No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Prove It! #2: Alleys Increase Crime

Jul 16

2007

Last week, in a comment on a comment on a post, I mentioned that alleys lead to increased crime. So naturally, someone who is Google-challenged asked me to prove it. It turns out there is a lot of evidence that alleys contribute to crime by providing quiet places where criminals can hide their activities and by offering easy access to secondary entrances to people’s homes.

The research goes back at least as far as the late Oscar Newman, an architect who wanted to know why some neighborhoods suffered higher crime rates than other neighborhoods inhabited by people in a similar socioeconomic class. Newman found that urban design plays a role in making neighborhoods more or less vulnerable to crime, and that the two most important factors were having defensible space, which usually means private property, and impermeability, which means limiting the number of access points to dwellings and businesses. By limiting permeability, cul de sacs make neighborhoods less vulnerable to crime; by increasing permeability, alleys make neighborhoods more vulnerable.

Newman wrote several books about the subject, one of which can be downloaded from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which commissioned the book. (The entire book is 3.2 megabytes; click on the image above to download it in several smaller chunks.)

Dayton, Ohio asked Newman to help a neighborhood that had very high crime rates. One of the things Newman did was gate the alleys in the neighborhood. Crime dropped dramatically and did not increase elsewhere in the city, indicating that the local crime was not simply displaced somewhere else.

More recently, the Justice Department commissioned a literature review on whether closing alleys would reduce crime. The report found studies showing that closing alleys had reduced crime in Charlotte, Hartford, Los Angeles, and St. Louis, as well as several locations in England.

The Brits have taken Newman’s findings to heart far more than Americans. The British government has an entire website devoted to alley gating. Alley closures there have proven highly successful in reducing burglaries and other crime.

Someone may object that many of these studies took place in low-income neighborhoods where crime rates were already high, and the results might not apply to higher income neighborhoods. Show me a high-income neighborhood where people routinely leave their doors unlocked when they leave their homes and I’ll show you a neighborhood that might not have to fear the effects of alleys on crime.

The alley debate is really a part of the larger debate over New Urbanism. As Stephen Town — an English police officer — and I wrote in Reason Magazine a few years ago, just about everything that New Urbanists want to do makes neighborhoods more vulnerable to crime.

The specific comment that set me off said that homes would be more aesthetically pleasing if only the garages faced an alley in back instead of the street in front. This point of view fundamentally misinterprets the role of streets and yards in suburban life.

Historically, we think of the street side of our homes as the “front.” Because this is the side we present to our neighbors and guests, those who can afford it add more architectural detail to the fronts to impress the public with our wealth and taste. Homes in the wealthiest neighborhoods had a service entrance in the rear for deliveries, servants, etc.

However, our lifestyles and priorities have changed. We are more likely to want to impress our friends and guests with the interiors of our homes than the exteriors. If the weather is suitable for outdoor life, we are more likely to entertain people in our backyards than our fronts. The service entrance we use for deliveries and utilities is on the street side — why waste space (and increase permeability) with an alley looking into our private yard?

Consider Radburn, New Jersey, one of the first master planned suburban neighborhoods. Designed and built in the 1920s, the streets were clearly intended as service entrances. Architecturally, the “fronts” of the houses faced away from the streets. The “back” yards of the homes consisted of a large greenspace adjacent to, not an alley, but a pedestrian/bike path.

The only problem was that the pedestrian/bike path, like an alley, added permeability and made homes and private yards more vulnerable to crime and vandalism. Post-war suburbs followed the Radburn design but deleted the public paths.

In effect, our homes have flipped: the backs are the fronts and the fronts are backs. Homebuilders figured this out decades ago. Thanks in part to the American Planning Association (discussed previously), most planners are still clueless.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner