Broken Window theory is based on the idea that rundown areas invite petty crime because people think that no one cares. And petty crime leads to more serious crime because no one, especially the police, care about the neighborhood or area. The police receive more calls to these areas because the residents have more fear that things are out of control.
The breakthrough project on “Broken Window Theory” was completed in 2005, but the effects of the study are belatedly making the rounds.
Lowell, MA was used as a test area for a not so original or unique experiment. Parts of the city that were blighted were cleaned up, Petty criminals were rousted, homeless people were moved on into programs or to be homeless elsewhere, and patrols became responsive to calls.
Other parts of the city were left alone. Crime went down in the parts of the city that were cleaned up and properly (for once) patrolled.
The problem is that it should not have taken the 2005 broken window project to get this across. These concepts have been discussed and proved in the early New York City tenements, and throughout the world. The most angry complaints occurred during the 1960s and 1970s in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Residents insisted that, if the police presence that they paid for with their property and income taxes would show up to deal with petty crime, then larger crimes would not be encouraged. Now, whole areas of Los Angeles are virtually uncontrollable because major crime, especially in the multi trillion dollar illegal drug industries, has an undeniable foot hold, where nothing but a protracted war would clear up problems.
During the 1980s and 1990s, real estate speculators found out that buying a few houses in a perfectly good neighborhood and renting them to the worst tenants possible would cause not just White flight, but middle class flight, until the neighborhood became blighted enough to restore, then profit from the restoration as “gentrification” projects were started.
Blighting, then gentrification for profit is based on understandings that predate the “broken window” project, so it is confusing as to why the project is receiving attention now, as if the concepts have only been recently discovered, and only as a result of this project. This implies a disingenuous and false posturing by some, who have profited by pretending that the underlying causes of neighborhood blight reside in the people who live there, and not on the conditions that are encouraged, or allowed, to develop.
