Reimagining Cities-Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop

WALKUP GDP VS. TOTAL CRIME INDEX

1200

900

600

300

2023 Total Crime Index

0

$0

$3

$5

$8

$10 $13

$15

$18 $20 $23 $25

2023 WalkUP GDP (Billions)

Downtown Downtown Adjacent

Urban Commercial

Urban University

Source: Esri; Places Platform, LLC; Cushman & Wakefield Research

CRIME 82 While place management organizations cannot replace local police, one of their primary goals is to help city police create both the perception and reality of safety within their boundaries. This can be done in various ways, including the deployment of safety ambassadors who provide additional eyes, ears and smiles to make the WalkUP more welcoming to visitors and less attractive to potential criminals. Other strategies include hiring private security (often off-duty police), installing security cameras, improving environmental design (e.g., better lighting and clean, clear spaces), engaging the business community and collaborating with local law enforcement. Crime has always been a social issue with negative economic impacts in walkable urban areas. One could argue that the “back to the city” movement of the early 21st

century would not have happened without the dramatic drop in violent crime in the 1900s. While this study doesn’t aim to provide an exhaustive analysis of crime drivers, we acknowledge that crime—even just the perception of it—has significant impacts on tourism, 83 as well as the willingness of local visitors and employees to spend time in city centers and WalkUPs. Although crime victimization rates can sometimes be higher in the suburbs than in downtown areas, the broad perception is that walkable urban cores are more dangerous, making this a particularly vital topic for denser, walkable urban parts of the city. 84 In our analysis of WalkUPs across the 15 cities in our dataset, we did not find a strong correlation between GDP and crime.

82 Crime is a difficult thing to manage and measure, given that there are many ways to categorize and distribute it. One of the more common ways to measure changes in localized crime is through an index. Crime index data provides a view of the relative risk of specific crime types. It is not a database of actual crimes, but it shows the relative risk in an area compared to the entire United States. 83 Ghaderi, Zahed & Saboori, Behnaz & Khoshkam, Mana. (2016). Does security matter in tourism demand? Current Issues in Tourism. 20. 1-14. 10.1080/13683500.2016.1161603. 84 Peiser, Richard and Xiong, Jiaqi, “Crime and Town Centers: Are Downtowns More Dangerous than Suburban Shopping Nodes?” Journal of Real Estate Research Vol. 25, No. 4, 2003,

62 Cushman & Wakefield