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.

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?