Design for safety

Dramatic crime reduction has occurred in two public housing projects designed with new urbanist principles. Two broad approaches can make safe places. The fortress strategy is exemplified by gated communities. New urbanists take the opposite approach, adding more connecting streets, creating smaller blocks and greater accessibility to the outside world. Safety is achieved by defining private and public space, ensuring informal surveillance of streets, encouraging social interaction, and other techniques. In Diggs Town, a Norfolk public housing project that was revitalized using new urbanist principles, police calls dropped dramatically after the new design was implemented in 1994, and have continued to drop. A follow-up study on Diggs Town, published in Housing Policy Debate, quotes one resident stating that “before the changes” he generally heard two or three gunshots a night. Since the new design has been implemented, the frequency is one gunshot every three or four months. Police calls in the neighborhood dropped to two or three a week from 25 to 30 per day. The 428-unit Diggs Town was built in the 1950s on superblocks with poorly defined open spaces between buildings. “The street pattern did not allow access to the inner parts of the complex or facilitate supervision by residents,” according to the study. “This isolated the central part of the project, leaving it open to criminal and other undesirable activities.” The redesign, by Urban Design Associates (UDA) of Pittsburgh, kept the same building configuration, but added small streets with on street parking and traffic calming measures to provide easy, pedestrian-friendly access to the center of the project. All houses were given front yards and porches with plenty of room for sitting. Private back yards were fenced off and gated. Diggs Town’s redesign was accompanied by other social interventions, including community policing. This makes it difficult to identify the precise impact of the physical design relative to other changes, but the authors believe that the physical changes have had a significant effect. The revitalization cost $45,000 per unit — $28,000 for interior renovations and $17,000 for exterior changes. When funds are short, they recommend focusing on exterior renovations. In Baltimore, the Pleasant View Gardens public housing redevelopment has produced results nearly as dramatic (like Diggs Town, Pleasant View Gardens is a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Hope 6 program). Unlike Diggs Town, Pleasant View Gardens involved the demolition of high-rise public housing buildings, formerly called Lafayette Courts. A new neighborhood of 228 townhomes and 110 apartments was built from scratch on the 21-acre site. Torti Gallas Partners/CHK, the designers of Pleasant View Gardens, created well-supervised streets and public spaces and private backyards. During the first six months of 1998, There were 241 police calls in Pleasant View Gardens. That compares to the first six months of 1994, when there were 952 police calls in Lafayette Courts — and at that time the project already had lost many tenants, according to John Wesley, spokesman for the city Housing Authority. Linda Love, an 18-year resident of Lafayette Courts/Pleasant View Gardens and now president of the Residents Association, describes dramatic changes. “It was nothing to walk down a stairway and find a dead body — somebody who had been shot or overdosed on drugs,” Love says of the old Lafayette Courts. “We used to call this the OK Corral, because gunfights would break out any time of the day.” Now she reports that there are no gunshots. “Things are totally different. The transition has been so overwhelming.” u