background : : : renovated houses and crime
Defensible Space - does design prevent crime?
Home ownership - key to successful neighborhoods

Defensible Space
While much research has been done to link urban blight and crime, little has been done to determine whether or not urban renovation decreases crime. Robert Sampson's 1999 work "Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods" explains that communities with "collective efficacy have lower rates of violent crime and disorder. Defined as "the cohesion among residents combined with the shared expectations for the social control of a public space," collective efficacy decreases crime and thus improves quality of life.(14)

To the extent that he attributes social improvement such as collective efficacy with decreasing crime, Sampson addresses the matter. But as to the physical improvement of buildings, there has been more assumption than actual research about their effects.

In 1995, a student from Taiwan, Simon Shu, questioned whether or not Newman's ideas of defensible space actually worked in practice. Shu used burglary as an example of one crime that Newman claimed could be prevented through proactive design. He studied burglaries not in terms of a house's address, but in terms of how the burglar actually gained access to the dwelling from public space. He criticized the "defensible space" idea, saying that there is no use living on a 'safe' street or cul de sac if you are in fact burglarized from a back alley or a nearby vacant lot.(15)

Shu's results suggest that there is no single spatial factor that deters crime. Other factors, such as zoning, demographics, and neighborhood cohesion affect crime at individual houses.While I certainly cannot claim to find a causation, I noticed increases in crime even in houses that were renovated. [Click here to read about how studying individual houses and their histories is related to my study]

Home Ownership
But defensible space is not merely an unrealistic theory. There are other matters as well that might affect crime rates in rehabilitated houses. In Providence, when an abandoned house is rehabilitated, the nonprofit organization or the City of Providence gains ownership over the parcel. The organization then has the ability to renovate and rent out apartments or to sell the whole house to a local homeowner. Importantly, there is now someone (or many people) who are charged with overseeing the property - the city, the nonprofit, a new homeowner - whereas when it was vacant, there was no one.