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ENVIRONMENT 47: Streets ahead Private neighbourhood management The problem: city squalour Urban growth can often put a strain on local services. The rise in crime may outstrip the ability of a hard-pressed police force to control it; the need for new facilities may outpace the ability of local authorities to provide them; and the planning process may fall behind the fast-changing needs of residents. The idea: local control Some communities have overcome these problems by allowing local residents to take more control of their neighbourhoods to tackle crime, revive the locality, and provide the essential services they want. Examples: security, neighbourhood, streets, planning Security awareness. Since 95% of crime is property-related, this is a major priority for residents and businesses in urban areas. To counter unacceptable urban crime levels, Neighbourhood Watch schemes first arose in the United States, spreading to the United Kingdom in 1982 and then to many other countries. Under Neighbourhood Watch, residents get together, usually with the support and guidance (but not funding) of the local police, and erect signs declaring their area to be a 'Neighbourhood Watch Area'. They look out for suspicious events, keep an eye on neighbours' homes when they are away, and report anything unusual to the police. The idea has also extended into Business Watch schemes, where firms in industrial or trading clusters agree to do much the same thing. Building changes. The built environment is often a contributor to urban crime. Work by Professor Alice Coleman of King's College London found that housing developments with many storeys, with inside corridors, with blocks raised on stilts or built above garages, with numerous entrances, or where there were no clear divisions between public and private spaces, were all more prone to crime, vandalism, litter and graffiti. As she predicted, when four overhead walkways were removed from a post-war development in Westminster in 1986, leaving each block with a single, easily observed entrance and exit, police reported that the burglary rate fell by 55% in a single week, without it being displaced to other areas. Associations of residents in developments like these are now banding together to demand similar crime-fighting redesign of their own homes. Progress can be slow when those homes are owned by local government; but now under Britain's right-to-buy legislation, much state-owned housing has been transferred to the ownership of the tenants, and local, elected housing associations and trusts have taken over management from the local authorities. Neighbourhood management. Homeowners associations can take on a wide variety of functions to provide a more responsive and localized service than the municipality. In the US there are nearly 100,000 such associations, each typically representing about 150 households who covenant to pay fees for the association's services and accept other rules (such as agreeing not to run a noisy business from their home). Nearly all of the associations have responsibility for routine street repair; about two-thirds of them manage local recreation facilities such as tennis courts or swimming pools; over half negotiate private contracts for local solid-waste collection. To combat crime, about a quarter of them provide manned security services, and their use of electronic surveillance is growing. Street management. St Louis, Missouri, has a long history of privately owned and privately managed residential streets. Many of these were a response to the poor public provision of street lighting, water supplies, police and other amenities in the nineteenth century. Later improvements and municipal control changed the fashion, but private streets staged a comeback in the 1970s when, once again, municipal services began to decline. In 1974 the residents of Waterman Place petitioned the city authorities to vest them with the deeds for the streets. In return, they agreed to take on responsibility for street maintenance, sewers, solid-waste collection, and security. Within fifteen years, one thousand streets in St Louis had done the same. Some of these associations put up gates or chains to help restrict access to their streets to residents or bona fide visitors and deliveries, adding to the coherence and security of the neighbourhood, and allowing children to play outside and adults to meet and socialize without fear. Studies by Oscar Newman, comparing similar public and private streets, found that crime and burglary was half or two-thirds lower in the privately managed areas. Nor is it just that crime is decanted onto neighbouring streets; the private establishments actually help stabilize a wider area against decline. And not surprisingly, property values in the privately managed areas have risen. Planning covenants. Houston, Texas, is one of the few cities in the world where building was not traditionally regulated by government planning. Instead, restrictive covenants evolved, under which the purchasers of property would agree with the sellers a number of conditions - for example, how the property was to be used, how far the structure could be changed, the style of any new building, the maintenance of the exterior, and so on. In Britain, the elegant landscape of Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh owes its continued existence to the restrictive covenants which the developers of the 'new town' imposed on their purchasers and their purchasers' successors. The English legal precedent was set by the case of Tulk v Moxhay in 1848, in which the owner of Leicester Square gardens in London covenanted with the buyer to ensure that the area should always remain as gardens - which, despite the many pressures on it from its location at the heart of London's theatreland, it still remains today. For further information:
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Copyright 2002: Adam Smith Institute
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