Crime in Residential Blocks: Does Greening Vacant Lots Matter?

Sara Hadavi (University of Illinois)
Paul H Gobster (USDA Forest Service)
Alessandro Rigolon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
William Stewart (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Urban vacancy has been a pressing issue for many cities in the US. Highamounts of vacancy can facilitate criminal activities and reduce resident safety and other aspects of neighborhood quality of life. A growing body of literature focuses on various ways to alleviate these issues. Different strategies have been implemented to address crime in high-vacancy urban neighborhoods, including the sale of city-owned vacant lots to property owners living on the block. This study evaluates whether one such initiative, the Large Lot Program in Chicago, has contributed to reduced crime. We hypothesized that with social use and visual signs of improvement made by new owners, city blocks with lots sold through the program will see declining crime rates compared to blocks without such lots.

Using a sample of 2063 residential blocks, 234 of which had at least one Large Lot, we examined crime density for two years before the Large Lot purchase and two years afterwards. We used spatial lag models in which one of the independent variables of interest was an index of visual lot condition and care indicators identified in the cues for care literature (Nassauer & Raskin 2014). The models controlled for demographic characteristics, amount of vacant lots, and adjacency to several land uses potentially associated with crime.

Our initial findings contribute to existing research on urban greening and crime in several important ways; they support earlier studies showing that vacant lot greening is associated with reduced crime density, but unlike many studies they show that this relationship holds when using a finer- grained, block level unit of analysis. Further analyses are expected to demonstrate that the quality of greening can play a significant role in reducing crime density. These findings have useful implications in planning and design of safer residential neighborhoods through community engagement and resident-led beautification.