Trees where people live

The psychologist Frances Kuo and the landscape researcher William Sullivan compared police crime reports for 98 apartment buildings in the Ida B. Wells development in Chicago in 2001. Residents were assigned to their buildings by the housing authority rather than by choice, so the vegetation around a building did not follow from who lived there. The greener a building’s surroundings, the fewer crimes were reported. Page 355 puts it in figures: buildings with high levels of vegetation had 52% fewer total crimes, 48% fewer property crimes and 56% fewer violent crimes than buildings with low levels of vegetation. The pattern survived controls for the number of apartments per building, building height, the vacancy rate and the number of occupied units.

The paper counts offences from police reports rather than convictions, and the comparison runs against buildings with little greenery rather than against no greenery at all. The full text is free from the University of Arizona.