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| Site of the former Rhodes Theater Fall 2009 |
Something to consider with vacant lots in our area:
Vacant lots in neighborhoods can mean trouble. Often overgrown and kind of creepy, these places can be magnets for crime, with tall grasses and bushes that can conceal criminal activity or serve as hiding places for weapons. They may even be good places to stash a body.
But not all empty lots breed crime. New research suggests that vacant lots that are cleaned up and maintained see reduced crime in their immediate surroundings. Cleaning and greening empty lots can even make people feel safer, according to the study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, published this week in the journal Injury Prevention.
The research is based on two separate clusters of vacant lots in Philadelphia – one set that was eventually cleaned up and maintained and one that wasn't. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society helped by removing debris from some sites, planting grass and trees, building fences and doing maintenance every two weeks. The researchers analyzed police records for these areas for the three months before the empty lot greening and the three months after and found a decrease in total crime as well as drops in assaults with and without a gun. Residents living near the greened lots reported feeling significantly safer than those living near the untouched empty lots.
Read the rest!
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