Reducing Crime by Changing Places

The below text is an excerpt from the Penn IUR brief "Reducing Crime by Changing Places: Assessing the Benefits of Abating Vacant and Abandoned Land in Urban Spaces."

Philadelphia is one such example. Vacant and abandoned urban spaces are an outcome of the 1960s and 1970s shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, the movement of people to the suburbs, rising crime, urban riots, and “block-busting,” all of which led to the spiral of urban decay. Cities such as Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle have been able to successfully rebound from the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy by attracting technology and finance industries. But Philadelphia, like Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis, has a legacy of blight and abandonment that had come to full scale by the 1990s.

In the later years of that decade, residents of the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia grew tired of the eyesore of vacant lots, the drug trafficking and associated violence, and other unwanted aspects of these places around their homes. They teamed up with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and created a revitalization effort called “land and care,” now referred to as the Philadelphia LandCare (PLC) program. When asked about violence and unwanted activity in their neighborhoods, these residents and others across the city are on record as consistently saying, “If I could change things I would. There wouldn’t be so many vacant lots [and] abandoned houses.”

PLC is simple and was designed to be applied across the neighborhood. Trash and debris are removed from a vacant lot. The land is then graded, and grass and a few trees are planted. A low wooden post-and-rail fence is installed with openings to permit residents access to the newly greened spaces. The fence prevents illegal dumping of garbage and construction debris; it is also a visual sign that someone is maintaining the property. The result is a small “pocket park.” The rehabilitation of such lots takes less than a week to clean and green. The lots are maintained through twice-monthly cleaning, weeding, and mowing during the growing season (April through October). The cost to clean and green a typical lot is roughly $1,000–$1,300, along with $150 per year to stabilize the lot through biweekly cleaning and mowing.