Are America’s downtowns unsafe? The information says no.

Three years after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic emptied them, America’s downtowns are nonetheless hurting. White-collar staff are solely again of their workplaces about half the time — and much much less on Monday or Friday. Many companies that service these staff have closed up store. Between 2019 and 2022, workplace rents in Manhattan fell about 14 %, in accordance with current reporting from Axios. In San Francisco, workplace rents are down by greater than twice that.

There’s an apparent rationalization for this disaster: Many white-collar staff merely not must commute to their workplaces, assuming their firm even nonetheless leases one. But there’s one other main issue that doesn’t get practically as a lot recognition: crime.

“The No. 1 barrier that we heard from people was that fear of crime was what was preventing them from going downtown, particularly within the central business district itself and on their commutes there,” stated Hanna Love, senior analysis affiliate on the suppose tank Brookings Institution.

Love is working with a workforce at Brookings that’s learning the well being and way forward for American downtowns. She shared their findings with Today, Explained, Vox’s day by day information radio present and podcast, for its new collection on the way forward for cities post-pandemic: “City Limits.” (I’m a producer and reporter for Today, Explained and the lead producer on this collection.)

Anyone being attentive to big-city politics proper now might be conscious of the salience of crime as a problem. Paul Vallas, certainly one of two candidates in Chicago’s early April mayoral runoff, is working an unabashed law-and-order marketing campaign in a metropolis the place automobile thefts doubled between 2021 and final 12 months. In Philadelphia, 89 % of respondents to a current survey forward of that metropolis’s mayoral election in November stated “crime” must be the highest precedence for elected officers. And in Washington, DC, President Joe Biden lately deserted his dedication to DC dwelling rule by refusing to veto a Republican measure to block the town’s proposed up to date legal code over considerations that it was comfortable on crime.

“Things can happen anywhere, anytime,” Allison McDonald, a Chicagoan who lives simply exterior of downtown, advised a Today, Explained freelance producer. “[It] used to feel more pocketed … you kind of knew where to stay away. Now it just happens anywhere, any time of the day. The carjackings. The street crime. It’s just way worse.”

Except right here’s the factor: While crime has risen for the reason that pandemic in most US cities, it’s not spiking in downtowns.

Tl;dr: Crime is up, however not up a lot downtown

That’s what Love and her colleagues discovered once they crunched the information. She and her workforce have spent the previous couple of months gathering statistics and conducting about 100 interviews with workplace staff, small enterprise homeowners, and other people in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Chicago — 4 cities the place the downtown enterprise districts have been sluggish to recuperate. They then broke out information for violent crime and property crime for every of these cities’ downtowns.

Homicides spiked nationwide within the early a part of the pandemic, earlier than leveling off after which declining barely between 2021 and 2022. Violent crime extra broadly — a class that features rape and aggravated assault — trended up in every metropolis between 2019 and 2022, to various levels. Chicago noticed a 5 % improve in violent crime throughout that point, Philadelphia noticed a 1 % improve, New York noticed a 26 % improve, and Seattle noticed a 22 % improve.

Property crime — a class that features offenses like larceny and automobile break-ins — noticed a sharper uptick in all 4 cities. Philadelphia noticed city-wide property crime improve by 17 %, New York 38 %, Seattle 17 %, and Chicago 36 %.

But right here’s the twist: in all 4 of these cities, the share of all property crimes taking place downtown remained comparatively steady or declined.

Violent crime downtown additionally stayed comparatively steady, declining by 2 % in Seattle, ticking up by 1 % in Chicago and Philadelphia, and by 2 % in New York City.

Courtesy of Brookings Institution

So downtowns have been among the most secure locations to be in these cities pre-pandemic. And, by the tip of final 12 months, they nonetheless have been. That truth, although, makes small upticks in crime numbers extra perceptible, Love stated.

“People aren’t necessarily thinking about citywide statistics when they’re thinking about how they want to feel safe,” Love advised Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “People are hearing about people getting shot. People are talking to their friends … there is this mismatch in perceptions and reality, but it still matters because people are still afraid.”

Violent crime has lengthy been concentrated in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods which have additionally been marked by segregation, discrimination, and disinvestment. But crimes in these areas, Love stated, are likely to get much less media consideration than those who happen downtown.

Conflating crime and “disorder”

What else may very well be behind the mismatch between crime information and crime vibes? One principle that got here up time and again is that metropolis residents and guests are, to some extent, conflating precise violent crime with broader indications of city dysfunction.

“There are several visible signs of disorder that are not necessarily related to crime that are causing people to feel that cities have become unsafe,” Henry Grabar, an city affairs reporter at Slate, advised Rameswaram. “I’m thinking of things like homelessness, drug use, empty streets, and lack of people … that’s causing them to think that cities have become more dangerous places than perhaps they are.”

Homelessness is an effective instance. In New York, Chicago, and Philly, in accordance with information analyzed by the Brookings workforce, the homeless inhabitants really fell by greater than 20 % between 2019 and 2022. Seattle was the outlier: King County, which accommodates Seattle, noticed its homeless inhabitants develop by 19 %.

But even though the homeless inhabitants fell by fairly a bit in most of these cities throughout the pandemic, the overwhelming majority of interviewees Brookings spoke to believed the variety of homeless individuals of their metropolis had spiked and that the unhoused have been contributing to the crime drawback.

“Across the board, the visibility of unsheltered homelessness has increased in downtowns because there’s less street activity. So people are seeing or noticing more unsheltered people and they are feeling unsafe because of that,” Love stated. “That doesn’t necessarily line up with what the statistics tell us, which is that people who are experiencing homelessness are more likely to be victims of crime than to perpetrate them.”

Tackling the notion of crime downtown

So what can a mayor or different elected official do to make individuals really feel as secure as they really are downtown?

Tackling this notion was the specific objective of “Broken Windows”-style policing. The technique, specified by a 1982 Atlantic essay and adopted most prominently by New York City within the Nineteen Nineties, argued that police ought to aggressively implement low-level offenses like public urination and graffiti, each as a result of that kind of crime makes individuals afraid and since it creates a way of impunity the place extra severe crime can flourish.

Broken Windows could have made some individuals really feel safer, however, via its cornerstone coverage of stop-and-frisk, it additionally led to numerous Black and Latino metropolis residents being focused by police in dehumanizing and legally doubtful stops. In Philadelphia in 2009, police made greater than 260,000 stops, greater than every other police division within the nation, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report. Close to half of these stops have been made with out displaying any affordable suspicion.

And the precise influence of the Broken Windows coverage on crime continues to be debated. Serious crimes fell in New York City all through the 2000s — and stored falling after NYC’s stop-and-frisk coverage was declared unconstitutional in 2013.

Grabar argues that the easiest way to handle the notion drawback is to get extra our bodies again into downtown frequently. It’s a notion first articulated as “Eyes on the Street” by the well-known urbanist Jane Jacobs: the thought being that wholesome communities naturally implement shared social norms. But that requires numbers.

And therein lies the issue. People don’t wish to go downtown as a result of they’re nervous. But the easiest way to make individuals really feel secure once more downtown … is to have extra individuals there. The finest option to sq. that circle, Grabar suggests, is that downtowns ought to try to appeal to residents as an alternative. That means changing workplaces to residences and constructing new housing.

City leaders in New York and Chicago are on board: They’re pushing plans to encourage office-to-residential conversion. And in Seattle, the planning division is providing a $10,000 prize to groups of property homeowners and designers that submit plans to transform downtown workplace buildings to residences.

“I don’t think I’m telling city leaders anything they don’t know. It’s just that I don’t think they quite grasp the urgency of it, because if you don’t get people downtown, if you don’t make those streets feel full and lively and vibrant again, then people will leave and they will stop coming,” Grabar stated. “And then you get this sort of doom loop of empty streets and a feeling of insecurity and disinvestment in public services and so on. So adding housing downtown is a big way of bringing people back and making the streets feel safe.”

The renaissance in American cities that started within the Nineteen Nineties and lasted up till the pandemic arrived trusted bringing crime down and making individuals really feel safer. The problem for metropolis leaders on this remote-work period is to as soon as once more discover success on each of those fronts, however with out resorting to the punitive ways of their forebears.