Fragmentary Evidence

The evidence of tough economic times is abundant, and most of us could probably cite numerous statistics or events as examples: An official unemployment rate that is over 8 percent (double digits here in California—we’ve always been trendsetters!); enormous companies entering bankruptcy or limping along with subsidies (sorry, make that “capital injections”) from taxpayers; tent cities forming on vacant land; friends or family members who have lost work or been subject to mandatory unpaid days off; commercial districts in cities and exurbs alike becoming ghost towns; irreplaceable local institutions like the Parkway Theater closing forever.

In addition to those much-noted signs of recession, I’ve been wondering recently how our economic troubles will manifest themselves in less obvious ways: in our public spaces, in our daily habits and routines, in our civic engagement. I’ve long been intrigued by the look and feel of cities, and in the ways that small, seemingly insignificant aspects of the urban fabric can have big consequences, but my specific interest in the visual symptoms of economic collapse was prompted by a discussion in the comments to a previous post.

A commenter wondered what I was seeing with my own eyes that “reflected the country’s current ailments,” and I realized that I didn’t have a very clear notion of what I would expect a deepening recession to look like in a city such as Oakland. I see more empty storefronts around, and more signs in front of foreclosed homes (although I feel as if I see fewer than I did six months or a year ago), and perhaps more people out and about during the traditional working hours.

I realized, however, that in a city which has always had more than its fair share of blight, poverty, and unemployment, the signs of a worsening economic situation are probably less glaringly obvious than they are in, for example, exurban developments in the central valley or the Mojave Desert that have gone from boomtowns to ghosttowns in just a few years. Ever since that discussion, I’ve had the question in the back of my mind, and I’ve been taking note of small local indicators of economic trouble that might not show up in a statistic or a news article.

Since I’m trying to be attuned to these symptoms as I roam the streets (i.e. walk the dog, bike to work, etc.), and since I still have a very limited mental image of what a deeper, prolonged downturn might look like in the modern world (will we see more “Hoovervilles” and bread lines, or will our age have its own different, less obvious manifestations of hardship?), I would be interested in hearing any other thoughts readers might have about subtle ways that the recession is affecting the look and feel of our cities.

Assuming that things continue to get worse before they get better, might we see a strengthening of neighborhood ties as people becoming increasingly concerned about property crimes? Or will people in fact become more isolated, because they will be more fearful of crime in the streets, and will have less money to spend in local restaurants and the like? Will the physical environment deteriorate dramatically, as public services and private investment continue to dwindle?

I don’t have any well-formed answers to these sorts of questions, and obviously much depends on just how bad things get, and for how long, but I’m curious — and more than a little nervous — about how further economic collapse might show itself in our streets, parks and sidewalks.

I finally got around to reading this Boston Globe article about the selective implementation of the “broken windows” theory of crime in Lowell, Mass. A partnership between some academics and the police department identified 34 crime “hot spots,” then in half of the places they took proactive steps to clean up blight, provide social services, or do more to combat misdemeanors and loitering. In the other half of the high-crime locations, they continued with traditional police techniques (basically doing normal patrols and responding to 911 calls, but nothing preventive or proactive).

The Globe article summarizes the conclusions of the researchers as such:

The results, just now circulating in law enforcement circles, are striking: A 20 percent plunge in calls to police from the parts of town that received extra attention. It is seen as strong scientific evidence that the long-debated “broken windows” theory really works – that disorderly conditions breed bad behavior, and that fixing them can help prevent crime.

Without knowing the details of the study, I’m not so convinced that this “plunge” is so “striking.” While a 20% decline is substantial, it seems predictable that any kind of extra attention given to a crime hot spot will be likely to reduce crime in that particular location — you could assign a few officers to stand at a certain location 24 hours a day, and crime at that spot would “plunge” by close to 100%, but so what? The more important question is which kinds of extra attention accomplish the most good in the most efficient way.

Thankfully, the researchers must have taken steps to isolate certain kinds of “extra attention” from others, and that’s where the more interesting information is. According to the Globe, “the Lowell experiment offers guidance on what seems to work best. Cleaning up the physical environment was very effective; misdemeanor arrests less so, and boosting social services had no apparent impact.” The correlation between the quality of the physical environment and the likelihood of people to commit crimes has also been established by some fascinating experiments in the Netherlands.

Assuming that these findings are valid, they could be very useful for people (and governments) in high-crime areas. Social services, however much they may help in other ways, are probably not an efficient way to reduce crime (sorry, bleeding heart, thug-coddling liberal hippies); zero tolerance for misdemeanors is also probably not a very efficient way to reduce crime (sorry, tough on crime, lock-’em-all-up conservative fascists). If you want bang for your buck, the way to reduce crime the most is to make the place you spend your life prettier — sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Since I live in a medium-crime part of a high-crime city, and since I’m interested in the effects of the urban physical environment for unrelated reasons, I find these studies to be pretty heartening news.

Unlike providing social services or cracking down on misdemeanor crimes, the aesthetics of the physical environment is something that residents of a neighborhood can easily improve without requiring the aid of the police department or city hall. Oakland’s police department is chronically understaffed, plagued by repeated scandals, and led by incompetents or worse, so it is a relief to know that there are ways to combat crime that don’t involve a responsive and accountable police force. Most of Oakland’s elected officials are too busy bickering over parking spaces at City Hall or trying to drive business away from the city to actually get anything useful done, so it is a relief to know that there are ways to combat crime that don’t involve a responsive and fiscally healthy municipal government.

That’s not to say that it’s easy to combat blight in our neighborhoods (it’s hard to get residents to care about anything beyond their own walls, and the collapsing economy is obviously not helpful), but small things such as picking up litter, turning an unsightly patch of dirt into a flower or vegetable garden (whether it be one’s front yard or an abandoned lot down the block), or painting over graffiti on one’s front stoop are not very hard to do, and are probably more effective than trying to get someone from downtown to do something productive in a timely manner.

Oakland has some venetian gondolas on Lake Merritt, but if you want to find a place in the Bay Area that feels (at least a bit) like Venice, you’ll do better heading across the estuary to Alameda’s lagoons, as I did one day late last week.

Unfortunately, unlike the canals of Venice, Italy (or the canals of Venice, California, for that matter), you won’t have much luck taking a long romantic stroll alongside these lagoons, because there are only a few spots where the public can reach the water’s edge. Most land on the shoreline is private property.

Also unlike the canals of the Venetian archipelago, these lagoons are neither ancient nor natural. In the mid 1950′s Alamedans, showing all the city planning wisdom of that era, voted to allow a developer to add 350 acres of landfill to the tidal flats south of Alameda’s town center, where a new neighborhood and a shopping center would be built (the Alameda Sun’s website has a dramatic but blurry aerial photograph from 1958 showing the new landfill). Stately Victorians on Alameda’s “Gold Coast,” which had previously been on bayfront property, now presided over these small lagoons instead, with views of other homes instead of ships and sailboats out on the bay.

One legacy of this sudden expansion of the island is that you still notice a stark difference in design as soon as you cross over the lagoons to the newer “South Shore” neighborhood. Whereas the older parts of Alameda have narrower 19th-century streets and pedestrian-friendly shopping districts, the more recent development 50 yards away is the epitome of late-50′s planning, with wider roads, numerous cul-de-sacs, drab ranch houses and a sprawling shopping mall. (more…)

I just noticed this plaque last week, after having walked past it dozens, if not hundreds, of times:

I took another photo from the same spot, looking in a different direction:

The plaque was placed where Interstate 580 crosses over Grand Avenue, creating a dark, imposing overpass that separates Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park from the 1926 Grand Lake Theater. It might be quaint that people were so jazzed about urban highways in the 60′s, were it not for the fact that these freeways drew and quartered the cores of many American cities, cleaving neighborhoods in two and allowing drivers to bypass Oakland on their way to and from San Francisco without ever having to see a city street, never mind interact with any of its citizens or businesses.

I finally got around to reading Samantha Power’s article on Gary Haugen in the January 19th New Yorker. Haugen is a Christian human rights lawyer whose organization represents impoverished and abused people in Cambodia, Kenya, and other countries.  Like most of Power’s work, the whole article is worth reading, but one set of statistics snared my attention:

Countries emerging from conflict often command headlines, congressional interest, and rule-of-law funding: Bosnia and Sierra Leone in the nineties, Iraq and Afghanistan today. Chronically flawed justice systems, like the one in Kenya, tend to get far less support. Haugen is incredulous: “Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.”

In 2007, Transparency International published a report underscoring the extent of the problem. Seventy-nine per cent of people surveyed in Cameroon, and seventy-two per cent of Cambodians, reported paying a bribe to obtain basic services in the previous year. The study also confirmed Haugen’s view that the poor are more likely to pay bribes than the wealthy, often to avoid harassment. According to a report published by Afrobarometer, a public-opinion research group, only fifty-three per cent of people surveyed in subSaharan Africa expressed confidence that senior government officials would be brought to justice if they committed a serious crime. In Kenya, sixty-four per cent deemed most or all of the police corrupt. A World Bank study of twenty-three countries found that the poor saw police “not as a source of help and security, but rather of harm, risk, and impoverishment.”

Those numbers, 53 percent and 64 percent, are presumably supposed to sound startlingly high. Perhaps because community-police relations have been on my mind lately due to the fallout from the shooting of unarmed Oscar Grant by a BART police officer at the beginning of this month, I was curious about whether the statistics would in fact be much different in some communities in the United States. Might we see similarly high distrust of the criminal justice system and the police in North Philly or the South Bronx, in East Oakland or West Baltimore?

I did some googling to see if I would find any comparable studies from communities in the United States. (more…)

An awful story this evening, related to my post about speeding cars and pedestrians on Park Boulevard the other day:

A pedestrian was struck and killed in a crosswalk at the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Santiago St. in San Francisco tonight.

The woman was walking westbound across Sunset when a man driving a Toyota Corolla south on Sunset struck her at about 6:15 p.m. The woman was taken to San Francisco General Hospital where she died. Her name was withheld, pending notification of her family.

The driver had no stoplight or stop sign and stopped after hitting the pedestrian, and police said the incident was just a tragic accident.

“It doesn’t look like he was speeding or under the influence or anything like that,” said Sgt. Renee Pagano. “There’s no crime here at all.”

“Just a tragic accident” Nice to know that a car can plow into a pedestrian in a crosswalk, and as long as the driver isn’t speeding or drunk, they are not breaking any laws according to the SFPD. (I actually knew that already, because these incidents happen all the time, always with the same result — you can even kill two young children on a sidewalk and as long as you didn’t intend to do it, you won’t be held responsible.)

My recommendation to people on foot or bicycle: Always assume that drivers won’t see you, and act accordingly.

The San Francisco Chronicle had a “Chronicle Watch” feature the other day about one of those solar-powered displays that cities put up to let drivers know how fast they are going (the Chron’s “Journalism of Action” in action!). The display in question, which briefly wasn’t working because its solar battery was dead, happens to be a few blocks from me on Park Boulevard (where the marchers were protesting recently).

I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about Park Blvd, because I face its problems every time I cross over it, walk down it, or bike up it. In some ways, Park is a nice street: it curves gently up shallow valleys and ridgelines, from humble flatland beginnings at Kragen Auto Parts and Church’s Fried Chicken to a posher terminus in hillside Montclair. There are several parks alongside the street, and numerous shops, restaurants and cafes. You wouldn’t call it bustling in the way that some other Oakland neighborhoods such as Chinatown or Fruitvale are bustling, but compared to the strip malls of Fremont or Fairfield, it’s an urbanist’s dream.

And yet lower Park, from E. 18th Street to Interstate 580, is clearly not living up to its potential; cars drive at dangerous speeds past the occasional pedestrian who stands helplessly at a crosswalk, businesses routinely disappear for lack of customers, and some neighborhood residents avoid the sidewalks and parks because they don’t feel safe.

Earlier this week, I was eating lunch outside a bagel shop on Park Street in Alameda, and I was surprised to realize that Park Street has just as many lanes as Park Boulevard. The streets could hardly feel more different: Park Boulevard often feels like a speedway running through a semi-deserted neighborhood, whereas on Park Street, the sidewalks are thick with pedestrians popping in and out of thriving businesses, drivers obey the speed limits, and people can cross the street without putting their life at risk.

I’m not a city planner or a traffic engineer, but a few explanations for Park Boulevard’s deficiencies come to mind. (more…)