Yet architect and urban planner Newman has his disciples -many of whom reside in Dayton, Ohio’s Five Oaks neighborhood. Three years ago Five Oaks was in the throes of racial transition and decline. In two decades it had gone from 97 percent white to 43 percent black. Poverty, prostitutes and drug dealers had infiltrated the neighborhood. Only a few minutes from downtown and easily accessible from two major highways, the roughly half-square-mile area was a perfect location for drive-through vice. “It was so obvious something had to be done or we were going to lose that neighborhood,” says Ray Reynolds, Dayton’s urban-development chief.
The police department sent in a strike force. “We were expending an enormous amount of manpower there trying to provide… some sense of security,” recalls Police Maj. Jaruth Durham-Jefferson. Yet she knew that the police presence would not make much of a long-term difference. She also knew of a more promising approach: an urban-planning concept spelled out in Newman’s 1972 book, “Defensible Space.”
As a professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, Newman had realized that while some parts of St. Louis were notoriously perilous, others seemed secure and serene-particularly certain wealthy areas on the outskirts of town featuring homes built around the turn of the century in the manner of the grand mansions of Europe. Pleasant cul-de-sacs and private streets gave those homes an air of inviolability. Could poorer neighborhoods, he wondered, profit from a comparable sense of sanctity? When Durham-Jefferson invited Newman to Dayton in 1991, Newman leaped at the opportunity to talk, and the city hired him to put together a plan that ultimately cost $693,000 to implement.
Though in decline, Five Oaks had much going for it, including residents determined to keep their community intact. “We had prided ourselves on being diverse,” said homeowner Ann Szabo. She and others were alarmed at the prospect of Five Oaks’ becoming a ghetto.
Originally, residents planned to focus only on the worst areas, but over the course of several meetings they opted for a community-wide strategy. During the year city workers put in speed bumps and barriers, closed streets and alleys and put up brick and metal gates tastefully decorated with plaques bearing the neighborhood logo. In the process, the residents decided to divide one big neighborhood into numerous mini-neighborhoods, each physically separated from the rest. Smaller neighborhoods, Newman reasoned, would enhance the sense of community while making anonymous crimes harder to commit. And though the street closures might make getting about more difficult, they would also discourage outsiders from wandering into the area.
By summer of 1993 residents noticed a remarkable change. It was wonderful, Patrick Donnelly observed, to sit on the porch and not hear gunfire. City officials were no less pleased. In the most recent one-year period for which statistics are available, community traffic decreased by 67 percent, total crimes declined by 26 percent and violent crimes fell by half. Though police had worried that a reduction in Five Oaks’ crime might mean an increase elsewhere, there was no corresponding jump in nearby areas. The crime, said Reynolds, “appears to have disappeared.”
For the time being, Reynolds is holding his breath, wondering whether, in time, miscreants will “get used to driving around the barriers” and overrun Five Oaks again. Though Newman is now trying to work the same magic in Seattle and elsewhere, all concerned concede that Dayton has found no panacea, that it has merely demonstrated that a determined and energized community with some good ideas can make a dent in crime. Nonetheless, residents are upbeat. For if Dayton has not worked a miracle, at least, as Donnelly puts it, “Five Oaks has a good chance to overcome the odds.”
