American Dream

Note that several of the areas described below are touted by Smart Growth advocates and groups (including the Sierra Club, Surface Transportation Policy Project, Coalition for Smarter Growth, Washington Regional Network for Livable Communities and the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC)) as an ideal place to erect massive new apartment complexes, and that families with middle-class incomes should be forced to live in them, instead of single-family detached houses or at least townhomes or row houses.

I am not aware of a state border anywhere else in the U.S. that has this extent of violent criminal activity.

PEC press release - Blueprint for a Better Region

Blueprint for a Better Region Web site

Living on Edge of Violence
District-Prince George's Border Is Region's Most Dangerous Area

By Allison Klein and Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 6, 2005; B01

Graphic: Border Crime

Quotes:

Liquor stores. Seafood joints. People hanging out on the streets. For several blocks in either direction, it's hard to tell whether you're in the city or the county.

"Now we're in Prince George's," says Capt. Kevin Davis of the county police as he drives over Southern Avenue in Capitol Heights on a recent night. "And now we're in D.C."

The traffic lights are the clue, he says. In Prince George's, they hang from cables at intersections. In the District, they are fixed to street posts.

But Davis says the criminals know exactly where the border is, and they know how to work it. The corridor has become the most dangerous stretch in the region, the scene of the majority of the 86 killings in Prince George's County this year. Of those, just
11 have been outside the Capital Beltway, and 14 have been on the D.C. border or within a few blocks of it.

The criminals know how to dart back and forth to avoid police, who do not have arrest or other official powers on the other side of the line, except in extreme circumstances such as a homicide
or carjacking in progress.

"These guys learn from an early age they can work the line like a dodge ball game," says Davis, executive officer for the chief of patrol services bureau. "They know where to stand and where to
move to avoid getting hit."

Southern and Eastern avenues, which run along the District's southeast and northeast quadrants, separate the county from the city. Much of the border area has been troubled, crime-plagued turf for years, the focus of community activism and police initiatives.

But this year, violent activity along the corridor has picked up so significantly on the county's side that the number of homicides in Prince George's is about 21 percent higher than at this time last year. In contrast, the number of killings has dipped about 3 percent in the District.

Police have different theories about why violent crime is an increasing problem along the border and whether the proximity of the District to Prince George's is a factor.

Former D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood Jr., who experienced a similar crime surge in the city in the early 1990s, believes that some of the county's problems stem from the District's systematic effort to raze and scatter public housing complexes. He said many
of those residents, who can no longer afford to live in the District's increasingly expensive housing market, took their vouchers and moved to Prince George's.

Whatever the causes, the homicide numbers have been steadily increasing in the past five years in Prince George's, mostly in border communities such as Capitol Heights, District Heights, Seat Pleasant and Suitland.