Paul, Administrator Dorn’s comments are even more absurd than you suggest considering what is just across the page from her pro-light rail agit-prop: a very sad account from one of the Observer’s own reporters on being mugged at gunpoint outside her mid-town Charlotte residence.
Now light rail does not cause crime, but the higher population density it requires shrinks private space and can create permissive conditions for opportunistic street crime. It is all laid out in copious detail in a February Reason magazine take-down of New Urbanist wishful thinking on land-use and crime. One snippet:
The reason mixing retail with residential areas increases crime is simple: Space is only defensible if residents have the clear right to influence and control what takes place there. In commercial or public areas, everyone has the right or excuse to be present, and offenders are indistinguishable from law-abiding citizens. Mixed use therefore reduces residential control over the neighborhood and provides criminals with anonymity as they merge into the background.
Other New Urbanist faves — alleys, on-street parking close to residences, low-rise development — all increase the “permeability” of neighborhoods and, hence, the potential for crime. This is an undeniable cost of high density, “transit oriented development” yet is almost never mentioned in the rollcall of trade-offs cities make when they jump on the light rail tracks and move away from the relative safety of “sprawl.”
