In an opinion piece for Shelterforce, Helene Caloir, director of LISC’s New York State Housing Stabilizing Fund, and Mona Mangat, head of Safety & Justice programming, make the case for yoking vacant building remediation with community safety partnerships to reduce crime and increase resident empowerment. They point to LISC-supported programs in Flint, MI and Binghamton, NY where this very work brought about greater quality of life and lowered crime rates in targeted areas. Now, they argue, this approach is needed more than ever.
The opinion piece below was originally published on Shelterforce:
Can We Curb Crime by Cleaning the Corner?
Vacant, neglected buildings and abandoned lots shrouded in overgrown shrubbery are hard on neighborhoods, and people. They provide cover for activities such as vandalism and drug dealing, and create a sense of insecurity in a community. Reams of research, not to mention neighborhood experience, have shown that concentrations of vacant and deteriorated buildings tend to be hotspots for crime; one study looking at Cleveland tracked higher rates of homicide, weapons violations, and aggravated assault associated with vacant homes and lots.
As community development professionals, we also know that we must mobilize now against the wave of vacancies that, without unprecedented federal action, are likely to follow mass evictions and foreclosures related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This, too, will disproportionately harm communities of color.
Many observers think about vacant buildings and crime as two separate problems. But they are intimately connected and rectifying each requires a multi-pronged approach. Combining vacancy prevention and remediation with community safety programming is an effective combination for helping communities tackle existing issues of crime and vacancy in neighborhoods, and doing so has supported them in staving off future dislocations that threaten to create new swaths of vacant homes.
We have seen—and a substantial body of research shows—that crime tends to be hyperlocal, attaching stubbornly to certain “micro places.” A few hot spots, often that empty house or unmaintained corner lot, may generate the bulk of the crime in a neighborhood. Pinpointing interventions at those sites can produce outsize results.
In New York State, we have coupled this broader strategy with an anti-vacancy initiative—LISC’s New York State Housing Stabilization Fund, which was founded with funds from a bank settlement with the New York Attorney General’s office to mitigate the continuing effects of vacancies across the state following the 2008-2010 foreclosure crisis.
LISC, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, is a CDFI that works with residents and partners to catalyze opportunity in communities across the country. The Housing Stabilization Fund supports multilayered partnerships between local governments and communities to inventory and track vacant properties (particularly those caught in foreclosure limbo, aka “zombies”), improve code enforcement, and ultimately revitalize these properties, bringing them back into productive use. The fund also supports counseling for at-risk homeowners to prevent foreclosures and vacancies from occurring in the first place.
Because crime reduction and vacancy prevention and remediation go hand in hand, the goals of these initiatives are closely aligned, and so are their methods. The three strategies that follow are core elements of the methods we’ve used, and while they refer to work done by our organization, they are applicable to communities all across the country that are struggling to revitalize, reduce crime, and create strong, stable neighborhoods. We believe they will be all the more instructive as localities work to emerge from the devastation of the pandemic.
- Root the work in locally led coalitions that engage residents. Our community safety and justice projects rely heavily on the community-based nonprofits whose very presence in a locale leads to significant reductions in violent and property crimes. Residents participate by giving and gathering information, identifying priorities, and helping to carry out the strategies they have helped devise. The NYS Housing Stabilization Fund programs encourage collaboration across municipal agencies, along with outreach to residents and nonprofits, that helps the agencies identify troublesome properties and help set priorities for reuse.
- The work should be data-driven. If we don’t understand the sources of a problem, it’s hard to solve it. Safety teams design interventions to address crime based on police data—calls for service, incidents, etc.—as well as site observations, resident surveys, and stakeholder interviews. Local governments that have received grants from the NYS Housing Stabilization Fund develop data-management technologies and gather in-depth information from a variety of sources on properties’ ownership, tax and lien status, and condition, as well as police, fire, and sanitation department visits.
- Identify a “point person” to coordinate the effort. In projects that involve a diverse coalition of residents, community-based organizations, government departments, and researchers, it’s important to have a coordinator who can communicate with partners, call meetings, set a timeline, track progress, and keep the effort moving forward.
To see what this approach look likes in action, we can point to Flint, Michigan, and Binghamton, New York, just two of the many places that have applied these strategies with transformative results.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mona Mangat, Vice President, Safety & Justice Initiatives
Mona directs national safety and justice initiatives at LISC, including overseeing efforts in dozens of cities funded through private and government investments. Her experience includes providing technical assistance to community-law enforcement alliances seeking to reduce crime while building the trust and infrastructure that make communities resilient and safe.
Helene Caloir, Director of LISC’s New York State Housing Stabilization Fund
Helene Caloir is Director of the New York State Housing Stabilization Fund, LISC’s program for administering bank settlements with the US Dept of Justice and the New York Attorney General. In this position for three years, she and her team have made and stewarded over 120 grants to cities, towns and villages, land banks and nonprofits, for housing initiatives in New York State. She previously served at LISC as Policy Director for LISC New York City, as Chief Legal Officer for LISC NYC/New York Equity Fund, and as Associate General Counsel and in other positions in the Legal Department.