Busy Streets Theory: The Effects of Community‐engaged Greening on Violence

Abstract

Lack of maintenance on vacant neighborhood lots is associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress for nearby residents. Overgrown grasses and dense brush provide hiding spots for criminals and space to conduct illicit activities. This study builds upon previous research by investigating greening programs that engage community members to conduct routine maintenance on vacant lots within their neighborhoods. The Clean & Green program is a community-based solution that facilitates resident-driven routine maintenance of vacant lots in a midsized, Midwestern city. We use mixed effects regression to compare assault and violent crime counts on streets where vacant lot(s) are maintained by community members (N = 216) versus streets where vacant lots were left alone (N = 446) over a 5-year timeframe (2009-2013). Street segments with vacant lots maintained through the Clean & Green program had nearly 40% fewer assaults and violent crimes than street segments with vacant, abandoned lots, which held across 4 years with a large sample and efforts to test counterfactual explanations. Community-engaged greening programs may not only provide a solution to vacant lot maintenance, but also work as a crime prevention or reduction strategy. Engaging the community to maintain vacant lots in their neighborhood reduces costs and may increase the sustainability of the program.

The Impact of Green Space on Violent Crime in Urban Environments: An Evidence Synthesis

“…Included in this group is a series of pre-post studies by Branas et al in which researchers "cleaned and greened" a series of lots over several years in Philadelphia, PA, resulting in decreased incidence of gun violence [11,34,40]. Heinze et al [52], Kondo et al [53], and Sadler et al [54] also reported similar results from vacant lot greening interventions. The overall positive effects of blighted lot remediation (compared to the mixed results from parks) may also be attributed to CPTED and defensible space theories, such that the removal of abandoned buildings and overgrown brush reduces the amount of shelter and improves visual guardianship of an area.…”

Firearm purchasing during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in households with teens: a national study

“…Extending these findings, parents with high levels of perceived violence exposure who purchase a firearm may be more likely to store firearms in an accessible manner that increases risk for teen firearm injury, but we have yet to assess the relationship between violence exposure and firearm purchasing among parents in the general population. If violence exposure is correlated with firearm purchasing among parents during this time, efforts to reduce violence exposure, including both community-level (Branas et al, 2018;Heinze et al, 2018) and individual-level violence prevention interventions (Carter et al, 2016;Walton et al, 2010), may encourage parents to store purchased firearms in a less accessible manner (i.e., unloaded and/or locked) or reduce firearm purchasing altogether.…”

Community-driven disorder reduction: Crime prevention through a clean and green initiative in a legacy city

“…Crime remained higher in places with little greening or where implementation of C&G was absent. More recently, Heinze and colleagues (2018) found that street segments in the city of Flint that maintained vacant lots by using greening tactics experienced a reduction in violent assaults.…”

“…Analyses use point level data for all Part 1 violent and property crimes reported to the Flint Police Department, and greening efforts compiled by the Genesee County Land Bank Authority (GCLBA) from 2005 to 2014. This study builds on earlier work on the C&G programme in Flint – which considered the perceived effect among city residents of the programme on crime (Sadler and Pruett, 2015), the relationship between greening and assaults (Heinze et al, 2018) and the spatial colocation of crime and greening hot spots (Sadler et al, 2017). In so doing, this is one of the first studies to examine temporal trends in violent and property crimes for a prolonged period of time (i.e.…”