Waking up in the 21st Century: The San Romanoway Story

One version of crime prevention is to hunt around for the latest program and try it out. Like a teen shopping for clothes, popular fashion dictates choice. Cost comes second. Many of the prevention programs we see today result from the most recent academic or policy fashion. They are impervious to cost and, to stretch the metaphor, they are silent on effectiveness.

Too many crime prevention programs are adopted as though one size fits all. They are effective or ineffective depending on where, on what, and how they are applied. Few have actually been tested for effectiveness with any scientific rigor.

It is like medicine that waits for symptoms and then looks for specific treatments. The more sophisticated doctor is more holistic, working in partnership with the patient to build overall health and wellness, rather than waiting for symptoms to arise.

SafeGrowth is such an approach in crime prevention. It is a 21st Century holistic form of collaborative community development. SafeGrowth works directly with residents, transferring skills and knowledge to the place they are most needed, within troubled neighbourhoods. It also applies to existing safe neighbourhoods looking to innoculate their community from disorder and delinquency.

Example: A large cluster of high rise apartment buildings - the San Romanoway project - becomes the subject of a multi-year program to address crime and disorder. Housing 4,000 residents, many of whom are new immigrants and single parents, the project has a history of problems with crime. They are surrounded by gangs, drugs and poverty of the notorious Jane/Finch suburbs in north Toronto. For decades conditions for the 60,000 residents in Jane/Finch worsen and grow into one of Canada's highest crime communities.

From 2000 to 2001 a research team led by Ross McLeod from Intelligarde and myself from AlterNation conducted research and crafted a SafeGrowth neighbourhood redevelopment plan. From 2001 to 2009 the Greenwin Property Management group led by Kevin Green, along with local residents formed the San Romanoway Revitalization Association, led by director Stephnie Payne. They immediately began implementing tailored strategies they selected for themselves. Community gardens, parenting classes, area cleanups, better lighting, improved management practices, social and recreational programs for kids, and others began the process. Fundraising was done locally and government, private corporations, and philanthropic groups all contributed.

Most recently San Romanoway has added new tennis courts and tennis camps from Tennis Canada, and a new cineplex movie theatre donated by the Cineplex Corporation within the apartment project - the first of its kind in Canada. They also have opened a new recording studio in which local kids create their own rap songs for public sale.

Crime at San Romanoway has plummeted, more residents are engaged in community life, and fear has decreased. While conditions in the wider Jane-Finch area are unchanged, San Romanoway shows us how the SafeGrowth model for neighbourhood building represents the future of 21st Century crime prevention.

The full SafeGrowth story will be reported this fall in a special issue of the Built Environment journal: Security versus Safety: A New Look.

the Built Environment journal website

Modernist message from a master architect

Beautiful places and streets attract people. They put eyes on the street, a basic principle of urban safety. I was recently reminded of a master architect of beauty, the award-winning Arthur Erickson, an architect the New York Times called Canada's pre-eminent Modernist architect.

While in Vancouver this week I spent time with Erickson's closest colleagues and friends, an impressive group who just like Erickson were concerned about both social equity and aesthetic beauty.

Modernism has not always had a good rap. Arguably, CPTED would not exist if not for the modernist planning and architecture that Jane Jacobs so bitterly attacked. Inappropriately applied modernism led to the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe social housing in 1960s St. Louis, the project dubbed indefensible and crime-ridden in Oscar Newman's Defensible Space.

Arthur Erickson showed another way; modernism done right! An example of his work appeared here previously regarding Vancouver's Robson Square.

The first Erickson building I ever entered was the Canadian Pavilion at the Expo 67 fair in Montreal in 1967, a kind of inverted pyramid. At the time I had no idea about architectural modernism. It just looked cool.

Later I studied at the Erickson inspired Simon Fraser University atop Burnaby Mountain in Greater Vancouver, a kind of spaceship in the sky. It too was very cool and futuristic - a fact not lost on film directors who have filmed there (BattleStar Gallactica, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Underworld Awakening).

Erickson taught it is the work quality, not the theory, that matters most in constructing beautiful places. The problem arises when modernism is done badly and applied inappropriately. This is the case in  Pruitt-Igoe, Chicago's Cabrini-Green, Toronto's Jane/Finch, and the Chichy suburbs of Paris. Unsurprisingly, crime festers in such places.

The takeaway? Build sensitively and in social context. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yet too many new architectural forms do the latter and too few architects do the former.

In Erickson's own words:

"…the reaction to the bareness of ill conceived modernist buildings was to revert in the 80's to a revival of historicism in the guise of "post-modernism"… That Dark Age is thankfully over but cultural insecurity is always there, hidden in the basement of our psyches - ready to spring out whenever brave confidence falters. 

It lingers in the gated communities where make-believe has become an adult panacea. It lingers with the developers who promote kitsch because it sells.  It lingers with the newly rich and the establishment who need to consolidate social standing with class accepted standards. It lingers in every shopping centre, multiplex, restaurant, Vegas casino where illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within." 

- Arthur Erickson,  2000

Tackling vertical crime - History in the making

Resident youth composing in the new San Romanoway sound studio

Reminiscing always gives me the willies. Are memories exaggerated? Ignored? Still, now and then, a memory surfaces worth shouting aloud. I recently came across this one.

Disclaimer: Some of this is probably not even my memory - at least not latter parts of it - but rather stories of others doing remarkable work. I doubt many of them even know my name. It's doesn't really matter. It's a fantastic story for turning troubled places back from the brink. It's also probably one of the birthplaces for tactics that later became SafeGrowth.

Yesterday I discovered a recently posted YouTube (see below). It shows another success at the San Romanoway apartments in Toronto's infamous Jane/Finch corridor. I have written about San Romanoway elsewhere.

Here's my memory of the project: 12 years ago myself and Ross McLeod assembled a team to review and recommend ways to reverse endemic violence in some high crime apartment towers.

In late 2000 we wrote the San Romanoway Revitalization plan. The plan had steps for research surveys, a community association, gardens, and lots of CPTED. Community organizer Stephnie Payne was then hired to start outreach, raise funds, administer the association, and get things going. She did that magnificently. McLeod's security company worked with her to tackle crime.

The rest, as they say, is history. The video tells the latest chapter in this story.

Malaise - the real threat to safety

Our local Halloween parade and scary costumes

Today we celebrate Halloween, that ancient Celtic harvest festival marking summer's end. Today it's signalled by masks and scary costumes hiding the faces of kids looking for goodies.

Last week I ran a SafeGrowth training in Milwaukee with the Community Safety Initiatives folks at LISC. (Students: Assignments will be posted in the Toolkit section below on Wednesday)! During the training I had interesting chats about the difficulty implementing tactics in an environment with poor resources and even poorer political support.

Then I thought of the scariest ghoul of them all when it comes to safer places: malaise.

Malaise is a feeling that things are just not going right. It's the social disease which President Jimmy Carter once called a fundamental threat to democracy.

Malaise is similar to anomie, the social pathology described a century ago by famous sociologist Emile Durkheim. It's the alienation felt by people from by an inability to reach legitimate goals, in this case caused by resources or politics.

I see malaise occasionally in the faces of practitioners who confront significant challenges. Perhaps they've been beaten back by setbacks. They get to a point where they lose faith that their work matters, but still they put on a brave mask. They may think to themselves; there are no treats from prevention work, only political tricks.

That is malaise at its worst!

No doubt this is a real feeling. But is it a real thing? Can someone not suffering malaise accomplish what others cannot? Is it like the spooks on Halloween - more contrived than real? There is no doubt obstacles exist. In fact, there is probably truth to the idea that some regions are more (or less) likely to solve problems creatively, what Richard Florida calls The Creative Class.

Yet, like Halloween, we can choose belief in one thing or we can choose belief in another. There is just as much to be gained from persisting and seeking more creative options. That is the exact opposite of malaise. It is called vigor.

Vigor is the magic I see in successful practitioners. Vigorous practitioners exist in all regions. I've posted many examples over the past year. Here are a few:

1. Seattle's neighborhood governance described by Jim Diers.
2. The Westville neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut.
3. The Oregon District neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio.
4. The Hollygrove neighborhood story in New Orleans.
5. The San Romanoway apartments in Jane/Finch, Toronto.

Interestingly, Milwaukee has a great example as well. The SOHI District, a main street program in Milwaukee sponsored by the city and the Local Initiative Support Corporation of Milwaukee. Some of the SOHI folks attended the SafeGrowth training a few years ago. Their work has been remarkable. There are websites of SOHI as well as a SOHI YouTube channel of their successes.

There is even a crime review article published in the April, 2009 CPTED Perspective newsletter

Perhaps the very best person to exemplify vigor was a young woman in a Cincinnati SafeGrowth training 6 years ago. Her name was Sarah and I titled that blog An Ode to the Sarah's. For the sake of tackling malaise, and the sake of our neighborhoods, it's worth a look.

Crime in 2010: Up or down?

The Great Depression - some very bad years

On New Year's night, a car crashed into my neighbors yard across the street. When I arrived to check it out (thankfully, no one was hurt) the driver had already fled from his booze-smelling wreck.

What will that look like in official records? A drunk driver? A car crash? A criminal charge for failing to remain? Damage to property? Truth is it might be one, all, or some combination of any of those.

Official stats depend on how busy the police are, the skill and experience of the investigating officer, whether the drunk driver can be found while he's still drunk, and whether the police are even summoned in the first place (in this case, I dialed 9-1-1). Crime incidents turn into stats (or not) based on a whole bunch of things.

None of that helps answer my most important 2010 crime question - Will crime go up or down? Will the Recession linger and jack up misery? Will the 1990's declines resume as potential offenders age out of their crime-prone years?

To some criminologists, visible social conditions and stories from residents tell the tale. Graffiti, homelessness on the street, and other such perceptions are stories that portend the future.

To others crime "data" alone tell the truth. The evidence-based folks slice and dice numbers and serve them up as proof of this or that. As the car crash shows, stats reveal (or not) different things depending on where they are diced and who is slicing.

So 2010. Better or worse? The Washington Post seems to think it will be better.

Last year Baltimore had a 9% increase in murders. Similar disturbing trends exist in a few other cities. Yet crime rates in many US cities continued the Great American Crime Decline that began in the 1990s.

The FBI Rankings of the 2009 six highest crime cities, in order, are: Camden NJ, St. Louis, Oakland, Detroit, Flint, and New Orleans. The lowest crime ranking cities included Madison, Bellingham, WA and Boulder, CO. Should I choose Boulder over St. Louis?

We teach in SafeGrowth that overall city rankings like this predict nothing about life on the street. We learn how to do a Risk Assessment because it is crime patterns within the neighborhood that matter in everyday life - patterns that can make you safe in a high crime city, (New Haven) or unsafe in a relatively low crime city (Vancouver).

How about the country in which we live? Putting stats ahead of patriotism for a moment, the US and Canadian city homicide rates are interesting:

City crime rates rarely tell the story

City homicide rates 2002
per 100,000

Washington, DC: 45.8
Detroit: 42
Baltimore: 38.3
Memphis: 24.7
Chicago: 22.2
Los Angeles: 17.5
Dallas: 15.8
New York: 7.3
Regina: 4.7
Seattle: 4.5
Saskatoon: 4.4
Sudbury: 4
Portland: 3.9
San Diego: 3.8
Edmonton: 3.5
Vancouver: 3.4
Montreal: 3.4
San Jose: 3.1
Winnipeg: 3
Calgary: 2.6
Toronto: 1.8

Am I unsafe living in US cities? The evidence-based folks might say yes (except if I chose San Jose versus Saskatoon or Portland versus Regina). But Vancouver's Downdown East Side or Toronto's Jane/Finch corridor are no doubt far more dangerous than New York's Greenwich Village or Washington's Georgetown.

Which brings us back to the car crash and whether crime will go up or down. I think it depends on where we live, how engaged local residents are in their neighborhood, and what happens in this economy. In some places it'll no doubt go down. In others, it won't.

I think, when it comes to neighborhood safety, the most valuable New Year's resolution we can adopt is neighborhood responsibility and vigilance: Keeping an eye locally and learning how to prevent crime where we live and work.

Civic engagement will tell the story. Our civic engagement.

Have a happy and safe New Year.

We the north - Twenty years later

The pedestrian entranceway built at San Romanoway

by Gregory Saville

Some high crime neighborhoods seem to remain that way forever, like a horror film that won’t end. Grandparents in those places share flashbacks with their grandchildren about ‘the old days’ of gangs and guns, while their grandkids still face those same neighborhood profanities decades later!

There is a theory in criminology called ‘deviant places’ that goes something like this: High crime neighborhoods persist for decades regardless who, or what generation, lives there.

Yet the San Romanoway apartments in north Toronto, a place we revisited a few months ago, is living proof the deviant places theory needs rewriting. It should be called the ‘reclaimed places’ theory because, if you know the incredible success at the San Romanoway neighborhood, you’d know that those chanting ‘it will never change’ are wrong.

Locally-led, non-profit, SRRA - two decades of community-building

SAN ROMANOWAY - HISTORY OF CHANGE

Read the history of SafeGrowth and you will learn that in 1999, not long after we created 2nd Generation CPTED, Gerard Cleveland and myself were asked to work with an urban design and crime prevention team to review conditions at a high crime apartment complex in the infamous Toronto Jane/Finch corridor. This was the San Romanoway apartments, a story that I published a decade ago, and now consider an embryonic version of SafeGrowth.

Food programs in the community dining hall

Since those early years, plenty has happened at San Romanoway where 4,000 residents live in 3 huge apartment towers. Most significantly, the crime and violence that plagued that troubled community has subsided considerably. It hasn’t vanished – last year they had a homicide. But, as SRRA program manager Cathy McCulloch told us, that was a rare event. In fact, on whole, crime is down and livability is up. It's a far better place than what we found 15 years ago during interviews and surveys. San Romanoway is no longer a horror movie; it’s a coming-of-age film about turning night into day!

Childrens play areas and sports programs are still thriving

Credit goes to the residents and the local organizers who have done all the hard work to transform the neighborhood, especially the non-profit, San Romanoway Revitalization Association (SRRA) – a group that still chases funding dollars but, somehow, keeps many of the programs running. Sadly, it hasn’t kept them all running and it hasn’t been easy! They have faced financial cuts, labor disputes, and defunded programs. As one of Canada's most successful crime prevention and community-building projects ever accomplished, they still don't get nearly the funding they deserve!

SRRA program manager Cathy McCulloch shows off
art by local photographers - a celebration of life at San Romanoway

In spite of it all, somehow, the SRRA persists and residents, along with leaders from the property owners, community leaders, and police, keep disproving the ‘deviant-places-never-change’ theory. As the photos from our site visit illustrate, places can change.

Toronto basketball fans just celebrated the 2019 national championship Toronto Raptors with a “We The North” chant. I’m reserving my chant for the supporters, leaders, and members of the SSRA. You are truly "We The North"! You rock!

San Romanoway community gardens at the start of planting season

Suburbs: The Fix?

Suburbs: The Fix is in

Tonight the CBC broadcast a news documentary about the increasing political power of the suburbs.

In every planning or human geography grad program there is a course on urban studies. In that course there is usually a debate about the urban/suburban divide, a divide that runs deep in popular culture. It cuts deep into the environmental wastage from long suburban drives to work in rush hour. It surfaces in a dwindling downtown tax base from out-migration.

Best-selling author Richard Florida recently wrote "the challenge is to remake the suburbs, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities and, in so doing, to make them engines of innovation and productivity."

For many years growing suburban populations and a dwindling urban tax base resulted in downtown deterioration and high crime rates.

The picture is no longer so clear.

Suburbs not only represent a place of increasing political power, they have also seen increasing crime rates. In places like New York downtown crime rates have declined while Memphis recorded a suburban crime blip after the demolition of a downtown public housing project.

There is now some light at the end of the tunnel.

Toronto's Jane/Finch suburb has long been a hotspot for crime. Last year I published an empirical study on one SafeGrowth project I helped launch there - the San Romanoway apartments.

It was one of the first times the crime trend was halted in a small suburban pocket. There is now a fabulous documentary film about San Romanoway's chief community organizer Stephnie Payne called "The Fix" explaining how it works.

Perhaps this is one future for our suburbs?

Les Miserables - reinventing the wheel?

Nothing to do in Chichy, France. It could be anywhere in the world.

My focus on North American cities results from my current travel agenda, not because cities elsewhere are very different when it comes to crime. Recent news about the French presidential election provides a reminder that we are all very much alike.

Consider France. To experienced travelers France is known as the place for exceptional cuisine, wine, and enviable high speed rail. France is celebrated for progressive social programs: eight weeks paid vacation for most employees, the world's best public healthcare.

Yet as elsewhere French cities too have high crime neighborhoods where misery outweighs civility. One is Chichy-sous-Bois, a so-called Banlieue (what Americans disparagingly call "the projects").

Chichy is a poor, run-down suburb of Paris. Some writers describe Chichy as a nondescript suburb without a center, wedged between high-rise apartments and four-lane highways. No public transit means two hour commutes downtown, only 10 miles away. Residents feel isolated and ignored. Except for public transit, that is also an apt description for Toronto's Jane/Finch corridor where San Romanoway is located.

The famous TGV high speed train. France produced this...

...apartment towers in Chicy. France produced this too.

Journalists describe Chichy as a "high crime area where police rarely bothered to venture". Crime and violence seem endemic. Until recently, that was an apt description for Hollygrove, the New Orleans neighborhood featured earlier.

There is discrimination against Chichy's immigrant residents. When two Chichy teen boys were accidentally killed while running away from police in October 2005 it erupted into three weeks of violence, looting and arsons that later spread nation-wide. Over 9,000 cars burned, 3,000 arrests. Ironically, last year the same thing happened in Tottenham, UK.

Referring to the Tottenham riots I wrote that festering poverty and deprivation dries up collective goodwill, what sociologists call community efficacy.

The French in Chichy, Canadians in San Romanoway, Americans in Hollygrove, or British in Tottenham. Same lesson: If you respond to (but don't prevent) crime, underfund public transit, ignore repairs to dilapidated homes, fail to address racism...you get a tinderbox.

The French are pinning their hopes on $500 Billion urban "renewal" in areas surrounding Chichy (completely ignoring Chichy) and a new police station in a nearby neighborhood. Hopefully they'll discover throwing cops and money at nearby neighborhoods seldom works to tamp down tinderboxes. Meanwhile, Hollygrove is coming back from the brink and San Romanoway was the first SafeGrowth success.

They don't have to reinvent the wheel to fix Chichy.

Catch and release - Swimming upstream in Vancouver

Vilfredo Pareto's 80/20 Principle

What does a 19th century Italian economist have to do with neighborhood safety? Consider Vilfredo Pareto's principle that the majority of a phenomena can be explained by a minority of causes. Sometimes called the 80/20 Rule, criminology has long demonstrated a small number of chronic offenders cause a significant portion of crime.

Reflecting on my Comstat and police leadership blogs recently, I came across a fascinating news documentary Pareto would have loved. It's called Lock Em Up.

It's about competent policing and quality leadership in an unlikely place - Vancouver, BC. I say unlikely because, with all my harping on the skid row tragedy in that lovely city, one might assume I blame the cops or their chief. Not so. In Vancouver at least, I don't think that's the case. Jim Chu, Vancouver's Chief and their Chronic Offender Unit - COU - have put research to good tactical use. Similar to the Winnipeg auto theft solutions project I mentioned two years ago, this seems like a winning ticket (though, as you'll see below, in Vancouver there is a number missing from their lottery ticket).

A DENT IN CRIME

Property crime is rarely seen as a serious matter, yet it comprises 75 percent of all crime. In 2009 Vancouver had over 21,000 thefts and 5,000 break and enters. As Pareto might warn us, chronic offenders with multiple offenses cause a significant number of those crimes.

What is a chronic offender? Vancouver defines a Chronic as someone with over 39 convictions (that's a lot of convictions). There are also Superchronics, a group with over 79 convictions each. That's convictions, not crimes. They committed far more than that. One offender interviewed in the film below says he has broken into well over 1,000 homes.

How many chronic offenders are there and how many property crimes to they cause in Vancouver?

The COU and the Vancouver Police planning section report that over 5 years, 379 chronic offenders were charged with over 12,000 offenses, roughly 10% of all yearly property crimes. It is of course much higher since chronic offenders were not charged for all of their crime, only a small number. The reality is probably more like 25% - an educated guess I'm sure both Pareto and COU detectives would confirm.

Vancouver Police report, 2008

In other words, out of a half million people only 379 cause between 10% to 25% of all property crime in Vancouver! Their research report is available for review by clicking here.

If there was ever a case where chronic offenders should be removed to protect us, this is it. Remove them for drug treatment, incarceration, or both. But, get them off the street.

What do police do in Vancouver? Since a small number of chronic offenders create a significant portion of crime, police strategies target habitual offenders to break that cycle. Vancouver Chief Jim Chu is behind the approach.

Criminological research, where it is done well, is fairly clear. It shows that arresting Chronics and getting them off the street works, at least until the courts release them again. That's the missing link in this chain - the Vancouver court system, one of the most lenient in Canada. Stunningly, their study showed length of incarceration actually got shorter as the Chronics committed more crime. Worse still, over half of the Superchronics received less than a month in jail - and 25% of the Superchronics received less than a day in jail.

CATCH AND RELEASE

In short, cops caught them so judges could release them. Talk about frustrating! The report says:

as these offenders tend to specialize in low‐level property offences, their sentences tend to be relatively short. These short sentences do not serve to incapacitate them and protect the public for any significant period of time, nor, in most cases, are they long enough to allow for admission into appropriate addiction treatment programs.

Makes one wonder, who are the real culprits? Unaware, ill-considered and lenient judges? That's what the CTV documentary suggests. What about criminologists failing to inform decision-makers? Where is the Canadian research? Of 30 habitual offender studies cited in the report, only 4 were from Canada (two of those were graduate student theses).

As I said in a previous blog, when social tragedies happen like the public housing fiasco in St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe and gang infested Jane-Finch corridor in Toronto, someone is asleep at the wheel.

In Vancouver, it's definitely not the cops.