The answer: Their contentions are theoretical and ideological, not based on reality. The idea that crime is a problem in New Urbanist towns like Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland; Southern Village in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Celebration near Orlando, Florida; and Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon, is laughable. Crime is rare in these communities, which are among the most highly sought-after places to live in their regions.
New Urban design also has inspired scores of market-rate neighborhoods on infill sites in historic cities and towns, most of which also are exceedingly popular in the marketplace and enjoy good reputations as places to live. The toughest projects that New Urbanists have undertaken are public housing redevelopments, including more than 100 projects associated with HOPE, a program that closely follows New Urban design principles. The HOPE VI projects have been the subject of numerous studies, and they have come through with flying colors.
The gaping chasm between crime rates in public housing census tracts and their cities as a whole had narrowed from 141 percent in 1990 to only 26 percent in 2000 in places where HOPE VI plans had been put in place. And this change took place while citywide crime rates fell dramatically. The HOPE VI neighborhoods were substantially safer in 2000 than their cities were in 1990.
The case of Diggs Town in Norfolk, Virginia, is also instructive, because a New Urban plan was put into place without tearing down any public housing units or displacing residents. Police calls dropped from 25�30 a day to about three a week, according to one study.
It seems O'Toole and Town cannot conceive of safe communities with open streets and pedestrian networks and without gates. Yet that is how all American towns and cities were built prior to World War II, when crime rates were lower as a whole than they are today and when gated communities were unknown. New Urbanism is based on empirical study and observation; O'Toole and Town let ideology drive their analysis.
Robert Steuteville
Editor/Publisher
New Urban News
Ithaca, NY
Randal O'Toole and Stephen Town reply: Neighborhood design is only one factor that influences crime, and to discern its influence you must examine crime at the neighborhood level. Comparing crime at the regional level, as Michael Lewyn does, or across decades, as Robert Steuteville does, loses the neighborhood effects. Atlanta neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs, for example, may have less crime than Atlanta neighborhoods without cul-de-sacs. It is also likely that East Aurora's mixed-use downtown has more crime than its single-use neighborhoods.
Steuteville is correct that no one has systematically examined crime rates in America's New Urban neighborhoods. But criminologists have confirmed that U.S. neighborhoods with mixed uses, alleys, and other New Urban traits have more crime than single-use neighborhoods without alleys.
Steuteville claims our article is driven by ideology while New Urbanism is based on empirical study. What is our ideology? We favor freedom of choice, and have no objection if someone wants to live in a New Urban neighborhood. We object only when planners promote coercive schemes and claim they offer benefits they do not. Where is their empirical study? While defensible space advocates from Oscar Newman to British police have compared crime with design on thousands of city blocks, New Urbanists base their ideas on untested hypotheses and ignore any data that challenge those hypotheses.
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