When Stores Close Due To Rising Crime, Urban Blight Is Back — And It Will Get Worse

While it's insane that crime is so severe and law enforcement so nonexistent in a prosperous city that businesses must close their doors early or shut them entirely, there's more in store.

In response to a retail rival's possible move to the city, Target opened a grocery store in 2010, pushing along competition in a city where neighborhoods with high crime are also neighborhoods with no grocery stores.

While bright windows, visiting shoppers, and neighborhood jobs bring safety, vacant retail, with its boarded-up windows, graffiti, uncleaned sidewalks, and ugliness brings crime.

A University of Southern California study found that even with temporary closures, "The area immediately around a closed restaurant experienced an increase in property crime and theft from vehicles." "Furthermore," the authors wrote in a Harvard Business Review article, "This increase in crime disappeared as soon as the restaurant reopened." There aren't a lot of studies on this important matter, but our understanding of it goes back decades.

Undeterred, one concept she famously developed was the "Eyes on the street" theory of crime prevention, where she suggested mixed-use neighborhoods bring safety and vibrancy to city living.

Crime begets crime begets crime, and changes to enforcement and prosecution policies are entirely to blame.

In nearby Oakland, where murder is up 90 percent in the past year and car-jackings up 88 percent while the city council continues to cut police, city leaders dismiss the surge in crime as "a bump in the road," but for the people who live there, strive to work there, and try to not be murdered there, it's more than that.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/when-stores-close-due-to-rising-crime-urban-blight-is-back-and-it-will-get-worse/