THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510130655
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: ELECTION '95
THE CITIZENS' AGENDA
The Virginian-Pilot has asked people around the state what their major
concerns are leading up to the Nov. 7 election. This is one in a
series of in-depth reports on those concerns: Today's topic: Violence
in Public Housing.
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
Less than a decade ago it was a nightmare. Drug dealers plied their trade and hookers made dates in plain view of children. No one, not even armed police officers, felt safe at night.
Diggs Town, circa 1989. The third largest public housing project in Norfolk, with more than 1,400 residents, was arguably the city's most violent.
The community may have reached its nadir one day in February that year, when Anthony Crish, a 60-year-old insurance salesman was shot and killed as he attempted to collect insurance premiums.
Crish's killer turned out to be a 19-year-old Calvin Morris, a resident of Oakleaf Forest, a public housing project across Campostella Road from Diggs Town.
The Crish murder became the most vivid example of just how dangerous life in Norfolk's third largest public housing community had become.
``It was an exceptional problem, it really was,'' said Ray Strutton, assistant executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority. ``There was a lot of drug dealing, a lot of shootings and a fairly high murder rate. . . . Those are the kinds of major things that were going on.''
Fast forward to 1994. Diggs Town has changed.
New facades on the buildings. Porches with roofs. Fences that define yards. New through-streets.
Most impressive, though, is the decrease in Diggs Town's violent crime rate to a point slightly higher than the city's. It dropped 17 percent in 1994, all in the span of one year.
Robberies, murders and aggravated assaults in 1994 were cut in half from 1993. And since 1990, robberies and aggravated assaults were cut by almost two thirds.
Strutton said a combination of things influenced the drop in crime.
For instance, construction workers were at Diggs Town almost non-stop for a while, and their activity disrupted street life in Diggs Town. That probably cut into the crime rate, Strutton admits.
But two changes made by housing authority officials also helped improve things.
First, a federal rules change in the early 1990s allowed the authority to combine funding so that additional money could be spent on one of Norfolk's housing communities. Th NRHA designated $17 million for physical improvements at Diggs Town.
``We were able to take three years worth of modernization funding and combine it into a final project at Diggs Town,'' Strutton said. ``We thought this would be an opportunity to do something unique.''
Second, Strutton wanted to develop a project where control was taken down to the lowest level within the community - the family itself.
To accomplish this, large chunks of Diggs Town were separated by roads, others by walkways and still others by fences.
This broke the community into front yards and back yards, and it destroyed the large blocks of common ground that had developed into frightening chunks of no man's land where crime flourished.
Also, front porches were added to every apartment. This brought families outside, increasing the eyes and ears that might spot trouble.
``We tried to create a sense of ownership for their portion of the neighborhood,'' Strutton said. ``We wanted people to start looking out for one another and to keep the bad elements out of their neighborhoods.''
A new traffic pattern eliminated dead ends and cul-de-sacs, adding through streets that cut into the no man's land that had been home to drug deals.
The same technique has been used successfully on a smaller scale at two other Norfolk public housing communities - Roberts Village and Calvert Square, Strutton said.
Other projects probably also would benefit, but the future of public-housing financing is uncertain, Strutton said. The Republican version of the next federal budget, for instance, has no money for public-housing construction.
``If the money was available, we would take what we learned at Diggs Town and try to duplicate it,'' Strutton said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
CUTTING DOWN ON CRIME IN DIGGS TOWN
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: COMMUNITY CONVERSATION CRIME PUBLIC HOUSING
HAMPTON ROADS STATISTICS
by CNB