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Quality of life improvements consistently reduce crime in general. And that makes sense, unless we're really stuck on the whole gun thing and can't allow the exploration of any other solution, even when those solutions are needed regardless.

If this is the case, why not just rehab buildings in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. It seems like low hanging fruit?

Because policy is not oriented by evidence

In this context, does remediation mean tear down or renovate? (I think tear down, but I can’t tell from the stury summary)

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Unfortunately, a lot of the ones in Baltimore are just not worth saving or would require far more investment then what is feasible.

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Is it that a better environment engendered better behavior or did the criminals move to a different bad environment?

When I moved to pittsburgh in 2009. It was still in pretty rough shape here in this region of the rust belt.

The city, decided to basically give those houses away for very cheap, they were basically, given away for their tax value. usually with no running water or utilities.

Both things happened as a result. Poor people were somewhat gentrified and priced out. And also, as those neighborhoods got nicer, alot more social programs followed suite.

The reason? there are several high profile hospitals in those areas that bring in alot of wealth from medical profession.

So it was a bit of both in this instance. However, the city ha been pretty aware of its growth and have been trying to pass zoning laws to keep low income people from being displaced.

From the article:

Interventions
The study consisted of 3 arms: (1) full remediation (installing working windows and doors, cleaning trash, weeding); (2) trash cleanup and weeding only; and (3) a no-intervention control.

They are being rehabbed, but it's all private enterprise. The three flat apartment buildings that were a cornerstone of low to middle class housing for a century are being gutted and rehabbed into $1.5 million single family homes. There is less and less middle ground all the time, it's either a dump or a palace. Gentrification powers forward.

It's nearly impossible at a local level to tax your way to sufficient funding to buy and rehab housing. It's further complicated by who owns it, if the city just covers rehabbing without owning the building, but it belongs to a slumlord, you can bet they will evict to current occupants or turn their property into an air bnb.

None which is to disagree with the assertion that raising home quality enhances safety and quality of life outcomes. I have a pet theory that if we made sure everyone had adequate air conditioning, the summer crime spikes would all but disappear.

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Its actually an interesting economics problem where local areas can end up saving money by investing in revitalizing an area. My specialty was on how government funding impacts chronic homelessness and how long it would take to repay the costs based on the cost savings found in the reduced use of public and emergency services. It gets even more complex in the long term as the basic prevention of health issues like infections reduces the load on local hospitals resulting in better treatment outcomes for locals.

No that would be demolition and redevelopment. This is maintaining existing housing stock, oft-forgotten

In order to get historic tax credits, your property needs to be income producing, so homeowners can’t access that capital. You can thank Ronald Reagan for that change

Yeah. Damn, that's sad.

That is an interesting theory. Man, it is so depressing that we cannot just build decent housing, provide adequate nutrition and healthcare, and fix public education.

What about something modular? I suppose we are not there yet, but I believe some of those solar power assisted tiny homes have promise.

Good ol' Ronnie. Let those record profits trickle down!

theres way too many possible scenarios

scenario A) theres some basic blight (deteriorating brick, missing gutters, bad roof) etc on an otherwise occupied and mostly "ok" property. in this case, they get cited by the building department, the owner makes the needed repairs, and the issue goes away. this is assuming they have the funds needed to make the repairs (in many poor neighborhoods they dont, which is why theyre in a state of dis-repair in the first place)

scenario B) the property is abandoned or in severe disrepair. in this case, it is a long long process involving building court. likely its a result of a foreclosure or extreme neglect. in some cases, the owner walks away from the property entirely, and in these cases the condition of the building declines rapidly as its exposed to the elements, gangs, etc. first the owner will get cited over and over, and typically there will be an active case against them. over a period of years, assuming nothing changes, the city will acquire the property through a court case. typically, the building is far too deteriorated to save without significant cost. so what will happen is the city will demolish the property, and then try to sell the vacant lot or re-develop it.

the sad reality is the neighborhoods where this is occurring often dont have strong demand in the first place because they are plagued by poverty and extreme violence (and also hyper segregation). so it creates a viscous cycle where the city is demolishing thousands of buildings, which makes it even more difficult for the neighborhood to rebound in the long run. in most cases, the cost to restore the building would cost more than you could otherwise be able sell it for in that neighborhood and theyre structurally compromised. in the cases where you CAN sell a rehabbed building for more than you acquired, well those neighborhoods are already undergoing gentrification and general improvement of the existing housing stock.

what Chicago is trying to do is tax developers building new construction to allocate a certain amount of money to an affordable housing fund. they then are taking those proceeds and trying to put up city-driven developments on some of those vacant lots. theyre also trying to offload a lot of those vacant lots into the hands of organizations who are willing to put up affordable housing or to do redevelopment. theres a lot of info here about the different approaches:

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/invest_sw/home.html

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Anecdotal, but I just moved to a nicer neighborhood and my quality of life and mood have improved quite a bit. The main difference for me is less trash, more greenery. Small things like this impact our mental health, which on a population-wide scale means less violence.

Is this not just like the broken windows theory? Small instances of disorder create a sense of lawlessness which increases other serious crimes.

Remedying the lawlessness cause would logically also deceased the likelihoods of those other serious crimes from occurring. Has this just never been proven before?

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The original theory, not the bastardized ‘arrest black kids’ version pushed by cops

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That was stop and frisk.

The ‘broken windows’ policing theory was that if you jailed people for things like possession or jumping turnstiles, you’d lower crime.

The original theory was that crime is lower if you fix the symptoms of disorder, e.g. fixing a window soon after it’s broken, rather that letting everything deteriorate.

We didn’t need science to figure out poverty equals crime for us.

And what has the best impact by $ invested? Best return/reward?

hospitals?

parks?

Public buildings?

Roads?

Some people do, though, and having the studies done will give people proof when they're presenting an argument for better solutions.

Thank you. Not sure how I sped past that.

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More evidence never hurts

Fair. I angrily agree.

Ahh yes, taxing our way to prosperity. That generality doesn’t work.

Pretty much.

Well, what hasn't worked is the private market addressing the needs of these communities for the past 60 years.

My work focused on the chronic homeless showed Mixed Income Assisted Housing provided the best long term results.

However there were some unique problems I ran into during my research. Treating homelessness has a unique aspect of game theory to it. If your area adds more services for the homeless population you would expect your area to have less homeless people. But people in other areas hear about the services and travel to your area for access to these services. This means the city/county that enacts programs to fix their homeless population may actually see an increase in the homeless population while surrounding areas see a decrease in their homeless populations.

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so the same as singapore, they introduced mixed income housing cause going for low only births villas and favelas.

net positive then

i think limiting the access to it would fix that. Not open to everyone but only for those that are trying to fix their issues. +using Face ID scans

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The last part just described SF in a nutshell

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I was thinking the same thing as well, was written about in the book “Freakonomics.”

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Let’s give the houses away, and the loans to fix them up - to the homeless

So what they're saying is the Broken Windows Theory was correct?

Yes we do. Because crime is a choice. Most people in poverty are not criminals.

But if you try that then half the neighbourhood will be ready to strangle you with claims of gentrification.

>Not open to everyone but only for those that are trying to fix their issues.

Then you end up like California. Homeless housing stands half-empty while tent towns spring up the other side of the street. Why? because according to the people in tent towns "they tried to take my freedom to do drugs away".

i think you are mixing something up. broken windows theory is that if you destroy something, rebuilding it will improve the economy in the area and create jobs, so destruction/crime is good.

It’s almost like having a safe environment and a sense of hope changes people…who knew?

Kinda checks out, I was looking at real estate in Baltimore, and the crappy areas had trash all over. There is a nice lady in the area who is trying to clean the area up, but people keep illegally dumping there.

I would guess less "trap houses" where people are selling drugs would mean less drug and gang related crime in that particular area.

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Two different concepts/theories that happen to share a very similar name:

Broken Windows theory (criminology)

Broken Window fallacy (economics)

That's certainly an option worth exploring.

But is most crime by people in or of poverty?

Its false equivalence. The same reasons that lead to poverty also lead to crime. Poverty itself does not lead to crime.

I was not suggesting that poverty leads to crime. It was merely a question to the audience.

I would in-fact suggest that most crime produced comes from those with money or influence.

You kinda do because it's a common misconception to think poverty generally has a significant impact on criminality and ignore confounders. I think household income/wealth on criminality is quite weak. Neighborhood wealth on criminality is maybe moderate. Most of the known portion of criminal variance is probably heritable.

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It absolutely does. SF was one of the areas I used during my research (However my research is OLD now and it looks like it may be even worse than when I was looking at it.)

I think it’s more related to “if I have nothing, I stand to lose nothing”.

Give people housing, jobs, and improve their standard of living. Now those people have to decide if the crime is worth losing all those comforts.

no, thats when you arrest everyone doing drugs like in a normal country.

No. Quality of life isn't only lowered by minor crimes, and the part of that theory that calls for aggressive and excessive policing of those crimes has definitively shown to just not work.

This is united states of america. Acting like a normal country is not allowed.

No.

Arresting them will just cost us all more money in the long run. They'll be put into a system designed around recidivism. They don't try and help these people in US prisons, they want the cheap labor.

If you think the solution to drug use is to put them in prison where drugs are just as common, then you're part of the reason we've ended up in this situation.

yes, its better to build pseudo-jails where you can help them by rehabilitation.

Either way the California way its the worst one cause they spend the most and get almost nothing.

Yes that is very true. It's like when you're depressed and you don't care about your life.

More vague language that proves nothing. Somehow rewarding people who are already "less than desirable" with free housing, paid for by tax payers, is not going to end well in the long run. Creating an entire class of folks that are criminals and also wards of the State is a recipe for disaster.

Who here is willing to have one of these renovated properties move in next to them? Are regular people/families that aren't prone to gun violence being given renovated homes as a reward for doing things right?

Seems like we have our priorities backwards.

Not true at all. There are places that are far more poor than these areas and have far less violence. Thanks for demonizing poor people though!

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Indeed, see SBF and Co. All from "great" families with lots of money....and they're the biggest crooks of all. Go figure?

...and/or the decline in your property value if you had a decent place where one of these "experiments" was implemented nearby.

If it "works" it will attract "the poors and other riff-raff", which will, in turn only lower neighboring property values even more.

The folks with the 30 year mortgages have lots more to loose than the gun-toating Junkies, I think we can all agree.

It will also simply become another ever-expanding, govt.-funded, corrupt mess. We all know who is gonna get the contracts for the "renovations" too ;)

You're confusing the original theory with how it was later adapted

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Way to make an assumption based on a question.

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