We will incorporate design and maintenance practices to create safer environments in both established and new neighborhoods. Addressing the impact of the neighborhood environment on public safety will follow two tracks: 1) reviewing new projects (including subdivisions and major new developments) and incorporating safe environmental design standards into their design, and 2) auditing existing neighborhoods for unsafe conditions and correcting problem areas.
Safety evaluation of new projects will start with developing design standards and guidelines, using the principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design as a starting point. Our public safety departments should develop specific areas of expertise in these principles and be fully integrated into the City’s project review and approval process.
Established neighborhoods present different challenges. Partnerships between City staff and community organizations will analyze the neighborhood environment and local crime patterns to identify and correct specific problems. The most common issues include overgrown lots, hidden spaces, and vacant and deteriorated buildings. We must be aggressive in such areas as vegetation control and demolition of buildings beyond feasible repair.
Response times when emergencies occur are also an important factor in the interaction between public safety and environmental design. Neighborhood designs should increase the efficiency of public safety operations and ensure that the greatest number of residents can be reached in the shortest amount of time by emergency responders. This should include strategic improvements in existing neighborhoods and efficient design in new neighborhoods.
Systematic evaluation and correction of design aspects of new projects and inherently unsafe environments in established areas will be necessary to ensure a safe environment for all residents of Oklahoma City.
We will correct unsafe building elements and design conditions in public facilities and outdoor spaces. The City should lead in providing safe and secure facilities and properties. This is especially important in distressed neighborhoods, where a public park or center may be seen as a refuge. All publicly accessed properties should be assessed for unsafe conditions, including but not limited to poor lighting, blind spots, and maintenance hazards. Once this inventory has been completed, priorities for repair should be set and incorporated into the capital program.
Graffiti and vandalism in public areas are special and persistent problems. Uncorrected incidents suggest neglect in a neighborhood, which in turn encourages both more vandalism and serious criminal activity. Graffiti can be controlled through an aggressive removal policy, best accomplished in partnership with neighborhood residents. Cooperative action for productive purposes has the secondary benefit of building a sense of neighborhood effectiveness and establishing credibility for improvement efforts all of which help reconstruct the social fabric.
Improve the functionality and efficiency of the street network by:
- Providing direct connections from residential developments to nearby places and to each other.
- Providing street and sidewalk stubs to adjacent vacant land in anticipation of future development.
- Connecting new development to existing street and sidewalk stubs, and to existing trail, open space, and bicycle networks.
- Reducing block sizes and use of dead-end streets.
- Maintaining the existing street grid to preserve connectivity and mobility options.
Revise subdivision regulations to include connectivity standards and guidelines that require greater street connectivity, and provide allowances for pedestrian and bicycle connections when street connectivity cannot be made.
Establish a process for existing neighborhoods to request traffic calming, including how to evaluate the request, select the appropriate type of calming treatment, and fund recommendations.
Require sidewalks on both sides of all streets in urban LUTAs and in the Rural Residential LUTA for subdivisions with densities greater than 1 unit per acre.
Reverse the detrimental impact of vacant and abandoned buildings through the following efforts:
- Develop an Abandoned Buildings program geared toward a significant reduction in vacancies by creating incentives and/or penalties that discourage prolonged building abandonment and help the City to recoup the costs associated with vacated buildings. Use fees generated by this program to help fund redevelopment of abandoned buildings.
- Assess the feasibility of potential reuse options for dilapidated or abandoned buildings. Define and establish criteria to help identify buildings that are too far gone and/or too costly to feasibly rehabilitate, and consider a coordinated demolition program for those buildings.
- Seek changes in state legislation to enhance the City’s ability to maintain and improve its neighborhoods including:
- Laws which would speed up the demolition process for long-term dilapidated or abandoned properties that cannot be rehabilitated, and
- Laws which would strengthen the City’s ability to require property owners to rehabilitate or sell neglected, boarded-up properties.
Target specific areas of the city for enhanced safety and proactive enforcement. Selection of target areas will be informed by the Intelligence Led Policing program, with coordinated involvement from Police, Code Enforcement, Public Works Department, Planning, and community-based organizations.
Create regulations/standards/guidelines that focus on design and/or compatibility principles which are sensitive to the surrounding urban form, especially in areas that are stable or improving and whose character is well-established. These provisions should also help ensure compatibility between lower- and higher- intensity land uses.
Improve parking provisions in neighborhoods that are near vibrant commercial corridors/areas by improving parking and corridor design, non-vehicular networks, transit, and signage.
Establish a Crime-Free Multifamily Housing Program designed to keep multifamily housing developments safe from crime and perceptions of crime by:
- Supporting partnerships between the police, property managers, property owners, and tenants.
- Providing training to managers and owners about screening applicants, fire safety, fair housing, and other components of ‘active property management’.
- Providing a security assessment based on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles.
- Conducting safety meetings with residents/tenants.
Ensure that safety is factored into the design of neighborhoods through the following policies:
- Incorporate development standards and guidelines into the Subdivision Regulations that integrate the principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and increase safety and social interaction.
- Create a pre-development checklist with criteria to evaluate how safety is designed into a project.
- Establish a pre-development process wherein safety is considered in the design of projects.
- Involve the Fire and Police Departments in reviewing proposed development and redevelopment to provide input on any safety-related design concerns.
Evaluate public facilities and public property for unsafe conditions such as poor lighting (quality and quantity); blind spots; poor maintenance conditions; and other unsafe conditions. Prioritize improvements to these facilities and properties based on the following criteria: a) Proximity and condition of nearby neighborhoods; and b) Cost/benefit associated with mitigating the unsafe condition and maintaining the improvement.
Establish criteria for locating, designing, and improving public and private parks to enhance safety and security, including:
Locating new parks in areas that are highly visible and accessible from surrounding residential streets and utilize trails to increase activity and visibility in parks.
Utilizing Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design principles, which includes controlled access, visibility, lighting, etc. for new parks and retrofitting/redesign of existing parks.
Improve safety of users of the parks and trails system by:
- Providing good lighting, emergency call boxes, and regular police patrols along the trail system.
- Providing shelter structures along the trail networks and determining the appropriate spacing for such structures. Structures could be relatively small to keep costs down but should be sturdy and easy to maintain.
Utilize existing natural streams as amenities in public parks, and regularly monitor and maintain stream banks for safety of park users.
Revise subdivision regulations to require development adjacent to parks and public open spaces to maintain open sight lines to parks and public open space. Reduce/limit residential rear yards, fences, walls, and physical and visual enclosures around park and public open space perimeters. Encourage designs that allow homes to face into parks or where side yards are located near parks.
Incorporate Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles into city-wide design standards for development and redevelopment of public and private projects. CPTED principles include: 1) Territorially – physically define spaces as public or private and the appropriate use is obvious even to outside observers; 2) Access Control – deny access to soft targets; 3) Natural Surveillance – make it easy to observe all users of/in a particular territory/space; 4) Maintenance and Management – ensure equipment is functioning (lights, gates, etc.), landscape is kept neat especially to preserve surveillance.
Maximize fire safety through actions such as:
Modifying regulations and guidelines to prevent subdivisions with a single point of access – except those with fewer than 10 homes.
Developing a vegetation management program targeting the wildland/urban interface, including rights-of-way in rural areas, and incorporating recommendations from the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise Communities initiative.
Requiring residential sprinklers for developments located in Rural Land Use Typologies.
Requiring exceptional, effective, and easy access to sites augmented by a thorough system of connections within and between developments.
Evaluate development proposals to assess design components that contribute to or detract from safety and analyze emergency response capacity and capability.
Ensure resources and funds remain dedicated to crime prevention programs, including but not limited to: block watches; graffiti removal; education and outreach associated with elder fraud, identity theft, and sexual predators; safe driver programs for automobiles, motorcycles, and bicycles; after-school and youth diversion programs that provide recreational and educational support (tutoring, homework help, etc.); and other crime prevention programs. Ensure planokc is maintained to support and reflect the City’s priorities to provide a safe and secure community.
Reinforce existing partnerships and create new partnerships with allied agencies and non-profits to intervene early and often with at-risk youth redirecting them from participation in criminal activities to educational opportunities, job training, community service projects, neighborhood and business improvement programs, and other community building projects and/or programs.
Adopt design standards to enable emergency management resources to be highly effective, such as resilient buildings, interconnected transportation networks, and other design considerations that help ensure community safety and recovery.
Reduce crime and improve feelings of safety through long term efforts such as:
- Improving design regulations to maximize crime prevention through appropriate urban design,
- Developing community-based activities, programs, and facilities that reduce crime and develop life skills, such as after school and youth diversion programs and facilities for recreation and educational support (e.g., tutoring, homework help, etc.),
- Encouraging more compact development to increase effectiveness of individual officers by ensuring less travel time and more engagement,
- Implementing a “good landlord” program,
- Exploring enhancements to police operations such as:
- Committing to a certain number of officers per capita and/or per square mile of urbanized area,
- Increasing patrols (automobile, bicycle, or on foot) in targeted areas,
- Evaluating needs on a regular basis for increasing the number of key positions, such as detectives, to meet demands,
- Coordinating neighborhood improvement efforts (such as the Strong Neighborhoods Initiative and the Vacant and Abandoned Buildings program) with policing efforts, and
- Supporting efforts to obtain more effective criminal justice law, such as stricter gang laws.
Catalyze infill development on vacant, underutilized, and brownfield sites in urbanized areas by:
- Investing in infrastructure improvements;
- Improving multi-modal transportation networks;
- Improving parks and open spaces;
- Improving schools and other civic resources;
- Exploring innovative methods such as:
- A public-private partnership to purchase problem properties in target areas and build or rehabilitate homes while improving infrastructure and amenities
- An infill house plan program similar to Sacramento or Milwaukee
- Identifying and removing barriers to rehabilitation and/or replacement of residential buildings.
- Establishing a position in the City to facilitate medium- and large-scale redevelopment projects through the development process by guiding interactions with City departments, allied agencies, and utility companies.
Encourage the adaptive reuse of underutilized structures and the revitalization of older, economically distressed neighborhoods.