How to Design Safer Public Housing
December 15, 2018 6:58 PM   Subscribe

Most low-income housing isn't a magnet for crime. Why do we think it is? Scenes like the one Mr. Mata describes also form the prevailing media image of low-income housing developments. But a new study of San Antonio suggests that, despite its fearsome reputation, most low-income housing isn’t dangerous at all, either to residents or neighbors who live nearby. The great majority of crime in the city’s projects is concentrated in just a few high-risk developments.

It turns out that low-income housing developments that are “hot spots” for crime tend to share certain characteristics. Some are large-scale, structural factors, like concentrated disadvantage and residential instability in the properties’ surrounding neighborhoods. But others are smaller-scale—and more easily fixable—matters of place, like a lack of basic security and design features.
posted by MovableBookLady (30 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Are the "carceral features" and strong "neighborhood" organizations really compatible? It seems like the one is virtually designed to stamp out the spirit of the latter.
posted by praemunire at 8:19 PM on December 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


I have to say, all the panopticon style stuff always makes me uncomfortable. Why is the focus on making sure we can all be seen and observed by everyone at all times? I don't want to be scrutinised by my neighbours. I don't think it's their place to police my behaviour, and when I'm forced to be visible constantly, in buildings with glass walls, etc, I resent it. The horrible sensation of talking outside your door to a friend for a moment, and realising 200 people could be watching you.

"there’s 20 to 30 people congregating, drinking, selling drugs, prostitution" ah yes, the crimes that, to a much greater extent than now, shouldn't even be crimes.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 8:36 PM on December 15, 2018 [16 favorites]


Isolated spots in cities are magnets for crime unless they are heavily secured. Stairwells and elevators in projects--the most enclosed and little-visible zones of the buildings--are notorious for their danger. (Speaking very generally, you can tell a suburbanite from a city-dweller because the suburbanite feels unsafe on a street crowded with poor people, whereas a city-dweller feels unsafe on a street with little traffic. I have a permanent sense of unease visiting friends in perfectly safe suburban areas because the streets feel so deserted and thus perilous.) But couldn't we try to implement some of these methods in dignity-promoting manners? I bet a doorman in every lobby and keyfobs for everyone would go a long way.
posted by praemunire at 8:52 PM on December 15, 2018 [37 favorites]


Jane Jacobs wrote the book on this way back in 1961 - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
posted by Lanark at 1:46 AM on December 16, 2018 [10 favorites]


Here's a place where white people need to check our privilege. We have built a world where we can have privacy, anonymity, and unaccountability. It's a very comfortable place for many of us, and legitimately soothing for introverts like me. But it's not the kind of thing healthy societies build. If we want justice and sustainability, we have to engage with our neighbors in networks of mutual accountability. Which I really hate. I'd rather be left alone.

And certainly when a group with power tries to impose their values on a group with less power that can lead to other problems (small towns where everybody knows everybody's business have a bad reputation). But when we (and again, I mainly mean middle-and-upper-class white people here) decided that needing to know our neighbors was not a thing anymore, I think we really broke something crucial.
posted by rikschell at 5:25 AM on December 16, 2018 [21 favorites]


Most low-income housing isn't a magnet for crime. Why do we think it is?

It's because generations of cynical, amoral politicians have used fear-based rhetoric to divide the citizenry into factions so that they can be more easily manipulated and exploited, right? That's what it is.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:25 AM on December 16, 2018 [22 favorites]


It is nice to see a little bit more conversation out there about how design affects behavior, and how 'crime' is a behavioral outcome that's made more likely by a set of manageable preconditions.

But I wish that this article dug a little bit more into some of the preconditions of the, like, 'dark stairwell as a place to do crimes' phenomenon - a legacy of racism, historical disinvestment, underfunded schools, few employment opportunities, and the resultant intergenerational poverty and complex health outcomes are some of the really important determinants of the type of public/street crime behavior the article describes.
posted by entropone at 5:34 AM on December 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


Oh, also a lazy and sensationalist news media that will take any opportunity to stoke fears in exchange for ratings.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:36 AM on December 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


My brief encounters with public housing led to a half-baked idea which I wonder if those with more knowledge or experience can weigh in on: Administrators at the more desirable public-housing sites can be pickier about their tenants, and they try to avoid picking tenants with criminal histories. As a result, those with criminal histories end up concentrated at the least desirable, least well-managed sites.

Is there anything to that idea?
posted by clawsoon at 6:47 AM on December 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


there’s 20 to 30 people congregating, drinking, selling drugs, prostitution

I’ve read several articles about the hard-partying aspects of Silicon Valley that involve all these things, and yet when it happens in the context of people who work at, say, Facebook, it’s presented as a side effect of people who are Doing Great Things. Of course they need booze, drugs and hookers, they work really hard! With a sidebar about misogyny and exploitation that gets a shrug, because who can do anything to stop that?

But then put it in context of people who don’t make much money and whose jobs aren’t glamorous on paper, and suddenly it’s “crime”.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:54 AM on December 16, 2018 [33 favorites]


A lot of the things talked about in the article as the new, safer way to design public housing are literally what public housing here in the UK used from the 1960s onwards. We're now taking the complete opposite approach - the new London standard for housing includes emphasis on "defensible space" - ie enclosed, lockable stairwells for a limited number of flats.
posted by leo_r at 7:05 AM on December 16, 2018 [5 favorites]


there’s 20 to 30 people congregating, drinking, selling drugs, prostitution

Meanwhile, upscale buildings have roof decks, pools and other areas where residents are encouraged to congregate and permitted to drink.
posted by smelendez at 7:14 AM on December 16, 2018 [16 favorites]


This is beside the point, but every place I ever saw that had a deck or pool, specifically forbade glass bottles and/or alcoholic beverages near same. Including the community I live in now, which is pretty squarely wage-earning median income. I think there’s a legal liability issue around allowing alcohol in community areas (probably dependent on state law/city ordinance).

Maybe it’s allowed in communities for the genuinely wealthy, but then if you’re genuinely wealthy, you probably have your own pool and deck, and are not dependent on sharing one with the community.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:59 AM on December 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


I imagine this is also geography-dependent, since having a pool is considered something of a luxury item here in the Bold North, whereas pools are ubiquitous in, say, Florida.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:02 AM on December 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


every place I ever saw that had a deck or pool, specifically forbade glass bottles and/or alcoholic beverages near same.
It depends on the kind of atmosphere they’re cultivating but it’s not unusual to allow alcohol as long as it’s not in glass containers — and not just in the hip places targeting affluent 20-somethings, either: when my father-in-law was looking, this seemed to be common in 55+ complexes in Florida which were solidly middle class.
posted by adamsc at 8:05 AM on December 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


Broken glass in a pool is no fun. Doesn't matter what your socioeconomic status is.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:06 AM on December 16, 2018 [12 favorites]


Good article!

Interestingly I didn't personally have a connection in my head between public housing and what I would consider serious crime. Certainly I associated public housing with a higher volume of calls for service (i.e. 911 calls) but at least in my city there's not really a connection between our public housing and crime like shootings and robbery. Which, having read the article, makes a decent amount of sense - the public housing in my city all has what I think is probably the most important element, controlled entry. A decent number of locations have night security guards at a front desk or equivalent. Those guards don't really take direct action, but people are reluctant to do drug deals or robberies in direct view of someone who's likely to call 911.

What I have seen in my own experience is that crime is very much attached to particular people. A couple years ago we had a particular guy living in public housing in my precinct and as long as we was there we had gunfights and shootings related to him on a weekly basis. He was eventually kicked out but he just moved elsewhere in the city. I'm now working as a detective and one of my current cases is a shooting related to him.
Meanwhile, upscale buildings have roof decks, pools and other areas where residents are encouraged to congregate and permitted to drink.
Just to respond to the general objection to this sentence that this thread has: in parts of cities where gang violence is common, it's not the drinking itself that's the problem, it's the shootings and stabbings that happen related to it. Every year in my city we have a few kids hit in the crossfire. I'm working a case right now where a completely innocent kid got hit. His sister ran back through the gunfire to pull him out of the street in a display of heroism and bravery that should never be required of a teenage girl in a city in the US. I've been watching security video from numerous businesses and angles capturing about an hour before the shooting to a half hour after. The particular corner where the shooting occurred is territory claimed by one faction and they're always there, dealing, drinking, etc. You can watch the hand to hands on video right up to the point where the two shooters sneak up on foot from around a corner and start just wildly blasting away. The case I'm working is by no means the only shooting related to the corner activity this month, just the worst.

I guess kind of the general approach of the well-meaning outsider to articles like this is "but that seems carceral!" or "but that seems like a panopticon!" And sure, it might. But you can't just think of how the 99% of residents that are good people will interact with the space. You also have to think "how will the bad actors interact with this space and how will that affect my other residents?" If the tradeoff is "the entryway is a little bit offputting but my kid hasn't been shot," that's worth it. And that's even for stuff that's not serious. If you're in a poor area and anyone can get inside the building and hang out somewhere they can't be seen, that area turns into a bathroom. Just because you're living in public housing doesn't mean you or your kids should have to walk through feces and urine to do your laundry or go to school.

Bigger picture views of things like "how do we help create communities where people aren't shooting each other over facebook beef" are important, but you also have to keep immediate practical concerns in mind.
posted by firebrick at 8:12 AM on December 16, 2018 [24 favorites]


We just had an incident where a MAGA-hat pulled a gun on the kids in line in front of him at McDonalds, because they were Somali. Nobody was shot. The McDonalds employees naturally kicked out...the kids. For being a disturbance.

And then there are the shooters who are economically stable, even wealthy, who nonetheless feel justified in believing that they can respond to any perceived infraction with lethal force.

How do we create communities where people are so divorced from social mores that they feel comfortable just murdering someone? Good question. It seems like a lot of people take different roads to get there, but arrive at the same mental state that makes them believe they’re allowed to do things like this. When it’s a MAGA-hat, we can speculate that it’s created by immersion in an environment with a lot of violent rhetoric, demonizing “the other” as subhuman, and portraying a situation as “it’s up to you to defend your way of life because you’re under attack from all sides” in the form of Fox News, but clearly that’s not the only avenue to receive that message. And immersion in the idea that men must respond to any challenge with violence.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:35 AM on December 16, 2018 [9 favorites]


Seeing as how women drink plenty of alcohol, and yet women are not pulling guns on people. Even though, in this country, women are literally taught that if you’re going to drink and socialize around alcohol, you should carry a weapon. Yet overwhelmingly, women are not initiating violent encounters. So it’s not the booze.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:47 AM on December 16, 2018 [13 favorites]


But you can't just think of how the 99% of residents that are good people will interact with the space. You also have to think "how will the bad actors interact with this space and how will that affect my other residents?" If the tradeoff is "the entryway is a little bit offputting but my kid hasn't been shot," that's worth it.

Interestingly, the article first talked about panopticon-type stuff but then talked about a preferable alternative being a bunch of much more wholistic and beneficial design approaches. These first provide a tangible QOL benefit outside of just the behavior they prevent. Implementing the first kind of "solutions" against the wishes of the host communities, and without regard for their wishes, because in your opinion it's worth the cost-benefit isn't a good approach for obvious reasons. Cooperation doesn't start with dictating the terms.

I agree that there's something to be said about "immediate practical concerns" - as much as progressive people tend toward "why do we consider this petty stuff crime?" there are very valid neighborhood concerns from people who don't want street level drinking or sex work and sometimes-associated (not necessarily inherent) misbehavior between their home and their kids' preschool.

But clearly an emphasis on "immediate practical concerns" has often shown itself to be an impediment to any real long term benefits. Exhibit A, the prison industrial complex. You stop thinking about how the 99% of people interact with the intervention that you're talking about and all of a sudden the intervention treats everybody like the 1% it's actually targeting.
posted by entropone at 9:25 AM on December 16, 2018 [8 favorites]


I do live in public housing for the elderly and disabled. We had some bad actors in our building. At times it was a mental health issue. At other times it was a genuinely bad person. The social side of life here has gotten difficult. Part of why it got that way has it’s roots in the last election. The immediate next door neighbor of Mr. R is a rabid Domionist MAGA person. This person has a serious and rare condition. The former husband of this person chose to Facebook stalk me and she has argued with me on Facebook as well. I of course unfriended her. She turns people into her little spies. She turned Mr. Roquet’s last male friend here into one of her little spies and it’s a dirty shame. I cannot understand poor people who are Trump die-hards. Me and Mr. Roquette used to cook the turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mr. Roquette’s turkey is unbelievably delicious. It also is always all the way cooked. He learned how to do this while working for Disneyland. A very high - end chef taught him. We BOTH have experience cooking for groups. We both know how to avoid nasty surprises like E. coli and salmonella.
Basically this is not something this lady and her new best friend are any good at. The manager here orders HUGE turkeys. We thought about going to Thanksgiving to make nice but the cooking did not start until 9:00 am for ‘dinner’ at 12 noon. So we had other places to be.
We will NEVER socialize with these people. The manager is good at management. The building is
in excellent repair. We don’t have actual crime but I wish there was someplace else to live..

The manager has a heart but the stress of runnning this place has made her very abrasive. Also I feel she was manipulated by the MAGA faction here. There’s lots of people who do not attend ANY functions here anymore because of that. Mr. Roquette and I are so over some of the people here. Yet if that horrid neighbor lost kin we’d slip a sympathy card under her door.
Just due diligence does keep problematic people out of a building. There’s nothing management can do if someone has bad associates who come over, except ban them if they become real pests.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 11:18 AM on December 16, 2018


there’s 20 to 30 people congregating, drinking, selling drugs, prostitution

Having lived in Wicker Park, Chicago in the bad old days, I can say from experience that public spaces built and intended for respectable purposes get used for respectable purposes, and public spaces that are abandoned by the community get used for other purposes.

When it comes to low income housing, the biggest probelm that I recall were lots that were abandoned altogether. THe next biggest problem was parking lots. Nobody cherishes a parking lot. Nobody helps maintain a parking. And when hardly anybody in a project uses a parking lot (poor people - fewer cars), and the few who do are heavily comprised of people who got their cars with money obtained off the books, well, you can guess what would happen.
posted by ocschwar at 11:39 AM on December 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


We have built a world where we can have privacy, anonymity, and unaccountability. It's a very comfortable place for many of us, and legitimately soothing for introverts like me. But it's not the kind of thing healthy societies build

Most people (other than libertarians or the conspiratological Right) would consider Sweden to be a reasonably healthy society, though the social system there is specifically geared for making individuals independent from each other.
posted by acb at 2:58 PM on December 16, 2018


It's pretty weird to start with "most low-income housing isn’t dangerous at all, either to residents or neighbors who live nearby," and then follow it up with a long article advocating draconian measures to fight crime in public housing.

It seems like, "thus, crime isn't really the problem. Let's talk about media representation and the way laws and local governments make public housing work less well than it should. . . " would be the natural way to follow the first few paragraphs.
posted by eotvos at 11:26 AM on December 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


It does mention that bars and locks aren't the only approaches: “[M]ost policies that aim to reduce crime focus on punishing people rather than improving places,” Klinenberg writes. “We invest little in housing and neighborhood amenities like libraries, senior centers, and community gardens, which draw people into the public realm and put more eyes on the street.”

Whether or not it'd be reasonable to stock low-income housing with libraries and gardens - poor and desperate people are often not careful with either - building space for them into the project would encourage people to develop those interests, to have a way to interact with neighbors and improve their community.

The article at least touches on the problems of crime not being caused by "evil bad people":
things like window bars and camera surveillance are designed to remediate crime problems that a whole range of bad planning practices, from residential segregation to systematic disinvestment from the urban core, contributed to in the first place. Those problems are inseparable from concentrated disadvantage and residential instability.
It doesn't go into detail about systemic racism and histories of oppression, but it does mention that "build better projects" is not going to solve the problems on its own.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:59 PM on December 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


It's pretty weird to start with "most low-income housing isn’t dangerous at all, either to residents or neighbors who live nearby," and then follow it up with a long article advocating draconian measures to fight crime in public housing.
..?

Entry fobs, courtyards, lighting, staffed front desks, and bay windows are draconian measures?

Didn't the example pictures of well-designed public housing look like pretty decent places to live?
posted by firebrick at 8:30 PM on December 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Whether or not it'd be reasonable to stock low-income housing with libraries and gardens - poor and desperate people are often not careful with either -

What?
I...
I don't know where to start with this.
posted by entropone at 9:29 AM on December 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Entry fobs, courtyards, lighting, staffed front desks, and bay windows are draconian measures?
Definitely an exaggeration, and I apologize for it. But, I'm also very glad I don't live in a building that has "strongly enforced visitor policies." (Or, more than a couple of very specifically placed surveillance cameras, or bars on windows. . . but, I'll agree there are contexts where residents might very well want those things.)
posted by eotvos at 5:10 PM on December 18, 2018


>Whether or not it'd be reasonable to stock low-income housing with libraries and gardens - poor and desperate people are often not careful with either -

>What?
I...
I don't know where to start with this.


I decided to start with, "Blaming poor people for the systematic, multigenerational disinvestment in their lives, neighborhoods, and societies is morally bankrupt."
posted by entropone at 6:03 AM on December 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


It's like the Marshmallow Test. If, in every life event, you have been taught that the system will cheat you, it's only rational to grab the damn marshmallow here and now.
posted by acb at 3:24 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


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