Posted on 02/10/2005 8:35:00 AM PST by madfly
ping
In Houston there has been a big push on for the last few years to revitalize downtown and midtown. There has been a great deal of growth, new condos, appartments, and businesses. All planned. But there is one thing they did not plan and no one is talking about. The Greyhound bus station in Grey St. only a few blocks from the new developments. The problem is that the TX Dept of Corrections (the prison system) lets out a large number of it prisoners out of jails less then 100 mile north of Houston, they are given bus tickets to where they want to go. Most if not all go through the Houston bus station. The first taste of freedom they get is right next to the hip urban developments. Car breakins are rampid.
Question, would you spend $250000 for a condo 5 blocks from the spill gates of the TX prison syste?
Yet another "Vison of the (Self) Anointed" proves to be grossly erroneous.
Houses close to the street: New Urbanists want to create “active, vibrant,” pedestrian-oriented streets, so they design homes and businesses close to the street and place parking in rear courtyards. Such rear courtyards increase burglary by providing criminals with more public access to private homes and create needless common areas that are costly to protect.
Let the residents carry firearms and the point becomes moot.
Denny Crane: "There are two places to find the truth. First God and then Fox News."
When Dayton, Ohio, asked Newman to apply defensible-space concepts to a neighborhood suffering high rates of drug-related violence and property crime, his solution was to gate numerous streets—in essence, to turn a traditional street grid into cul-de-sacs. Within two years, violent crime in that neighborhood fell by 50 percent and overall crime by 25 percent, even as crime in Dayton overall increased by 1 percent.
It also cut down on the number of drivers who used the residential streets as shortcuts instead of sticking to the main roads.
I'll never figure out the attraction of the "new urbanism". When I think of my dream house, I see something with many acres of land, not something with a lot less than my current 1/3 acre.
"Planners" aren't any smarter than anyone else, whether they are planning economies in the Warsaw Pact or neighborhoods in the U.S. To plan properly, they would need to know all kinds of things they can never really know. In particular, like everybody else urban planners don't really have any idea how to design neighborhoods that provide the optimal mix of safety and other desirable things. That's no indictment of them, simply a realization of what a complex problem it is and how little we know.
People value low crime rates, as they value other things. Left to their own devices, people who want to sell them housing will cater to that desire in ways that most efficiently solve these tradeoff problems. Stop planning and replace it with competitive experimentation by competing property and neighborhood types and we will reconcile as best we can all of these conflicting objectives.
Many, if not most, petty crimes are crimes of opportunity. The criminal didn't plan his crime ahead of time, he just happended to be in the right place at the right time to see an opportunity. After a quick evaluation of what he could get versus the chances of being caught or hurt, the criminal makes his decision and the crime is committed.
My goal in life is to spend all day at work packed in an urban highrise office building only to ride a packed commuter bus/trolley/etc to my home in a "New Urban" neighborhood where the dwellings are so close that from my living room I can smell whatever one neighbor has on the stove while listening to the other neighbor's telephone conversation. I then turn up the volume on the TV and hope I don't have to try and go to sleep to the sounds of any of my neighbors attempting to procreate.
Jenny "cool cities" Granholm needs to read this.
If people don't like New Urbanist type communities, they don't have to buy houses in them. Let the market decide.
St. Louis has done the same thing. My friend lives in a gridded area that has been mostly severed from the major road system. It is credited with preserving the neighborhood, and in other nearby areas, blocking off the end of the street is considered the first step in renewal.
You can do this in places that have nothing to lose and where traffic isn't the dominant concern. Cul-de-sac developments elsewhere are a disaster for traffic management since they funnel all cars onto a few roads.
I live in a two-family house in the most densely-populated city in New England and I only hear my next-door neighbors when both of us are on the back porch or in the back yard. The exception was when the Red Sox hit the home run in Game 7 of the ALCS and I heard my neighbor scream from inside.
If only it were that easy:
New Urbanists eagerly helped write zoning codes that forbade things that had previously been mandated—broad streets, low densities, separation of residential from commercial uses—while mandating things that had formerly been forbidden, such as narrow streets, high densities, and mixed uses.
In New York, people pay more than that to live a block away from a housing project.
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