Near this city’s new green spaces, a dramatic reduction in crime
Linda Lloyd has lived in West Philadelphia her whole life. The 67-year-old, a retired municipal employee, has always taken pride in her community and tried to keep her neighborhood in good shape. But it hasn’t always been an easy task.
“Before, it was pretty bad here,” Lloyd, who moved to her home on Wyalusing Avenue in 1989, tells Reasons to be Cheerful. “The poverty. It was drug-infested. We struggled a lot.”
Like many Black Philadelphians, Lloyd grew up surrounded by stark poverty. For decades, Philadelphia was America’s poorest big city, suffering the highest poverty rate of the 10 most populous metropolises in the United States. Historic, racist urban policies such as redlining meant that poverty was — and still is today — unequally felt: 24.5% of Black residents now live below the poverty line, double the rate of white residents. Criminal gangs thrived in and preyed on Black districts.
But over the past years, shoots of hope have begun to emerge in Lloyd’s community thanks to a groundbreaking project revealing an underappreciated upside to creating and maintaining urban green spaces: preventing violent crime…