Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning

the largest and best-known example of this to date is the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) study. The MTO study is a five-city RCT started by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s. Some 4,600 very low-income families in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an

The study found a 44-to-45-percent greater reduction in crime and arrests in BID areas compared to neighboring areas. BIDs are also associated with a significantly higher drop in police arrests: about ten fewer arrests per year in a neighborhood, or a 32-percent yearly decline. In our examination of actual BID private security expenditures, the evi

CPTED offers a recipe for reducing crime by shifting the availability of easy targets. This does not mean that an offender’s motivations to commit crime have been erased; it simply means that some offenses won’t occur in given areas because offenders either choose to go elsewhere or to not commit the crime. If one assumes that not all crimes are ea

Successful place-based changes do not necessarily lead to gentrification or price increases that push out the poor from communities. In fact, there is little empirical evidence that shows that gentrification pushes out the poor at a faster rate. Several well-conducted studies show that working poor are less likely to leave a neighborhood when it is

A place-based intervention that leads to the greater desirability of a place—such as the expansion of transit, the greening of small park spaces, or the creating of a business improvement district—could also foster new housing or condominium developments, which would then increase the population in an area. Yet if an area doesn’t have a school syst

The results from the MTO housing mobility experiment showed mixed results. In general, adults reported better measures of happiness and improvements in physical health and perceptions of safety.29 Adult women that moved to the low-poverty neighborhoods were also significantly less likely to become morbidly obese and have signs of diabetes.30 For gi

While there is a body of research that suggests that public housing is correlated with crime, it remains unclear if it is the buildings’ design, the social organization of public housing,21 its mismanagement,22 or the land-use patterns around these places that promotes crime.23 Weighing the relative impact of these possible causal factors is import

Area-specific policies can be put in place to buttress against the negative effects that gentrification can have on longer-term poor residents. Inclusionary zoning, for example, is an approach that requires developers to set aside 10 to 20 percent of residential units for lower-income people, or to pay a fee that gets placed into an affordable-hous

The public health challenge of poor-quality housing is not just a problem of the developing world. Exposures to unhealthy housing conditions are also common in poorly constructed and maintained housing stock in the United States and other developed countries. Exposure to lead, for example, has harmful consequences on brain development and is most l