Here’s one way to combat crime in public housing — shine a light on it.
Fifteen NYCHA developments are getting hundreds of new lights to illuminate high-traffic areas to try and reduce crime. Even as the city boasts about a drop in the numbers, public housing residents are dealing with an increase in violence.
The new lights will be permanent fixtures in the problem-plagued developments, which account for nearly 20% of all violent crime in public housing.
The city added lighting to those developments — including some which hadn’t seen upgrades in decades — starting in 2014, but it was only a temporary fix.
Broken lights will be replaced, and lights will take certain areas out of the dark, giving residents peace of mind, Mayor de Blasio said.
“You need to feel safe, and that is about having the lighting that makes you safe,” said de Blasio.
The 15 developments — including the Brownsville Houses in Brooklyn, Castle Hill Houses in the Bronx, and Stapleton Houses in Staten Island — are home to 62,000 people, De Blasio said.
Major crimes in the city’s 328 public housing developments has risen 8.3% so far this year through June 5, according to the latest NYPD stats.
That’s compared to a .1% drop citywide during the same time period and includes a 15% spike in murders, a 21% hike in rapes, 28% more burglaries and a 13.2% rise in felony assaults.
The new lights are part of a $210.5 million public housing road map, dubbed the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, or MAP for short.
It began in 2014.
Since then, officials said, violent crime in the 15 MAP developments has dropped 11.2% compared to 6.9% city-wide.
