Campus eyesores

As spring approaches, Penn is preparing for another round of landscaping. And while it's nice to see the University go the extra mile to make sure green spaces in the center of campus are, in fact, green, a handful of eyesores around campus are often neglected.

Maintenance workers should be more active in clearing away abandoned property that has been left lying around. Namely, bike racks near residential and academic buildings are often littered with fragments of old bikes that have long since been discarded. Some have been around for more than a year, and it's time for them to go.

There are many other cases like this in which trash has accumulated, and when taken together, they negate all of the work that has been done to improve the appearance of campus.

But beyond aesthetics, removing abandoned property has serious public-safety benefits.

James Wilson, a Harvard professor, and George Kelling, a former transit police officer in New York, first outlined their "broken windows" theory in 1982. Their conclusion was, essentially, that the appearance of disrepair was the impetus for crime in any metropolitan area.

In the early 1990s, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani put this theory to work in cleaning up the streets in the Big Apple. By removing abandoned property, Giuliani was able to make the city more livable. And lo and behold, crime decreased -- significantly.

Penn, of course, is not New York City. But there is no reason to believe there will not be benefits to removing abandoned property around campus.

Taking care of empty storefronts, broken windows and yes, abandoned bikes, would go along way toward sprucing up the campus this spring.

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