Fighting gun violence in Chicago with trees, rakes and cleanup crews

A new program in Chicago is converting 50 vacant lots on the South Side and West Side into gardens as a way to fight crime as well as blight. Ashanti Randolph (above) from Urban Growers Collective places mulch around freshly planted sunflowers in one of the lots, in the 6000 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. | Joshua Lott / The Trace

Last spring, a Chicago woman emailed her alderman, complaining about litter on vacant, city-owned land near her South Shore home.

The appearance of the mess, she said, had coincided with an increase in loitering outside the restaurant next door, where four men had been shot to death two years earlier.

Early the next morning, a van dropped off a cleanup crew to clear the lot at East 75th Street and South Coles Avenue. The men worked for Safer Foundation, a nonprofit that helps ex-offenders and other job-seekers get back on their feet.

The workers scooped empty beer cans, cigarette butts and other detritus into plastic bags and tossed them into a garbage truck. They cleaned the sidewalk and trimmed trees whose branches hung low.

“We wouldn’t want people to get hit in the eye walking by,” said Al Jacoby, the Safer Foundation’s director of transitional employment, watching the crew work.

Brian Freskos reports for The Trace, an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to shining a light on America’s gun violence crisis.

All of this was the result of an innovative effort in Chicago to reduce gun violence by beautifying public spaces where shootings are most likely to occur. City leaders have boosted spending on sprucing up streets, vacant lots and public transportation lines, putting Chicago at the forefront of a movement to harness neighborhood beautification initiatives as a prescription for the violence that has cauterized daily life. This year, Chicago directed $7.4 million to workforce-development programs that put high-risk individuals to work greening areas in neighborhoods with high rates of shootings.

The programs are backed by research showing blight and violence often go hand in hand. One reason, experts believe, is that blight decreases people’s use of outdoor spaces. Criminals, in turn, are more apt to use those spaces to carry out illicit activities, figuring no one’s likely to intervene. Blight begets more crime, people flee, and that leads to more blight — and more crime.

“There is something about physical space that signals whether or not this is an area where crime can happen,” said Justin Heinze, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan who has studied the impact of blight on crime rates. “This literature goes way back into the 1970s, and there’s a lot of evidence to support it.”

Safer Foundation workers pick up garbage on a vacant lot in the 2700 block of East 75th Street in South Shore.

Similar beautification efforts — known as “greening” — have popped up in hundreds of cities around the country, part of what Alan Mallach of the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has called “perhaps the most significant vacant property strategy to emerge over the past decade.” This comes as local governments have grappled with the fallout from the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis. The programs have been justified as a way to spur economic growth, improve quality of life and improve public safety.

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The violence is heavily concentrated in pockets of the South Side and West Side, areas where unkempt vacant lots, boarded-up houses and litter are also common.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has shown support for the beautification programs since taking office in May. This summer, she unveiled Grounds for Peace, a $250,000 pilot program that aims to convert 50 vacant lots into gardens on the South Side and West Side. Lightfoot campaigned vowing to reorient Chicago’s broader violence-prevention approach with a smarter mix of policing and community-based programs.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is joined by (from left) Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th), Erika Allen, co-founder of Urban Growers Collective, and police Cmdr. Gloria J. Hanna at the kickoff of Grounds for Peace, a program to beautify city-owned vacant lots.

Grounds for Peace is a partnership between the city and READI Chicago, a Heartland Alliance program that provides job training, therapy and other services to young men who are most at risk of committing violent acts or becoming the victims of violence. Dozens of men will be involved in greening the vacant lots, selected because of proximity to high-crime areas in Woodlawn, Englewood and North Lawndale. The work is overseen by Urban Growers Collective, another nonprofit, which will train the men in property maintenance and landscaping — skills that can help them land jobs.

“This is a really progressive thing for a city to spearhead,” said Erika Allen, co-founder of the Urban Growers Collective. “These guys are really trying. And, in the end, they’ll walk away having done something that impacts everybody in a positive way.”

It’s a solution for reducing gun violence that doesn’t have to do with the Second Amendment,” said Michelle Kondo, a research social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service who has studied beautification initiatives. “That’s a major plus for this approach.”

The enthusiasm for beautification comes as Congress and the White House remain deadlocked over proposals to curb shootings, including a universal background-check bill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had promised to take up. One piece of legislation that has gotten much less attention is a measure introduced in April by U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, that would provide federal funds to help clean up vacant lots, tear down abandoned buildings and complete other beautification projects. It has yet to move out of committee.

Meanwhile, the scientific community has coalesced around the notion that beautification presents an effective, low-cost, crime-fighting tool, with studies showing violence tends to fall after blight is eradicated.

In one experiment, researchers found that the number of gun assaults dropped 29 percent in high-poverty areas surrounding vacant lots a year and a half after they were mowed, graded or otherwise dealt with through a public-private partnership in Philadelphia. The study authors concluded that, if vacant lots citywide were treated similarly, Philadelphia could expect to have 350 fewer shootings a year.

The findings mirror those from a study published in August in which scientists reported that an effort to demolish vacant and abandoned buildings in Detroit was associated with an 11 percent reduction in gun assaults.

Neither study found that the violence moved to other neighborhoods.

Charles Branas, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who was involved in both studies, said the fact that so much research has connected blight remediation to decreased levels of violence was striking.

“Typically, if you run multiple studies, they don’t show the same thing,” Branas said. “But these have been triangulating to show the same findings across different scientific studies conducted in different, scientific ways.”

Researchers have long surmised that, in addition to signaling that a neighborhood isn’t being watched or cared for, overgrown lots and vacant buildings might provide good hiding spaces for illegal guns. Ethnographers who interviewed young people for the Philadelphia study found that drug dealers also stowed their weapons in cars parked in front of vacant lots or abandoned buildings.

Heinze, the University of Michigan professor who has studied the impact of vacant-property beautification in Flint, Michigan, said the growing body of research could have implications nationwide.

“There are a lot of cities in the country that have thousands upon thousands of empty, vacant or dilapidated properties that would be candidates for this type of activity,” Heinze said. “The more of those properties that we get greened, I think, the stronger the effect on violence and crime is going to be.”

But experts caution that the approach isn’t a panacea. Mallach, a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress who has written about the growth in vacant properties around the United States, said beautification needs to be accompanied by social services and community programs that increase community engagement and help people up the socioeconomic ladder.

“If you’re going to be serious about trying to use this as a way to address gun violence, it’s got to be part of the strategy, not the whole thing,” Mallach said. “Magic bullets don’t exist.”

Brandon Whitmore (right) of Readi Chicago plants sunflowers at a vacant lot in the 6000 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive as part of Grounds for Peace.

People who live in a neighborhood, particularly those who feel their communities long been neglected by the local government, might look at a beautification program with suspicion and be reluctant to get involved, experts say. That happened in Detroit, where the city embarked on a massive tree-planting initiative only to get pushback from people unhappy that they had not been involved in the planning.

In Chicago, Grounds for Peace organizers say they hope to avoid such problems by building relationships with the community.

“Our goal is to provide meaningful activation, and hopefully the data comes back to show that just even doing this activation has disrupted some crime patterns in the area, and, because of that, it’s worthwhile to continue the program and deepen those connections,” Allen said.

Brandon Whitmore, 30, was part of a READI team planting sunflower seeds on the vacant lot in Woodlawn over the summer.

“The work is more than I expected, but accomplishing this feels good,” Whitmore said. “I think it will have a domino effect. Once the community sees us out here, hopefully, they’ll come together and change things for the better.”

Nicole Robinson, a 37-year-old hairstylist who lives in an apartment next to the lot, said she thought the sunflowers enhanced the neighborhood. But she was skeptical the changes would make the area safer.

“It’s a positive thing,” Robinson said. “But I don’t think it will have an effect on violence. It takes a community to affect violence. Not that.”

Grounds for Peace was inspired by the study on the study soon after joining former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration last year as an adviser.

“If you only provide social services and policing, it feels like you’re only getting at part of the issue,” Speigel said. “I think we also need to look at the environment as one of the things that we can address.”

The funding for the program has allowed established beautification programs to hire more workers, raise wages and reach areas that otherwise might have gone untouched.

“Historically, I haven’t operated for 12 months a year,” said Jacoby, who oversees the Safer Foundation’s Neighborhood Cleanup Program. “I’ve operated for as long as I can make whatever monies they budgeted for the program last. But this new money can put more people to work for a longer period of time.”

In 2018, Safer Foundation crews collected more than 60,000 bags of trash and debris, according to Jacoby, who pointed to a map of the city on which the neighborhoods where his workers had done most of their recent cleaning were circled. “The majority of our work is in some of the more violent areas of the city,” he said.

The employment aspect of these programs is key, as social service providers who work in violence prevention say one of the main reasons people turn to crime is to make ends meet. That is why the programs that gained from the additional funds are geared toward hiring people with criminal records. They get paid for beautifying neighborhoods while also gaining skills and certifications and being provided with services to help them land better-paying jobs.

One of the3m is Faith Smith, a 40-year-old mother who worked as a substitute teacher for the Chicago Public Schools before she got pulled over with an illegal gun in her purse. Smith blames that lone felony conviction for keeping her from getting another job. She said she applied for jobs in the school system, for a custodial position at a hospital and driving a delivery truck for Amazon. “Every job turned their back on me,” she said.

Smith learned about the Safer Foundation’s Neighborhood Cleanup Program from a friend and signed up this year. She was part of a crew that helped sweep the area around East 75th Street and South Coles Avenue in April, after the complaint about the litter.

“Do I want something better? Yeah,” Smith said. “But, without this, I wouldn’t be able to take care of my son.”

Turning vacant lots into gardens as part of a program that aims to reduce violence in Chicago.

In Englewood, a city program called Greencorps Chicago is working to turn a grassy, trash-strewn lot at 58th Street and Ada Street into an urban farm. About a half dozen Greencorps workers fanned out across the site one morning earlier this year to begin replacing the chain-link fence to make way for an 18-inch retaining wall of brick-filled gabion baskets — small cages to hold back earth and water. Eventually, workers will lay down wood chips and fresh soil so tomatoes, onions and herbs can take root.

Carlos Jackson, a 78-year-old retiree who has lived in a house across the street for 40-odd years, said the lot has been vacant for much of that time. “It’s going to be a huge improvement,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t nothing. Now, it’s going to be something.”

Across violence-wracked parts of the city, Greencorps workers have helped install raised garden beds, erect arbors and fashion landscapes to capture rainwater and alleviate pressure on the city’s stormwater system, according to Andy Johnson, director of the program, which is a partnership between the Chicago Department of Transportation and WRD Environmental.

“What’s good for the environment is usually good for people, and what’s good for people is a strong factor in the projects we look for,” Johnson said.

Greencorps got an additional $700,000 from the city this year, allowing the program to raise wages and hire more people, Johnson said.

Jasmine Davenport, 33, said she enlisted in Greencorps after seeing a flyer in a public aid office.

“Why not be a part of something that can change your neighborhood for the better?” Davenport said. “All this gun violence is happening. We need a bright spot in the city.”

A Greencorps crew digs holes in preparation to install a fence around a vacant lot in the 1300 block of West 58th Street in West Englewood being transformed into an urban farm.