Villa Park Neighborhood Assoc.

Preventing Crime

Preventing Crime in Affordable Rental Properties:

The Role of the Property Manager
by David Anderson

All of us want a home that is secure and a neighborhood that is safe--a place where we can live without fear. Therefore, providing affordable housing that is secure and safe from crime is one of the most important aspects of managing a successful rental property.
But what can a property manager do to create a safe property? To answer this question, Enterprise and the Consortium for Housing and Asset Management (CHAM) are writing a manual called Managing to Prevent Crime: A Guide for Owners, Managers, and Staff. This article summarizes what we’ve learned.

Creating and maintaining a secure, crime-resistant property is not a one-step process. There is no single contractor (police, private security, alarm company) that can ensure that a property will be free of crime. Safety and security are systemic issues. Every aspect of a property has an impact on its resistance to crime and disorder.

Preventing crime in low-income housing includes three components: place, people, and partnerships. Incorporating these three components into the day-to-day management of a property will help to deter crime and provide solutions to existing security problems.

Place

Our physical surroundings affect the way we behave. Everything we know consists of things we see, touch, smell, taste, or hear. We gather these sensations from our surroundings and interpret them to create our perceptions of the people and things with which we interact.

Naturally, the physical environment (and our perceptions of it) has a major influence on the way we behave. A room painted red can make many people feel agitated and aggressive, while a blue room can be calming and encourage concentration. A dark alley may scare us away, while a sunlit street may invite us to stroll--even though we know nothing about the people who live either place.

Fast-food restaurants and grocery stores use our perceptions to their advantage. Consider the way the layout of your local grocery store--produce near the entrance, brand-name merchandise on display at the end of aisles, candy at the checkout line--influences your perceptions (and your spending habits).

In the same way a supermarket chain encourages you to buy things you don’t need, it is possible for a property manager, and a property’s residents, to increase the property’s resistance to crime. By manipulating the appearance and design of a property, managers and residents can make it much less likely that crime will occur.

To understand this concept better, let’s look at William Spelman and John Eck’s simple model of the components necessary for a crime to occur:



The three sides of this triangle are the three things that need to be present for a crime to occur. Eliminate any single side, and the triangle disappears. A person walking down a dark alley that lacks a mugger will not be mugged. A person walking down a crowded, well-lit street next to a mugger is just as safe. And a mugger hiding in a dark alley will be unsuccessful if nobody ever walks past.

A property manager can influence a property and remove it from the triangle by paying attention to the appearance (its design) and maintenance of the property. Appearance depends somewhat on the initial design created when the property was constructed, but a property manager can do much to alter the original design in order to enhance a property’s resistance to crime.

Components of Good Design

The components of good design are access-control and surveillance. Access-control serves to keep criminals away from a crime target, such as an apartment or an office. Surveillance has two purposes: to observe and catch a criminal who does gain access and to cause a potential criminal to perceive that there is a risk of being observed.

These two components depend on a concept called territoriality--the sense of ownership among residents and staff that serves to protect a property from crime and disorder. It is important to create and nurture territoriality to ensure that access-control and surveillance are effective.

Access-control and surveillance can be incorporated into a property’s design through mechanical strategies, such as locks, video cameras, and burglar alarms, and structural strategies, like landscaping, signs, and street and housing layouts.

General Housing-Design Principles

Deciding how to apply these strategies effectively requires an understanding of the following basic design principles. These principles can be used in the development of new construction, and they also can be applied to existing properties.

Assign as much space as possible to individual units. This encourages a sense of ownership (territoriality) among the residents of a property. Space can be shared by more than one unit (or family), but it is difficult to achieve this effect if more than six units share a space (such as a hallway or yard).
Define territory with landscaping, fencing, and signs. Use design elements to clearly demonstrate the boundaries between private and public space. Make it obvious to everyone that someone is responsible for every part of the property. This indication of territoriality will create a perception among residents that they live in a safe place and it will cause potential criminals to perceive that there is a good possibility that they will be caught if they try to commit a crime.
Encourage natural surveillance. Homes and buildings should have main entries facing the street (or whatever functions as the main thoroughfare). Windows and porches should be utilized to facilitate resident attention to the street and the yards (front and back) of a property.
Use mechanical and structural strategies together. Housing should not be designed with a fortress mentality. Moderate levels of mechanical security like locks and fences, combined with good design and organized residents, will deter all but the most determined of criminals. Too much reliance on one type of strategy can have a negative effect on the other strategies. For example, surrounding individual yards with high stockade fencing may make it more difficult for a criminal to gain access, but it will also make it difficult for residents to keep watch over their neighbors’ property.
No property is perfect. But by understanding how a property does not fit the design principles above, a property manager can devise remedies that will turn those weaknesses into strengths. For example, if a property has too much common exterior space (like a large central "green"), it might be possible to divide much of that space into individual yards.

The Importance of Good Maintenance

Standard operating procedure should require that management staff inspect the property on a regular basis. This inspection should identify any problems that could affect the condition of buildings, grounds, or systems. Attention and responsiveness to these details are absolutely essential for both healthy finances and a secure property. Consistent, proactive maintenance can not only preserve a property, it can also deter crime. This chart, adapted from Successful Residential Management by Barbara Kamanitz Holldan, illustrates this relationship:



How Maintenance Relates to Security
Excellent Maintenance
New housing units in good physical condition
¯
Implement a plan of preventive maintenance
¯
Resident complaints addressed promptly
¯
Excellent resident relations; feelings of pride and ownership developing
¯
Initiatives by residents to plant gardens and beautify property beginning
Poor Maintenance
New housing units in good physical condition
¯
No formalized maintenance plan
¯
Resident complaints addressed haphazardly
¯
Unhappy, angry residents, many of whom want to move
¯
Untidy property, graffiti, overall deterioration of property


The cycle of decay that begins when a property (or neighborhood) is not well-maintained can quickly lead to problems of crime and disorder that will contribute to more decay, and so on. Just as the design of a place affects people’s perceptions, so too does the way it is maintained. Poor maintenance says that no one cares--and if the owner doesn’t care about a property, then why should anyone else?

Proper maintenance is one of the basic ways that a property manager can demonstrate territoriality. Replacing burned out light bulbs, mowing the grass, painting, and thousands of other little things are the signposts that demonstrate there is somebody guarding a property. Such maintenance will help to support the good design elements of a property and to remedy design weaknesses.

People

Another key group of strategies, in addition to mechanical and structural strategies, is human strategies. Management staff and residents of a property are key elements in preventing crime. Together they work to deter criminal behavior by demonstrating their ownership of a property. A property manager can ensure that this cooperative arrangement exists by screening prospective residents, enforcing rules, responding effectively to problems that occur, and nurturing resident involvement.

Resident Selection

The single most important thing in screening prospective residents is simply to do it. Some affordable-housing property managers do not screen at all for fear they will be accused of illegal discrimination. But being selective about who resides in a property is a vital element in preventing crime and can certainly be done without breaking the law. The key is to have a screening process which is simple, fair, and legal.

Screening Steps:

Put leasing criteria in writing and share them with applicants. (These criteria should be reviewed by a qualified attorney.)
Screen every applicant thoroughly.
Apply the screening process consistently and fairly.
Verifying Information:

Make sure all information provided by a prospective tenant is consistent. Compare the information on the applicant’s identification to the information on the application; addresses, phone numbers, and pictures should all match.
Run and analyze a credit report.
If local laws allow it, identify and contact previous landlords. Find out about the applicant’s behavior as a tenant.
Ensure that all reported sources of income are valid.
Consider checking for past criminal convictions.
Enforcing Rules

Lease provisions and rules are the ways that property managers define what is expected of everyone in the community. These provisions and rules should be clearly explained to new residents and fairly enforced throughout the property.

Responding to Problems

Property managers should develop and maintain a written plan for responding to crime and security issues (especially emergencies) so that everyone--staff and residents--will know how to respond to problems. Components of a plan should include:

whom to contact in an emergency;
a system for notifying residents about important events so that facts, not rumors, are communicated;
an incident-report form to document incidents so patterns and chronic problems can be identified and addressed; and
procedures for helping residents who have been victimized.
When one resident is victimized, all residents are affected. Criminal incidents can destroy a property’s sense of community and threaten its viability. By responding with sympathy and support, a property manager can dramatically affect the way an incident is perceived by the victim, the victim’s family and friends, and all of the residents. The steps to accomplish this are:

Visit the resident, express concern, and give him or her the opportunity to share the details of the incident.
If the police have not been called, offer to call.
Complete an incident report and offer any other assistance the resident may require.
Provide the resident with a list of local service providers that offer counseling and other forms of assistance. Most municipalities have some kind of victim services, either as part of the criminal-justice system or as a nonprofit organization. The property manager should know what agency does this and provide that information to the resident.
Nurturing Resident Associations

Establishing good relations with and among residents is a key factor in effective property management. When relationships are strong, residents are more likely to be better tenants--paying rent on time, staying longer, and demonstrating a sense of ownership. Aside from maintaining the property and being responsive to residents’ complaints and requests, one of the most important ways to create strong relationships is to support resident associations. Some methods that property managers use to do this include bulletin boards, newsletters, social events, regular meetings, financial assistance (funding for certain activities, initial start-up costs for an association, in-kind contributions, etc.), leadership training, and links to social services.

Partnerships

Crime problems that affect a low-income rental community frequently come from outside the property. Dealing with these problems requires developing partnerships with members of the surrounding community (residents, merchants, clergy, and government agencies). Property managers and residents can develop ties to the broader community by:

joining the local chamber of commerce or business association; (Because the members of these groups have an investment in the community, they can provide support with efforts to solve community-wide crime problems.)
attending neighborhood association meetings; (Many neighborhoods have some type of resident association. Property managers should participate in any such organizations and make an effort to involve their residents as well.)
developing relationships with community leaders; and
developing relationships with government agencies and social service providers.
To Learn More

This summary is just a starting point for understanding how property managers can prevent crime. To learn more about ways that place, people, and partnerships work together to enhance the safety of low-income rental communities, look for the manual Managing to Prevent Crime: A Guide for Owners, Managers, and Staff , to be published summer 1997 by The Enterprise Foundation and CHAM.

David Anderson is Senior Program Director, Community Safety, with The Enterprise Foundation. He can be reached by e-mail at danderson@enterprisefoundation.org.


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