Designing out Crime

I had a chat with Geoff Martin, soon to be former owner of one of the troubled apartment buildings on Mascotte. He is selling to someone who already owns a couple of the 4 unit buildings and, according to Geoff, the new owner plans to put up some fencing in an effort to stop illegal dumping and other criminal activity.

Call me a dreamer, but when I walk or drive by these buildings I see some real opportunities for trying some inexpensive Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) measures. As always, my vision starts with some nice low water use plants to replace the dirt that would be lawn if anyone ever watered. But I'll save my Xeriscape rant for another day.

I also see barriers, but not the high chain link fence I fear, more of a decorative barrier to denote boundary between public space like the library parking lot, and private space like the apartment complex would-be grounds. At this time it's hard to tell where the parking lot ends and the garbage dump starts, and none of it looks like the landscaping you'd expect around even modest apartment buildings in a neighborhood as nice as the rest of ours.

While we should do everything we can to encourage people to call the police when something suspicious happens, and expect TPD to take active policing measures to help us keep the open air pharmacies out of Port Tampa, it's time to also find incentives for owners and residents to install and maintain attractive landscape elements. These apartment buildings need both plant material and hardscaping that says "This is private space! Someone who cares and has TPD on speed dial lives here!"

A lot has been written about why these small efforts could do a lot to change our problem blocks. In Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs listed the three attributes needed to make a city street safe: a clear demarcation of private and public space; diversity of use; and a high level of pedestrian use of the sidewalks. Jacobs was then an editor at Architectural Forum magazine, with no formal training in urban planning but to say Death and Life influenced a new way of looking at cities would be a massive understatement. By the mid 70s urban planners and criminologists had come to similar conclusions and the terms "defensible space" and "CPTED" were coined.

CPTED is no panacea* but you can read a nice summary of the major concepts in
Watchword, TPD's monthly Neighborhood Watch newsletter.

* Which begs the question, what would be a panacea? I've often thought it might be worth buying a beach house in Panacea, FL just so I could use the phrase "now this is a true Panacea."