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The Fresh Youth Initiatives building on W. 171st Street (right) was studied by Columbia University to see how change on a block affects the people living there.
What impact can a new building have on a block? How about one built for a group dedicated to doing good in the community?
An almost decade-long study by the Columbia University’s Center for Youth Violence Prevention followed the construction of Fresh Youth Initiative’s building on W. 171st Street between Audubon and Amsterdam Avenues and the impact the building and the organization has had on the block.
The study, due out in September, found that compared to “control” blocks two streets north and two streets south, the new building had an impact.
”The presence of the building has got other landlords to spruce up their buildings,” said Dr. Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero, an assistant professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at the Center for Youth Violence Prevention.
“It has not eliminated illegal activates on the block, it has changed the time they’re conducted.”
FYI is a youth organization that focuses on community services.
Founded in 1993, the organization engages children and teens after school, provides a meal and gets them out in the community doing service projects.
FYI and the Center for Youth Violence met after FYI took on the recommendations of the center’s first study, which examined the violence of the 1980s and 90s and its effect on people.
According to Hernandez-Cordero, social networks had broken down, people were afraid to come out of their apartments; because they might be associated with the wrong people, or become victims themselves.
One recommendation of the study, designed to get scared people out of their apartments, was to improve public spaces.
FYI did it with flowers.
“You knew where FYI was because they had these huge FYI planters,” Hernandez-Cordero said.
When FYI decided to construct a building on W. 171st Street, Hernandez-Cordero and her team saw the chance to measure the change such a building might have on the block.
The team gathered “observational data” by mapping the block, noting the amount of garbage, graffiti, and street usage among other things.
They did the same thing on nearby streets that were not getting a new building.
The team also surveyed people living on the block about life on the street, like how they would feel if they saw a group of teens sitting on a stoop or a corner, or how they felt if it were all boys or all girls or a mix of the two.
After the building was finished and FYI was settled in to the street, the Center for Youth Violence Prevention tried to find the people from the original survey and see how they responded to similar questions.
That information is still being processed, but the observational data, what the street looks like, is pretty conclusive.
“What we found is that there has been a contagion of building improvement very visible on the FYI block,” Hernandez-Cordero said.
More than the other two blocks that didn’t get a new building, landlords and building managers starting taking better care of their property.
Though the surveys haven’t been processed yet, she thinks people might feel better about the block too, because of the activity FYI has brought to the street.
“What we are hoping it will tell us is how those perceptions have changed now that there is a youth center, compared to blocks with out it,” Hernandez-Cordero said.
She said the goal of the study is not necessarily to say specifically how FYI changed the street, but how to increase the quality of life on any street.
If the results show that people feel better when more people outside, how can that be encouraged? Not every block and get a new youth center, but would trees and park benches have the same effect?
“We know that presence [of FYI] is having a change. How do we replicate that on other streets?” Hernandez-Cordero asked. With this study, she’s hoping to at least prove it can be measured. The next step is making the change happen on other blocks.
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