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

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The defensible-space approach has been most influential in England, where a team of land-use researchers led by the Kings College geographer Alice Coleman in the early 1980s replicated and expanded Newman's research by carefully examining nearly 6,000 residential blocks, including both suburban and urban areas. Affirming most of Newman's conclusions, they found that neighborhoods of single-family detached homes had the fewest problems, and those that did have problems were across the street from apartments. Apartments could reduce problems, Coleman found, by minimizing the number of dwellings accessible from a single entrance and privatizing common areas.

Today all British police departments have architectural liaison officers who review proposed developments and help developers find ways to minimize crime. British police have developed a national award program called Secured by Design, which is based on Newman's defensible-space ideas. The program's success is apparent from dramatic reductions in crime that have followed its implementation.

Developers in public housing have a financial incentive to achieve the Secured by Design award, which includes a package of design and security measures in their plans. All applicants are volunteers, though the program gives police power to impose things on developers that will significantly reduce the cost of policing. Americans may or may not want to give police departments that much power over developers. But they certainly don't want planning departments promoting designs that will increase crime.

One of the British architectural liaison officers' clear findings is that assigning common areas to individual families in a multifamily housing project can virtually eliminate burglaries and vandalism. When people own an area they have the right to influence and control it in a way that is impossible in common areas.

For example, Royds was a West Yorkshire public housing development of about 3,500 homes sheltering some 12,000 people. Royds was originally built in the 1950s, but by the 1990s it had gone into serious decline, with parts resembling a slum. The burglary rate was one of the worst in the country, at seven times the national average. So the government regenerated it in the early 1990s using secured-by-design principles. The result, for nearly a decade, has been a virtual elimination of burglary.

Even Britain has its New Urbanists, and one architectural liaison officer was moved by pressure from the New Urban movement to compare defensible space with New Urbanism. Peter Knowles, of the Bedfordshire Police, compared the design features of 24,000 housing units with some 20,000 incidents of crime. He concluded that New Urban�like housing had five times the crime and cost police departments three times as much to keep secure as neighborhoods designed to defensible-space standards.

British New Urbanists consider Hulme, in Manchester, a model of New Urban design. It consists of a mixture of low-rise and four-story apartment buildings with a semi-public interior courtyard. The latest Police Crime Pattern Analysis found that it suffers three and a half times the national average rate of crime, and a recent survey found that many children felt unsafe even in their immediate home environments because of the public nature of the streets.

"The design of streets and buildings should reinforce safe environments," says the Congress for the New Urbanism, "but not at the expense of accessibility and openness." With accessibility a euphemism for mixed use and openness a euphemism for permeability, it is clear that New Urbanists make safety from crime a low priority. That is fine if residents understand what they're getting. But they should not be misled by books like SafeScape into believing that one of the things they're getting is less crime.

Urban design can enable crime or it can limit crime. As Jane Jacobs wrote more than four decades ago, "To build city districts that are custom made for easy crime is idiotic. Yet that is what we do." And that is what Zelinka, Brennan, and the New Urbanists would have us do today.�