Home ›

The Planetizen News Brief

25 October 2007 - 7:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

Like What You're Hearing? Have Something To Say?

Let us know how we're doing. If you have any comments about the Planetizen Podcast, send your questions, comments, or suggestions to editor@planetizen.com

Full Transcript

With big cities across the world investing in closed circuit cameras and hidden microphones to catch criminals and keep the streets safe, a new movement is gathering momentum to take a more passive approach to crime prevention. It’s all about fighting crime with design. Law enforcement officials across the country are encouraging planners and urban designers to follow a strategy called "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design" – an approach that seeks to make urban areas more uncomfortable for criminals. The Sacramento Bee reports that making a street less crime-friendly can be as easy as propping up a couple more streetlights, but can also include more urbanistic goals such as increasing foot traffic on streets, or performing landscaping beautification projects that eliminate possible hiding places, and designing buildings with more windows facing sidewalks and parking lots. And after a redesign of a particularly crime-prone gas station in Sacramento last year, crime has dropped by 33%.

Meanwhile, a neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland, is being scouted by developers who want to turn the single-family area into a higher density, mixed-use urban village. The proposed buyout of the neighborhood’s 60 homes would create a clean slate for this development, but many residents are opposed to the idea of moving out of what they thought would be the last place they’d ever live. The Washington Post reports that the developers originally offered homeowners more than $3 million apiece for their properties -- an amount many found hard to resist. That offer has since been scaled back, but the new price is still far above the market-value of these homes. But despite the economic gains to be had, many homeowners have banded together to fight against the proposed buyout, hoping that if the entire 60-house section can’t be bought, the developers will be forced to take their project somewhere else.

And while those Maryland residents are fighting to prevent their neighborhood from being turned into a high-rise development, homeowners in Houston are fighting to prevent a high-rise from moving in next door. The Wall Street Journal reports that plans have been approved to build a 23-story high rise condominium tower in an affluent neighborhood primarily occupied by million-dollar single-family homes. As the only major U.S. city with no zoning laws, Houston pretty much has its hands tied to prevent the project from going forward, despite a vocal group of opponents in the affluent neighborhoods adjacent to the planned tower. This latest land use battle has many in Houston longing for the adoption of zoning laws in the city, but Mayor Bill White says that day will not come on his watch.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

Fighting Crime With Design

How Much Is An Entire Neighborhood Worth?

Condo Project Upsets Affluent Houstonians

»
Bookmark and Share
“
"To ignore this space is shortsighted." -- Jennifer Wolch, Director of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities
”