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Given the emphasis that Gov. Roy Romer and others are
placing on fighting crime and violence, perhaps we should
revive a 1960s chant: The streets belong to the
people.
Back then, the streets seemed to belong to violent factions like the police and National Guard. Now many streets belong to other violent factions, like youth gangs.
The new crime-fighting concept is to get us ordinary citizens to become as committed to our neighborhoods and communities as we are to careers or sports teams.
For once, our governor is on the right track. Jane
Jacobs, the best urban theorist of this era, has often
pointed out that street crime is virtually unknown in old
urban ethnic neighborhoods where there are many eyes on
the street,
where people sit on the stoop of an
evening, where shops mingle with residences, where police
officers live in the neighborhood and walk their beats,
where middle-class people walk or use public transit.
Though that environment is quite urban, it's really not all that different from life in a small town. And it's essentially what Romer promotes with block organizations.
The problem is that the most potent forces in modern America want a homogeneous country of interchangeable parts, and communities and neighborhoods are obstacles.
Given a choice between building a freeway and destroying a neighborhood (unless it's an exclusive gated and walled subdivision for the wealthy), America will build the freeway every time.
Our zoning laws, designed to elevate property values, segregate residences from businesses, so we have residential areas that are empty by day (good pickings for criminals) and commercial areas vacant by night (ditto).
Corporate America -- the institutions that Romer often tries to recruit to Colorado -- loves to transfer people often, thus insuring that the prime loyalties of capable people are to the company, not to their communities. There are many good people who were in Omaha last year and will be in San Diego next year, so what's the point of investing any energy in Denver this year?
And even if you do invest time and affection in your community or neighborhood, trying to keep it a fit place to work and live, can you stop the developers who install auto-dependent franchise outlets? Or the companies who move stores out of a pedestrian downtown into a mall surrounded by parking lots?
The recent outbreak of urban street crime is terrible. But it's just a symptom. MacWorld wants you off the streets, so that you're in the car you bought from a big company, burning gas America bought with blood in 1991, driving to a mall to buy electronic entertainment so that you won't sit on the porch and gossip with passing pedestrians. They profit when we abandon our sidewalks, and so who's left on the street except criminals?
Block associations are fine. But if Romer is sincere about fighting crime, he should put his shoulder to a bigger wheel and help us take back our neighborhoods and communities -- if we had those, we'd have the streets, too.
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