Pittsburgh’s Perfect Storm: Easton Take Note
Pittsburgh is one of my favorite cities. It is manageable even for the novice urban explorer, boasting a rich diversity of arts, culture and ethnicity. From September through December the city revolves around the ‘black and gold.’ If you’re not part of Steelers Nation, then you just don’t know what life is really about.
But Steel City has had many bumps along the road. Economic depression, sky rocketing unemployment and spiking crime forced the city to reinvent itself. Over the years, as a frequent visitor, I have seen the city improve dramatically. Every urban area, including Easton, could learn a lot from Pittsburgh’s brain trust.
Ask any cab driver about the down town and he or she will be quick to point out the number of cameras and police officers that have attributed to a safe city. Pittsburgh sports over 300 surveillance cameras in its downtown and employs over 1,000 officers. Crime statistics, investor growth, increased tourism and a steadily strengthening real estate market are all evidence of a city that has proven to prioritize safety and quality of life.
Yet law enforcement cannot take the credit alone. In concert with these policing measures is the highly successful ‘One Vision One Life,’ street intervention. Three key ingredients, working in harmony with each other, has created the ‘perfect storm’ of crime and violence reduction for a city that not long ago faced what seemed to be a dismal future.
One Vision One Life is an initiative of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services Office. The program works with targeted communities to reduce or eliminate violence. Creators of One Vision One Life (OVOL) crafted a six point plan designed to mediate and intervene in street conflicts, provide alternatives to at-risk persons through outreach, build strong community coalitions, promote key messages through street contacts to reduce shootings and acts of violence, provide rapid response to shooting victims and establish programs for at risk children.
Components leading to the success of the intervention include:
Trains street-wise outreach workers who have benefited from OVOL. Outreach workers are residents who live in the neighborhoods and have an intimate knowledge of street activity. They are overseen by key community leadership.
Outreach workers and community leaders strategically and systematically collect street level information and intervene in turf battles, disputes and drug and or gang activity before they evolve into acts of violence or other crime.
Outreach workers quantify and qualify the success of their conflict mediation on the streets, conflicts rising out of gang and drug related activities, domestic and acquaintance disputes.
Community leaders and coordinators meet with police every month to review and analyze police statistics to help guide OLOV policies and intervention tactics and to help better inform the public.
Outreach workers canvass the streets at night providing conflict resolution through relationship building
OVOL provides employment opportunities and assists with professional training and education as an alternative to crime and incarceration along with housing services, addiction treatment and youth programs.
Over and over again throughout the country progressive thinking community leaders, legislators and law enforcement personnel are crafting and implementing creative strategies reducing crime and therefore incarcerations.
The goal of these cities is not only to make a city safe but to make it healthy through restorative practices working in concert with law enforcement tactics.
Easton needs to follow suit. With a looming $107 million dollar proposal to expand Northampton County’s prison, a 70% prison recidivism rate, a struggling economy and double digit unemployment, continuing on a path emphasizing arrests and crime suppression while minimizing intervention will only fuel unemployment and continue to fill our prisons.
While city council has had no problem in contributing $200,000 toward a surveillance camera, a progressive law enforcement measure, it has yet to embrace forward thinking social intervention measures that have a direct impact on reducing crime. It is incumbent upon Easton City Council members to explore, adopt, implement and in part fund strategic interventions similar to One Life One Vision.
Residents have a responsibility to learn about alternatives and use their votes and voices to provoke the cutting edge change other cities have embraced.
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3 comments:
Pittsburgh has always been one of my favorite cities. Two of my three mothers live there - my father died there last year. I lived in Shadyside for 2 years when a VISTA Volunteer in early 1970s - I was the architectural consultant to 68,000 public housing tenants and the East Liberty community revival effort. I published the first major gay newspaper on the east coast there before taking an architectural position in South Wales, then London, then Australia.
Pittsburgh overcame many financial and environmental setbacks by redefining itself, including creating a global medical research industry there.
Every city could learn much by studying how Pittsburgh claimed a better future in spite of it's decline.
Terrence--this sounds like a great program. Will you be working in some of the One Vision One Life techniques into the outline for the comprehensive strategic plan for reducing open air drug markets? Please post to the blog when a date is set for the neighborhood meeting to get input for developing this strategy.
Tim--it sounds like Pittsburgh figured out that marketing is important to revitalization--something Easton hasn't figured out yet. Do you remember any sort of coordinated marketing effort there?
Noel:
Great question!
I was personally involved for a year volunteering for the AIA Architects Workshop in East Liberty, Pittsburgh when I was a VISTA Volunteer Architect there for two years in 1970-71.
The workshop was established through the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Sam Jamron, R.A., was the architect who created and pitched this idea to the institute, and enlisted the efforts of the city, as best as my memory serves almost 40 years later, eeek.
Other notable city improvement initiatives included the Pennsylvania History and Landmarks Foundation, where a founder, the late James D. Van Trump, an illuminating architectural historian, promoted areas such as the Mexican War Street neighborhood, Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, etc., via his weekly radio program.
Jamie was a personal friend when I lived in Shadyside and later. He inspired me to publish my first book of the historic architecture of Western Australia, in 1974, during a time when 'modernism' was the rage!
To this day people comment about Jamie's legacy in revitalizing historic Pittsburgh neighborhoods.
Regarding Pittsburgh's current place as a leader in the medical research industry, I am certain that industry visionaries did much groundwork with the city municipal authorities, to create the necessary infrastructure to welcome such an endeavor. It was not cheap, but it has since paid off hugely.
I do know that Easton has been very fortunate to have had civic leaders and volunteers who look do much to create a better tomorrow for Easton. We're already living in that better tomorrow!
I know of many current positive developments that could not have happened without such visionary leadership, and love of Easton, that I have been fortunate to closely witness in my past 33 years of being involved here.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that only a few people are necessary to create immense positive change in the world. Indeed, that's all that's ever moved humanity out of the stone age, so why should Easton be any exception?
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