime-prevention device, and any breaching of cul-de-sacs will predictably increase crime. Newman didn't include suburbs in his study because they had much lower crime rates than the urban neighborhoods he did examine. This, he believed, was because the suburbs were less permeable and more defensible.

Relying more on mid-rise developments than high rises, New Urbanism claims to have fixed the problems of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. Yet New Urbanism shares many features with Pruitt-Igoe, including the large communal areas and permeability that Newman found caused so many problems.