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

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the ability of municipalities to establish rules on land use through zoning is now a settled legal matter. In 1926 the US Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid, OH v. Ambler Realty Company settled the legal power of municipal governments to regulate the use of land. This case unfortunately also set the stage for the development of single-use

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In the end they estimated that the “nasty pest,” as they called it, caused at least an additional seven respiratory and seventeen cardiovascular deaths per year for every 100,000 adults in the affected counties. This translated into roughly 21,000 additional deaths per year—a staggeringly high number. The study team found no relationship between

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The large-scale demolitions of public housing complexes was both expensive and disruptive to the people living in them, but it provided a unique opportunity to learn what happens to crime when these complexes are demolished. In the case of Chicago, the housing authority demolished nearly 22,000 units of high-rise public housing and relocated

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Note that this model does not address the fundamental motivations behind crime; rather, it tries to make crimes inconvenient. The idea is that there are easier targets elsewhere. Some have criticized CPTED because it does not address underlying root causes that make someone likely to commit a crime in the first place. This misses the point. CPTED

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Even when transit is available, people are less willing to use it when they are concerned about their personal safety.36 When the effort to travel to transit seems daunting because of fear of danger, people will default to the easier decision to drive. But research suggests that transit isn’t dangerous. One of our own studies examined what happened

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When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was famously asked why he chose such a vocation, he was reported to reply, “I rob banks because that’s where the money is.” This logic holds true for many types of crime: it happens because it is more or less likely based on the opportunity structure. As place is a prime element of that opportunity structure, it

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The study compared crime around hundreds of buildings cited by the new ordinance that complied with the violation and installed working windows and doors (treated buildings), to hundreds of buildings cited by the ordinance that made no renovations (control buildings). These comparisons were made within the same sections of the city, and treated and

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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

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