Business districts and crime?

Beautiful patterns tell us how...not why

"When imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning." Albert Camus  - 1960

Last blog discussed a study by US Forest Service researchers showing how tree canopy in Baltimore cut urban crime by 12%. I just read a 2010 study commissioned by the Center for Disease Control showing how business improvement districts cut violent crime by the same amount in Los Angeles.

So we cut crime 24% by planting tree canopies in a business improvement district (BID)?

Sounds silly. That's because both studies are correlational - studies that show a pattern between two things, not a cause. We don't know why canopies or BIDs work, only that they seem to have impact.

Dozens of correlational studies  appear each year. Like research showing underarm deodorant causes cancer. Or toothpaste. Or cell phones. Or smoking which, it turns out, is true. What to do?

There is a mantra in science: correlation-is-not-causation. Because there is a relationship doesn't mean you can infer cause. Tree canopy and BIDs may coincide with crime declines. That doesn't mean they cause them.

Unfortunately neither can we dismiss correlation studies. Doing so may result in dismissing a good cause assertion. The International Agency for Research on Cancer lists criteria for testing correlational studies - a plausible mechanism between cause and effect, a singular relationship between before/after effects, a reasonable time between the cause/effect, and so on. 

Satisfying these criteria helps mitigate the correlation-is-not-causation dilemma. 

CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSE

I think what correlational studies need is simple - a plausible theory explaining why. That way we'll know if a study shows a correlational relationship we are seeing a shuffle not a full step. 

Sometimes I wonder if theory-building is a dead language. It shouldn't be! That's where research creativity and imagination really show up (not in clever data manipulation or new statistical methods). 

There are some great publications that provide imaginative theory, for example Gilligen's Preventing Violence and Kennedy's Don't Shoot".

It would be wonderful to produce a 24% cut in crime by planting tall trees with great canopy in a business improvement district. It would be a shame if they don't and we have no idea why.

Avoiding a Wire-esque nightmare - Part 1

Bob Castle's "The Wire" diagram from Creative Commons

David Kennedy’s book Don't Shout for eradicating gang violence describes only the first step. It skims root causes that create gangs in the first place. There is more - the neighborhood and the street and the housing where gangs breed.

A few years ago an HBO crime drama, The Wire, portrayed contemporary gang life and a cultural war against the urban underclass. Striking to me was the similarity between gang ghettoes in The Wire and the actual housing projects we work in SafeGrowth programs. We call them "gang breeders" because that is exactly what such nightmarish places create.

Five years after The Wire ended we are deep in recession and housing is undergoing a transformative tsunami. Foreclosed houses in outer urban rings are leaving swaths of ghost suburbs. Inner urban rings are densifying into a new kind of suburb where demands for multi-family housing and apartment rentals are exploding.

A WIRE-ESQUE FUTURE?

Are Wire-esque nightmares in our future? Suburban ghettoes? A new kind of vertical poverty, growing in cities like LA, Chicago, Toronto and New York?

How can we build denser, environmentally friendly housing? How can we satisfy the needs of the future and make livable and safe habitat?

Intentional communities provide a proven answer. One successful version is co-housing. I've studied co-housing for 20 years and visited dozens in different countries. I've spent time with architect Jan Gudmand-Hoyer who pioneered the idea in the 1960s.

In North America co-housing has been around for a few decades. There are about a hundred in the US and Canada. In Oregon, Washington and British Columbia alone there are 24 projects, a third of which have been running for over 15 years.

McCamant and Durrett write about co-housing. Their recent book Creating Cohousing describes it.

Next blog: How can we make this a reality?

Don't Shoot - Ending inner city violence

Professor David Kennedy [Center for American Progress photo]

Street drug dealing and gang violence isn't the only neighborhood crime problem. But it's at the top of the list.

I met David Kennedy a few years ago and liked him immediately. He's a professor at New York's John Jay College. He has no PhD or MA, yet today he is a leading voice in crime prevention policy. When he speaks about drug dealers and gang violence, people listen. I certainly do. Every time I've seen him he strikes me as the smartest guy in the room.

The New Yorker says he's onto something. Newsweek magazine says he is the only person "who has ever come up with a consistently viable and cost-effective strategy for helping the inner city" drug and gang problems.

If you don't know David's work on Boston's Cease Fire anti-gang project or the High Point, NC, drug dealer project, then you need to get caught up. No better way than to read his latest book -Don't Shoot.

I haven't read it yet but David is one of the few people whose book I can recommend before I have.

Malcolm Gladwell, of Tipping Point fame, says: "Don't Shoot will do for the fight against violence what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environmental movement a generation ago".

When someone like Gladwell says that, it's time to pay attention.