In addressing a complex phenomenon, growing consensus sees a powerful indirect link

Wanda Castillo Diaz is not afraid to walk around center city Manchester.

“I am aware of my surroundings when I walk around, but I am comfortable,” she said. “But there are others who are really afraid.”

Castillo Diaz has been working in Manchester neighborhoods as a community health worker for 21 years. She’s also a member of The Center City Neighborhood Group, a group of residents and other stakeholders who have been meeting every month for the past six years to try to build community engagement and improve the neighborhood.

The group formed after a daytime shooting near a local restaurant left them feeling as though they needed to do more (see sidebar).

Residents know outsiders describe their neighborhood as a magnet for poverty and crime and are frustrated with how hard it has been to shake reputation.

“The residents feel stigmatized,” she said. The persistence of center city’s crime issues are easy to spot in the last decade of crime data from Manchester Police Department. According to the Collaborative’s analysis of calls for police service between 2006 and 2020, the number of crimes reported per resident was significantly higher in center city than anywhere else in Manchester (see map). Compared to the suburbs in northwestern and northeastern Manchester, parts of center city reported roughly five times as many calls for service.

Crime is a notoriously complex phenomenon, and no single theory can explain all crime, but interviews with criminologists and an analysis of the city’s crime data suggests some of this disparity is the indirect result of historical zoning policies. Since the 1920s, zoning laws in Manchester have helped reinforce pockets of concentrated poverty and, indirectly, higher crime. Crime control is not the primary goal of land-use zoning, but there is a growing consensus among researchers and city officials across the country that zoning has a powerful indirect effect.

As Manchester makes its once-in-a-decade revision to the zoning laws, a closer look at the relationship between zoning and crime may help planners better achieve the goals they’ve outlined in the Master Plan, which was approved last year. It may also help them dramatically improve the quality of life for some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, who have long been burdened with a disproportionate share of the city’s crime, and provide a helpful example for other New Hampshire cities dealing with similar issues.

Crime and zoning

According to veteran investigator and Manchester Police Reserve Officer Bob Freitas, police in Manchester have long understood crime in the city is tied to geography.

Freitas said between 1985 and 2009, when he was working as a police officer in the city, Manchester cops often referred to one part of center city as the “combat zone,” an allusion to the seedy reputation of an adult entertainment district in Boston which was created by city zoning in 1974. The area known to MPD officers by that name in Manchester — bounded by Merrimack, Auburn, Chestnut and Beech Streets — encompasses parts of the downtown and Kalivas/Union neighborhoods, according to the city’s neighborhood map, and parts of tracts 14 and 15 in Census Bureau records.

“From our perspective on it, we knew where the problems were, and they didn’t venture out past that,” said Freitas. “It seems to me, just driving through the city, those spots haven’t changed.”

Previous reporting by the Granite State News Collaborative has explored the link between zoning and poverty in Manchester, finding the city’s zoning policies have helped segregate the city by income. That reporting focused on the housing market, but as criminologists and city planners are increasingly aware, the economic side effects of exclusionary zoning policies can help exacerbate local crime rates.

“What often I think gets missed in this work,” MacDonald said, “is how important the actual zoning of residential land use is for crime.”

“When you have a place where there’s economic deprivation or there might even be a case where people get stuck in a neighborhood for generations living in poverty, these things together create a social environment that makes crime more likely,” he added.

According to Tate Twinam, a professor of economics at The College of William & Mary, “zoning feeds into that by helping to essentially create those concentrated pockets of poverty.”

Twinam and MacDonald also noted zoning affects crime not just through the residential housing market, but through the commercial market as well.

“Commercial areas tend to have higher crime, because we have a higher ambient population. You also might have more targets or things for people to steal. It’s a finding we see city after city, decade after decade,” MacDonald said.

The connection between commercial areas and higher crime also appears in Manchester. Areas zoned for commercial uses experienced by far the greatest number of calls for service of any zoning type in the city.

Echoing patterns seen in cities across the country, Manchester’s historical use of exclusionary zoning means very few single family homes are now located nearby commercial properties, but the overwhelming majority of multifamily homes are.

According to the Collaborative’s analysis of data from the Manchester Assessor’s office, less than 20 percent of single-family homes are within 100 yards of a commercial property, compared to more than 80 percent of multifamily, many of which are in center city.

The city’s planners have expressed intent to use zoning to help reduce crime. In a section of the current Master Plan, the authors wrote neighborhood design should be done with crime reduction in mind, citing a widely used framework called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED).

According to the International CPTED Association, an advocacy group, these principles can be applied in a wide range of programs, including neighborhood watches, graffiti removal, improvements to nighttime street lighting, and even broad-based community groups and events.

‘Problem-solving cops’

The good news is even if poverty and crime are on the rise in a given city, experts say, those trends can be reversed.

Professor Twinam, for example, highlighted recent research showing the effect of poverty on crime rates starts going away as soon as the underlying poverty subsides.

“One example is there have been studies looking at the demolition of these big public housing projects in places like Chicago and other cities that were big hotbeds of drugs and crime,” Twinam said, who was not involved in the studies.

“These big housing projects get demolished, and the people who live there end up getting spread out to different neighborhoods, some to public housing, some to private housing that is subsidized,” he added. “And what you see is they don’t really take the crime with them. Overall crime in the city just falls. And that’s just people basically responding to their environment.”

Studies like these have not only emboldened scholars like MacDonald and Twinam, but also those at Notre Dame, Georgetown, and the University of Denver, to call for the use of land-use law to help reduce crime.

These methods often aim to make areas more friendly to the public, whether by increasing nighttime lighting, mixing use types to ensure areas are frequented at all hours of the day, designing buildings to make public spaces more visible from the street, or designing public spaces to encourage residents to take more ownership of them.

By making spaces more friendly to the public, the theory goes, those spaces become less friendly to criminals.

MacDonald and Twinam agree policies like these tend to help reduce local crime rates when they are introduced.

“When we have mixed-use and mixed-income, you find that the crime rates (are) lower (overall),” MacDonald said.

“It’s not going to be as low as affluent single-family only, but it’s substantially lower than when you have single-use (separated from) high-density residential. This suggests that if you have a greater distribution of income in a place, there’s benefits for everyone living there.”

To its credit, the Manchester Planning Board has already suggested implementing some strategies experts advocate.

“Housing units should be distributed throughout mixedincome, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods,” the board wrote in the new Master Plan.

More dramatically, they also called for the city to “eliminate or reduce” zoning districts that are exclusively single-family.

Change in the city’s housing market won’t happen overnight, however. Even if the city does implement some of these changes, it will likely take years for newly allowed development to have a city-wide impact.

For John Rivera, pastor of Hope Tabernacle and member of the Center City Neighborhood Group, he sees more property ownership as a solution. During his time as a pastor in New York City, he said one of the few things he experienced that actually affected change was an investment in residential homes.

“We saw the community change when the city and the state … subsidized home ownership,” Rivera said. “I saw a block transform because there were owners now.”

‘I am aware of my surroundings when I walk around, but I am comfortable,’ says Manchester resident Wendy Castillo Diaz. ‘But there are others who are really afraid.’ (Courtesy photo)

Other tools are at the city and community’s disposal. As MacDonald emphasized, the police still have an important role to play by doing what they can to help reshape the physical environment.

MacDonald described a strategy of policing that was first proposed in the 1970s in which police are encouraged to think creatively about each crime issue they encounter and the potential strategies they could use to deal with it, beyond just using their arrest powers.

MacDonald described a study run by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Anthony Braga in which Braga studied how police in Lowell, Mass., implemented this strategy, which is called problem-oriented policing.

“They randomly assigned officers to basically put more officers in a place, but it wasn’t just flooding an area with more police. The police were supposed to engage in these problemsolving tactics.”

Over time, MacDonald said, crime went down. “The police were doing things like getting abandoned cars removed, or if there’s a bunch of trash built up, if there’s a place with no street lights, you know? Now, the police aren’t doing work themselves, but they can identify what to do through their own observations, and then trying to get other city agencies and organizations to respond to the problems in the community. Obviously, the police can’t change the zoning. But they can at least help.”

For its part, the Center City Neighborhood Group regularly plans initiatives to try to improve the streets and build social investment and cohesion in a place unfairly mired in isolation and sometimes fear.

They focus instead on cleaning trash off the streets and alleys, petitioning for better street lighting, organizing flower plantings to beautify a curb or murals to cover up graffiti. The group organizes annual cleanups and, through its affiliation with Neighbor-Works Southern NH, covers half the cost to spruce up badly vandalized buildings with murals, with the other half covered by landlords.

“People really do care,” said Rivera. “They just don’t always know what to do to fix the problem.”

---

Editor’s note: This article is another installment of “Invisible Walls,” an ongoing joint project of the Granite State News Collaborative, NH Business Review, Business NH Magazine and NH Public Radio that describes how exclusionary zoning laws have reinforced areas of persistent poverty, impacting many aspects of community life, including crime, public health, affordable housing and access to economic opportunity in Manchester. The team used Manchester as a case study, but the same sorts of exclusionary zoning practices present in Manchester are common across the state, and likely have had similarly broad effects.