Can saving a building save a neighbourhood?

 

The former Denver Civic Theatre, built in 1921 and now home to Su Teatro Cultural and Performing Arts Center, illustrates how a modest historic building can find new life through adaptive reuse and community stewardship

GUEST BLOG: Carl Bray, Ph.D. is principal at Bray Heritage, a cultural heritage planning firm, in Kingston, Ontario. He is a member of the SafeGrowth Network and a co-author of our forthcoming book Hope Rises (University of Toronto Press). He is also adjunct associate professor at Queen's University's graduate program in the School of Urban and Regional Planning.

A few decades ago, residents in a declining Liverpool neighbourhood faced a familiar problem. Empty houses, demolitions, disinvestment, and a growing sense that their community was being written off. Rather than accept the loss, local residents organized, reclaimed vacant properties, created gardens, restored homes, and eventually formed a community land trust. Their efforts helped reshape both the physical environment and the story of their neighbourhood.

We have recently explored how old factories, warehouses, and historic buildings can find new life through adaptive reuse such as community marketplaces. In a few recent blogs, Greg touched on just such a story now unfolding regarding Denver’s new football stadium and an adjacent Third Place arts co-operative. 

But what happens when local residents take the lead in saving buildings themselves? 

Cover image courtesy of Princeton University Press

In her recent book Preserving with Purpose: Reimagining Buildings for Community Benefit, architect Amy Hetletvedt describes examples of local residents taking over abandoned or dilapidated buildings and transforming them into community assets. While a building alone does not create community, the process of acquiring, renovating, and using a building can bring people together and become a catalyst for neighbourhood revitalization.

Hetletvedt argues that it is not always the most historically significant buildings that offer the greatest opportunity for renewal. In many neighbourhoods, modest and ordinary buildings are more accessible, more adaptable, and more connected to local life. A former shop, school, church, diner, or row of aging houses may hold meaning that goes beyond its market value. Such places help tell the story of a community.

LOCAL CHARACTER

The author describes a range of strategies for preserving threatened buildings. In some cases, communities stabilize structures, provide temporary protection, or relocate buildings to prevent demolition. In Florida, one community group mothballed several houses slated for loss, persuaded the owner to donate them, and then transferred some homes to local residents while holding others for future use.

Liverpool, Granby Market looking toward Princess Road
- phoro by Rodhullandemu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the most compelling examples comes from Liverpool, England. Faced with years of demolition and neglect, residents formed an association to care for nearly one hundred vacant terrace houses. They began by boarding up buildings, cleaning streets, planting gardens, and preventing further deterioration.

Over time, they created a community land trust and purchased ten vacant houses. Some homes were sold at prices linked to local wages rather than market rates. Others were renovated through collaboration between architects and residents. In one collapsed structure, the community created an enclosed garden beneath a glazed roof, reflecting the neighbourhood's long tradition of gardening.

What makes this example noteworthy is not simply the restoration of buildings. The project unfolded incrementally over several years and depended on local initiative, persistence, and collective effort. Residents were not passive recipients of outside assistance. They became active participants in reshaping the future of their neighbourhood.

On Liverpool's Cairns Street, residents, housing associations, and the city worked together to help revive a neighbourhood marked by disinvestment and demolition.
Photo - Toxteth, Liverpool. Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

TAKING ACTION

How easy is this process? Hetletvedt points to familiar barriers: financing, regulations, administrative complexity, and negative perceptions that discourage investment in distressed areas. Any one of these can derail a project.

Yet she concludes that access to technical expertise and professional support can help communities overcome those obstacles. That observation echoes a central principle of SafeGrowth. Outside assistance is most effective when it helps residents build their own capacity to improve where they live.

Revitalizing a building can bring people together around a common purpose. The result may be a neighbourhood hub, a gathering place, or simply a visible sign that local residents still believe in their community.

As Hetletvedt writes in her introduction, professionals from outside a neighbourhood can contribute most effectively when they respect and empower residents to determine the future of their own places.

Sound familiar?

 

Returning to Vancouver - projects survive, but the neighbourhood worsens

Vancouver's Hastings Street - the Downtown Eastside, one of
the most challenged neigbourhoods in Canada.
Photo CC Wiki Commons 

by Gregory Saville

This week I returned to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, often described as Canada's largest skid row, to work with members of the SafeGrowth Network and several of the city's Community Policing Centres (CPCs). We were there to prepare local instructors for Canada's first SafeGrowth Livability Academy. 

It was a milestone. Three Vancouver CPCs participated in the training: the Strathcona CPC, the Chinese CPC, and the Aboriginal CPC. Along with their SafeGrowth and CPTED training last year, Vancouver has now become the first city in Canada to move this far along the SafeGrowth pathway.

Yet the visit was also deeply personal for me.

A PERSONAL JOURNEY

More than thirty years ago, my former business partner and I conducted traditional CPTED projects in this same neighbourhood. While preparing for this week, I looked back at some of those projects. To my surprise, many are still holding up. The lighting improvements, design modifications, and site-specific interventions remain visible decades later.

That should be encouraging. Yet I could not escape another conclusion. Those projects improved places, but they did not substantially improve neighbourhood life.

Vancouver's Chinatown is among the most exciting and
fascinating communities in the country

I found myself once again walking through areas adjacent to Vancouver's notorious Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside. Decades have passed since I first co-taught problem-oriented policing to British Columbia police officers. Decades have passed since criminologists, sociologists, urban studies researchers, and community development analysts began studying crime, addiction, homelessness, and social disorder in Downtown Eastside. Entire careers have been built examining the Downtown Eastside. Hundreds of reports have been written. Countless interventions have been launched.

A few crime stats have been declining of late (as they have everywhere), yet the situation remains bleak on most categories. The corridor still accounts for a large portion of the city’s serious assaults and robberies. Mental health calls for police service increased, overdose incidents remain high, and from what I could see, street disorder has displaced and is spreading. And, making matters worse, homelessness has been increasing.

Homeless rates concentrated on Downtown Eastside from
the metro population demographics and annual homeless counts

 

The homeless numbers tell part of the story. In the early 2000s, Vancouver's homeless count was approximately 56 people per 100,000 residents. Today, that figure is approaching 200. Even after accounting for population growth, homelessness has increased dramatically over the past two decades.

WHY DON'T HOTSPOT TACTICS LAST?

For those of us who have spent careers studying crime prevention and community safety, these trends force uncomfortable questions.

Why have decades of hotspot interventions failed to produce lasting change? Why have the various social programs, such as a safe injection site or the many social service agencies here, not prevented the worsening spread of the problem? 

Why have so many individual projects succeeded, such as a recent police crackdown and our prior CPTED work, while the broader neighbourhood ecology continues to struggle?

Why has so much effort yielded so little transformation?

I could see that some of the original CPTED improvements we helped design are still functioning. Yet, standing on Hasting Street today, it felt like our earlier work was all for naught. It brought to mind three principles in SafeGrowth planning: 

• Neighbourhoods are more than collections of hotspots
• Communities are not simply the sum of their crime locations
• A city cannot solve deeply embedded social problems by repeatedly treating symptoms while neglecting the health of the larger social ecosystem.

The Downtown Eastside remains home to thousands of people living
with addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and profound social isolation. 

A NEW THEORY ON COMPLEXITY

Since last year I have been working with new colleague, a talented oncological medical researcher, regarding complex adaptive systems. We are studying the power of these systems, (like the Downtown Eastside), and how they exhibit distributed adaptive behavior near critical thresholds. It now seems possible this may be the reason why street disorder continues to displace and spread in spite of enforcement actions. We have learned how small perturbations can produce disproportionate, scaling-law effects that deteriorate stability. This, in turn, may explain why complex adaptive systems such as tumors or high-crime neighbourhoods resist interventions rather than underlying system conditions.  

In other words, hotspot policing alone cannot tip the neighbourhood far enough on its own. Much more collaboration and a strategic long-term action plan is needed, and that is where the Community Policing Centres and their neighbourhood-based Livability Academy might better address the conditions they face every day.

Walking in and around Hastings Street it was clear; there are too many dysfunctional activities, crime hotspots, crime generators, and too few social controls and social stabilizers to help those who suffer and those who work and live there. There is simply no way to arrest, imprison, or hotspot our way out of this disorder. 

Downtown Eastside has long ago scaled out of control. I left Vancouver today feeling both discouraged and encouraged at the same time.

I was discouraged because the visible suffering remains. The homelessness, addiction, and disorder that have characterized parts of the Downtown Eastside for decades continue unabated despite enormous investments of effort and resources. 

I was encouraged because something wonderful remains. I refer to the dedicated and passionate residents, community workers, business people, and CPC members attending both our SafeGrowth problem-solving training last year and the Livability Academy instructor's course this week. 

Instructors and some students of the recent Vancouver Livability Academy
Instructor Training celebrating their graduation

GOOD NEWS

I am also encouraged by the Vancouver Police Department's continuing support of their Community Policing Centre’s illustrating both persistent and intelligent leadership.

Those CPCs are staffed by committed, highly capable people. They understand the neighbourhood, the relationships on the street, and the kind of inclusion needed for successful problem-solving. I was impressed by their professionalism and organizational skills. They asked difficult questions. They challenged assumptions. Most importantly, they were already thinking about how to engage people and build long-term neighbourhood capacity.

They are the ones who best represent the heart of SafeGrowth. They know their goal is not simply to reduce a statistical crime blip next month or to remove a hotspot next year. They want their neighbourhood stronger, more resilient, and capable of self-help.  

Thirty years ago, I co-taught CPTED and problem-oriented policing in Vancouver. This year, I returned with some SafeGrowth friends to help launch Canada's first Livability Academy. The problems are still here. But so are the people willing to confront them with new skills, a new action plan, and deep connections to the social roots of their community.

After everything I saw this week, I believe the next chapter will not be written by its problems, but by the people working together to solve them.

Neighbourhoods need more than Wi-Fi

 

At the cafe, Les Deux Magots, in Paris, generations of writers, philosophers, and artists shaped culture through conversation long before the digital age

by Larry Leach

In 2026, communication technologies are everywhere. Pen and paper, telephone, email, text messaging, Facebook, X, Bluesky, Discord, Snapchat, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, podcasts, and countless social media platforms allow us to communicate instantly. Yet when I speak with people of all ages, many describe communication today as getting worse. Misunderstandings, jargon, mistrust, isolation, conflict, and social fragmentation seem more common than ever.

This matters because SafeGrowth is built on the idea that safer neighbourhoods depend on communication, participation, and trust between residents. Communities function best when people know one another, share concerns openly, and work together to solve local problems.

FACE TO FACE

Face-to-face interaction remains one of the strongest ways to build those relationships. In person, we observe tone of voice, body language, emotion, and empathy in ways digital communication often cannot fully capture. Online communication can connect us, but it can also amplify misunderstanding, hostility, and social distance. At a time when loneliness and social isolation are increasingly recognized as a public health epidemic, communication skills matter more than ever. 

At the same time, digital communication has become essential to modern community-building. Neighbourhood groups use online platforms to organize meetings, share information, recruit volunteers, and respond quickly to local concerns. Used well, these tools can strengthen participation and collective problem-solving.

The challenge for SafeGrowth is not choosing between digital communication and face-to-face interaction. The challenge is learning how to combine both in ways that strengthen rather than weaken neighbourhoods.

Solitude can restore us. Lonliness can diminish us. The challenge for modern neighbourhoods is learning the difference

THE SITUATION

If face-to-face communication is so important, how do we convey facial expression, tone, humour, and intent through social media? In some cultures, sarcasm or tongue-in-cheek humour is playful. In others, it may appear insulting or aggressive. What one person sees as harmless humour, another may experience as disrespect. They may consider it insulting and try to defend their friend who you never meant to insult.

When companies, politicians, and public speakers study communication, one lesson always appears near the top: know your audience. The same principle applies online. Public speaking training emphasizes that private jokes, insider references, assumptions, or emotionally charged language can easily be misunderstood in public forums.

SafeGrowth has long emphasized that safer neighbourhoods depend on more than physical design alone. Communication, participation, trust, and local problem-solving are equally important. Residents who know one another, share information, and participate in community life are often better able to respond collectively to local concerns before problems escalate.

Digital communication can support that process, but it cannot fully replace the trust-building that comes from direct human interaction in neighbourhoods, public spaces, and local gathering places.

Communication is not simply about technology. It is about people gathering, sharing experiences, and building community together - Denver Art Society, Santa Fe Arts District, Denver.

THE COMMUNICATIONS PLAN

From a SafeGrowth perspective, building community starts with a good communications plan to understand who lives in the neighbourhood and how they communicate. Different cultures, languages, age groups, and life experiences require different approaches.

If a neighbourhood includes multiple languages, communication should occur in those languages. Different age groups may respond to different communication tools and meeting styles. Community-builders should also consider who is most likely to volunteer, what motivates participation, and where those residents are most likely to engage.

Once the medium is chosen, the message matters. People volunteer and participate for many reasons: learning, contributing, meeting others, improving their neighbourhood, sharing experiences, or simply feeling connected to something meaningful. Above all, communication should begin with listening. The goal is not to force agreement or predetermined outcomes, but to ensure all perspectives are heard respectfully. People do not need to agree on every issue, but they must feel included in the process.

An effective communications plan begins with listening, understanding, and choosing communication methods that help residents participate meaningfully in community life.

There is an old marketing adage that that it takes seven impressions to change attitudes. Whether it is seven or more, the message is clear: Strong communities are rarely built through a single conversation. They emerge through a decent communications plan, trust-building, and participation over time.

What works and what is right

 

Street views from New York's Highline Park
"Eyes on the Street", literally

by Mateja Mihinjac

In crime prevention, we often categorise strategies as working or not working simply based on measured changes in crime rates. If crime goes down, the intervention is labelled “evidence-based,” and the conversation moves on.

SafeGrowth, as with all evidence-based methods, measures crime rates. However, SafeGrowth also asks a more difficult and penetrating question: Is it the right thing to do? 

It may sound odd to state that crime prevention should not be judged only by what works. Yet, our experience with decades of crime prevention show that it must also consider who it works for and who it works against.

 

WHEN “WHAT WORKS” COMES AT A COST

Many traditional crime prevention strategies rely on target hardening and security measures: locks, gates, fences, barriers, and surveillance systems. These approaches, now subsumed under First-Generation CPTED, can be effective. They reduce opportunities for crime and are relatively easy to measure. From a narrow perspective, they can work. 

They can also fail due to an unintended consequence. 

For example, they reshape the places where they are applied and trigger the application of “hostile or defensive architecture”, now associated with First-Generation CPTED by some anti-CPTED critics. Says one from the University of Toronto: “Defensive architecture is an outgrowth of a set of design principles known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.” 

Public walkway single seats and preventing homeless sleeping. No one sits. 

High fences and controlled access points can create environments that feel closed, sterile, and exclusionary. 

Subtle deterrents, such as hostile architecture mentioned earlier,
to devices designed to discourage loitering (mosquito devices),
send clear signals about who belongs and who does not. In these cases, safety may be achieved, but often at the expense of equity, inclusion, and social life. 

Public spaces begin to look and function more like private territory and arguments are emerging to halt the process.

Fencing to control access -  keeping the Geese outside the gates

WHERE THINGS GO WRONG 

First-Generation CPTED traditionally focuses on four core principles: territorial reinforcement, natural surveillance, access control, and maintenance. These are powerful tools and, when applied thoughtfully, can improve safety and reduce opportunities for crime.

But that is problematic when CPTED is reduced to these elements alone and applied as a checklist of physical interventions without considering broader social impacts. I’ve written about the problem of such reductionism in one of my previous blogs.


In practice, this can produce environments that are technically safer but socially problematic. 

Measures based on increased control, exclusion, or surveillance can disproportionately affect already marginalised communities. Critics have shown how such approaches can reinforce spatial inequality and exclusion, including forms of racialised access to public space characterised as anti-blackness.


 

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village where Jane Jacobs and community activists prevented destruction from highway expansion in the 1960s. Eyes on the street that care.

Thus, focusing only on measurable outcomes risks overlooking a key question: who bears the burden of those outcomes?

FIXING THE PROBLEM 

The Second- and Third-Generation CPTED are the building blocks of SafeGrowth and they offer a different path. 

Second-Generation CPTED moves beyond physical design to include the social, cultural and ecological dimensions to stabilise neighbourhood conditions. It employs strategies such as social cohesion, community culture, neighbourhood capacity, and connectivity


Third-Generation CPTED expands further, emphasising safety as a result of thriving, healthy and sustainable neighbourhoods. It employs four strategies, including environmental sustainability, social sustainability, public health sustainability, and  economic sustainability


The regular weekend chess tournament in the park.
An age-old activation and cultural strategy

These approaches recognise that safety is not just about reducing crime opportunities. It is about building places where people feel they belong, participate, and take ownership. Instead of asking how do we keep people out, they ask how do we create places where people want to be and where communities themselves contribute to safety?

 

RETHINKING “EVIDENCE”

Part of the challenge in identifying what works lies in how we define evidence.

Target hardening is often favoured because its impacts are immediate and measurable. We may install a fence or reduce access, and crime may drop. The result is clear and quantifiable. 

Yet broader impacts, such as reduced accessibility, loss of public space, increased exclusion, and hostile architecture, are harder to measure. They unfold over time, often after post-intervention evaluation has been completed, and are frequently overlooked.

 

Modern 'homeless encampment' behind fences and locked gates in Denver, Colorado.
Exclusion, hostile architecture, reduced access. This is not the answer.

Some more comprehensive evaluation frameworks, such as those developed by the European Crime Prevention Network, have begun to move beyond simple crime reduction by examining context, process, and broader outcomes like fear of crime.


However, they still tend to prioritise what is measurable over what is equitable. The question of who benefits and who is excluded remains insufficiently addressed in such evaluations. 

In SafeGrowth, we are encouraging expansion in what counts as evidence. This means moving beyond crime reduction and considering inclusivity of space and strength of community ties. It also includes the overall quality of life in the neighbourhood.

 

LOOKING AHEAD

There are many strategies that have been shown to both reduce crime and support equity and community wellbeing. Some are well established. Others are still emerging.

We all want safer places, and we also want better places for everyone. The real task is to reconcile what works with what is right and to recognise that lasting safety depends on both.

Two Kansas Citys - Design, community, and crime

 

Downtown skyline of Kansas City, Missouri - day and night. Two different cities.
How you look determines what you see.

 

 by Greg Saville

This week we spent time in Kansas City. I watched this city not as a tourist, but as a field observer. One afternoon I photographed the downtown under a calm blue sky. It was interesting, not remarkable. That evening it stood silhouetted by a burning orange sunset. The sky had changed. The city had not. Depending on how you look, you see two different cities. 

When you look at Kansas City and crime research, what do you see? A decades-old program for neighborhood diagnosis called CityScope, a city-wide project on gun violence, a study on alcohol outlets, and another on property values. But overall, Kansas City is most notable for a famous 1974 study on police patrol and more recent crime and mapping research on “Risk Terrain Modelling” (a tool for police crime analysts). 

Apparently, at least since the 1970s, Kansas City is a police research laboratory, not a neighborhood research laboratory. When it comes to social ecology and neighborhood crime prevention, the pickings are slim.

I was interested in the people living in neighborhoods. That too is where crime can be addressed, perhaps not with formal police methods. Social ecology studies show how crime prevention can happen in more informal, and powerful, ways. A walk in two Kansas City neighborhoods was revealing. 

South of Midtown is the Country Club Plaza and Brookside neighborhoods. These are analytical approximations of the three neighborhoods. There are numerous ways to classify neighborhoods, in this case established urban indicators of land use, movement patterns, and activity. 

 

A LOOK AT BROOKSIDE

Brookside is a 1900-1930 streetcar community where clusters of shops and stores lined the sides of the streetcar routes. Brookside has a mixture of architectural styles, with front porches, short setbacks, and a continuous tree canopy overhead (a Third Generation CPTED concept called biophillia).

Brookside neighborhood. A commercial main drag surrounded by residential
 - the streetcar city 

Residences and apartments radiated in grid streets perpendicular to the main street. It is an comfortable neighborhood to stroll with shopping, coffee shops and parks nearby. History describes how design features here evolved organically, with different builders over decades and families rehabbing to their own style. 

The short front yards and gardens not only brought people outside to interact; they helped people get to know familiar faces. 

Straight and angled parking, seating on the sidewalk, planters, different architecture

The eyes here did not simply see the street. They loved their neighborhood (said locals). That did not just ensure eyes on those streets, it ensured eyes that cared about their neighbors. As a result life here unfolds in predictable ways, a slow rhythm that enhances both the sense of community, and the historical memories of community from one generation to the next. 

A LOOK AT COUNTRY CLUB PLAZA

Just north of Brookside was Country Club Plaza (The Plaza). Here, activity and design are deliberate. It was built in 1922 using Spanish Revival architectural styles including apartments, retail, entertainment, eateries, and offices. 

Country Club Plaza neighborhood, built in 1922, has Baroque and Moorish
Revial Architecture, fountains, murals, and Spanish style art

The Plaza is privately-governed, and though it has residential and apartment living, it is often termed the first outdoor shopping plaza in the country. 

It was a beautiful neighborhood with fountains and murals. This managed economic ecosystem was an architectural showpiece and a place where security is controlled. 

I wondered: these are two different kinds of neighborhoods so how did The Plaza and Brookside look from the perspective of our Third Generation CPTED Neighborhood Livability Heirarchy? 

Country Club Plaza, a 15-block area, has a long, and complex, story in urban planning history

Both places work, yet for different reasons. Brookside might be slightly closer to the advanced level on the Livability Hierarchy. Interestingly, there was one category where they differed most: Crime! 

 

CRIME IN EACH NEIGHBORHOOD 

Crime is not simply a function of environmental opportunity. It is a function of how places regulate that opportunity over time. That becomes clear when comparing Brookside and the Country Club Plaza using available crime data. Any clean comparison requires assembling patterns from multiple sources, an imperfect solution but good enough for a quick look. 

Country Club Plaza crime reports, Jan-April 2026.

Brookside crime reports, Jan-Apri 2026

Even with data limitations, the pattern is clear. Brookside’s residential fabric shows lower and more stable incident levels, while The Plaza carries greater and more visible crime pressure. That difference is reinforced by a spike in crime incidents since last year at The Plaza. Management brought in increased private security measures such as lighting, CCTV, and armed security. 

In practical terms, Brookside operates as a self-regulating neighborhood system with continuity of residents and routine use. The Plaza, by contrast, is a high-activity destination that depends on formal control to manage the risks it attracts. Looking at it this way, strong social continuity regulates opportunity more effectively than design and management alone.

 

FLAWS IN CPTED TRADITIONALISM 

None of this suggests either neighborhood is unpleasant. Likely, both sit in the moderate range of the Livability Hierarchy, though Brookside appears stronger.

None of this suggests crime prevention absent. In Kansas City, police and security agencies conduct CPTED surveys, and violence prevention groups promote CPTED toolkits. Unfortunately, these approaches remain rooted in traditional 1st Generation CPTED and offer little more than surface attention to social activity and connection. The kind of social ecology seen in places like Brookside demands far more. It emerges through daily life and the conditions that reinforce it over time.

As Oscar Newman and Jane Jacobs both argued, safety does not arise simply from physical features like walkability or shared amenities. Those matter, however without understanding how community life forms and sustains itself, they are not enough. Adding design features without that understanding does little to create lasting safety.

HOW YOU LOOK AT SAFETY MATTERS

That is why 2nd Generation CPTED and SafeGrowth focus on community development. It is not enough to only rely on checklists of surveillance, access control, maintenance, and territorial reinforcement. This is the flaw of CPTED traditionalism. Real safety requires building the social conditions that sustain it.

Brookside did not become safe by defining property boundaries, installing lights, or eliminating blind corners. It evolved into a safe place through the visibility of vibrant daily life and the development of pro-social activity built into the work and play of residents. Kansas City shows this gap plainly: between the appearance of safety, and the lived reality that sustains it. 

From fear to familiar - Reclaiming Oppenheimer Park through SafeGrowth

Source: Google Earth imagery, Oppenheimer Park, Vancouver, Canada.
Screen capture by G. Saville

Guest blog – Ekin Buran & Dixon Ng

Ekin Buran is Programs Manager at the Strathcona Community Policing Centre and Dixon Ng is Victim Services Worker at the Chinese Community Policing Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. They were two of five members of a SafeGrowth team  from a training program in Vancouver last year. Both have worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for over three years, focusing on community safety and crime prevention. Through their project work, they apply SafeGrowth strategies to the community they serve and care about. This story describes one of their projects.

***

Oppenheimer Park sits on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples in Vancouver’s historic Japantown. The baseball field where the Vancouver Asahi once played is still active today. The Asahi were a Japanese Canadian baseball team based in the Powell Street area from 1914 to 1941 and became a symbol of perseverance and community pride during a period of widespread discrimination. Totem poles, cherry blossom trees, and cedar trees remain part of the landscape, reflecting both Indigenous and Japanese Canadian history.

Yet despite its deep history and ongoing community life, Oppenheimer Park is often discussed mainly in terms of safety, especially by those less familiar with the space. Media coverage and public discussions frequently focus on encampments, drug use, and police presence, shaping how the park is perceived before people ever visit it.

Our goal was to begin a planning process that could change that perception by building on the park’s existing strengths. Over the past year, following a multi-month SafeGrowth training workshop organized through the Strathcona Community Safety Association, our team began applying the SafeGrowth approach in and around the park.

Walkways in the park on a quiet day

Recognizing that meaningful crime prevention and safety programming is a long-term effort built on collaboration and trust, we began by focusing on relationships. Using the SafeGrowth approach and principles from Third Generation CPTED, we identified two initial goals: 1) to strengthen partnerships among organizations already working in the neighbourhood; 2) to engage more residents by helping them become familiar with the park and its assets.

LEARNING FROM THE PARK 

Our team of five works across four organizations in the neighbourhood, and at least one of us is in and around the park almost every day. We walk through it, meet people there, and park nearby, which gives us a close view of how important this space is to the people who use it.

Our research included observing park activity, conducting safety audits and CPTED assessments, and interviewing park users, nearby residents, and local organizations. Our guiding question was simple: how might safety grow from the relationships, strengths, and sense of belonging that already exist in the park?

We found strong appreciation for the park, clear interest in greater community use, and the Fieldhouse acting as an important anchor for positive activity. We also observed that fear of serious violence appeared stronger than reported incidents, with most calls involving property-related offences.

A survey commissioned by the Vancouver Police Department found that 74% of respondents were concerned about crime in Downtown Vancouver, and more than one-third said those concerns led them to avoid neighbourhoods such as the Downtown Eastside, which includes the Oppenheimer Park area. 

Some data was available through a survey commissioned by the Vancouver Police

Our research uncovered that:

• There is a strong appreciation for the park as a place to rest, connect, and spend time outdoors

• Many people expressed care for the park and a desire to see more neighbours enjoying it

• The Fieldhouse is one of the park’s greatest strengths, providing coffee, workshops, and an indoor gathering space that anchors positive activity

• Fear associated with violent crime was not proportionate to actual risk according to the data which revealed most incidents involving property offences rather than serious violence.

INITIAL COMMUNITY-BUILDING STEPS

Strengthening Local Partnerships

To achieve this goal, we began introducing ourselves to surrounding businesses, community groups, housing providers, daycare centres, and the Oppenheimer Fieldhouse. We wanted to learn more about organizations already active in the neighbourhood and explore ways to collaborate and strengthen connections between groups that do not always interact.

These early conversations helped build trust and created a foundation for joint activities in the park.

Summer Playground Event

In partnership with the Fieldhouse and a local daycare centre, we co-hosted a Summer Playground Event in 2025 that brought more than fifty families into the park. Following this event, another daycare approached us about hosting a similar activity, which is now planned for summer 2026.

Last year's summer playground event to activate the park.
Another is planned for this summer. 

Neighbourhood Walking Club

We organized group walks in and around Oppenheimer Park to encourage participants to spend time in the space, learn about its history, and connect with one another. During these walks, residents shared that the park felt less intimidating than they had previously believed. Spending time in the park together helped participants feel more comfortable and begin to see the space as more welcoming.

Walking club around the park - building familiarity and dispelling fears 

Community Workshops and Gatherings

We began participating in the Fieldhouse’s monthly community gatherings and co-leading workshops, including emergency preparedness sessions, fraud awareness workshops, seasonal events, and informal coffee chats. These activities created opportunities for community members to gather, meet their neighbours, and socialize in a familiar setting.

A number of Fieldhouse programs helped provide crime prevention
education and pro-social activities 

LOOKING AHEAD 

Early results are promising. Seniors already using the park expressed interest in joining future walks. Dozens of neighbourhood families attended park events, and additional daycare providers have requested similar activities. Residents are becoming more comfortable using the park for everyday visits, increasing casual use and natural surveillance. The Fieldhouse continues to grow as a focal point for pro-social activity and community interaction.

These early steps reflect a broader SafeGrowth principle: Safety grows when familiar faces, shared activities, and local leadership become part of everyday life.

Our long-term goal is to sustain this work by increasing resident leadership and involvement. Lasting change in Oppenheimer Park will not come from one event or one project, but from continued presence, relationship-building, and shared responsibility. Oppenheimer Park is gradually evolving into a more connected and welcoming community space shaped by the people who use it every day.