Mixed Use Development
Contributed by Michael LaPlante, President of Eastside Pioneers Neighborhood Association
Recent research in Baltimore and Philadelphia by Temple University criminologist Ralph Taylor and several colleagues confirms that mixed uses increase both crime and the cost of policing.
While some developers assert that mixed use development is associated with lower crime this conclusion does not seem consistent with research on crime and crime prevention. In fact, findings from many studies seem to indicate that mixed use development is more prone to crime problems than are more homogenous neighborhoods. Criminological theory predicts the same outcome as well.
Modern urban planners see mixed use areas ( mixtures of commercial, residential, income levels, density etc) as a way to address neighborhood gentrification. It is also used as a means to clean up neighborhoods plagued by crime and other signs of urban blight.
Initially it may seem to work but because mixed use developments invite large numbers of people, from outside the neighborhood into a community, the network of social bonds of coming to knowing and recognizing one another that neighbors usually form in a single use neighborhood becomes more difficult.
Sampson and Raudenbush (1999) found that mixed-land use was significantly associated with social disorder (loitering, public drinking, etc.), which was strongly negatively associated with “ collective efficacy” which would be defined as its somebody’s problem but not my problem for control of a public space.
In addition care and concern over the properties by the original developer may wane and the high standards of care and maintenance of the properties will be left to the already weakened neighborhood.
Given the weakened social ties of the mixed use neighborhood it will be harder to maintain the standards of uniform maintenance for the developments. Further, because people will be drawn from outside the neighborhood, it will be more likely that the littering and damage to property will occur and that the neighbors will be less likely to keep up with the damage done and maintain the appearance of order.
Space is only defensible if residents have the clear right to influence and control what takes place there. In a commercial or public area, everyone has the right or excuse to be there and offenders are indistinguishable from law-abiding citizens. Mixed use therefore reduces residential control over the neighborhood and provides the criminals with anonymity as they blend into the background.
Oscar Newman, a teacher of urban design, at St Louis’ Washington University, commented on the proponents of mixed use developments shortly before his death in April 2004. He said “I am not very impressed with the work of the New Urbanists, It is nostalgia, a throwback to the past, with little thought about what made those environments work then (long-term occupancy by an identical economic class and ethnic group), and unworkable today. The residential environments they are creating are very vulnerable to criminal behavior, unless, of course, these environments are exclusively occupied by high-income groups.”
The proponents of mixed use developments, the New Urbanists, of course, detest exclusive, high-income neighborhoods and insist that communities should include people of all incomes.
Urban design can exacerbate a crime problem or it can limit crime. As Jane Jacobs wrote more than forty years ago, “To build city districts that are custom made for easy crime is idiotic. Yet that is what we do.” And that is what proponents of mixed use developments, the New Urbanists would have us do today.
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