Or we add it to the Stamen crimespotting map. Historicriminography!

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=101289211293820073005.00044449857af71d75ef3&ll=37.763387,-122.438164&spn=0.14222,0.307274&z=12

I also mapped all of the murders from 1929 to 1955 if you want to check them out. It is interesting to see them laid out on the grid to see the trends that were taking place. The Western Edition was where a lot of those murders were taking place — most of which were around where the new St. Mary’s Cathedral is located.

Too bad we lost the Filmore to these people, thanks in no small measure to the Japanese internment.

The density question doesn’t necessarily overlap completely with the high-rise question. The economics of wood-frame construction in California are so compelling that absent some bad planning decisions, over the last 3 decades we would have probably built a few hundred thousand more mostly 2-5 story wood-frame apartment buildings and row houses around the places where the crummy 60′s buildings now stand. There are these liminal places all over California, the places that have 60′s and 70′s apartment buildings right next to fairly compact, pre-suburban houses — places like 4th St between La Cienega and Fairfax in LA; Benvenue Ave from Dwight to Derby in Berkeley; the area west of the Hillsdale shopping center on the peninsula, to take a few examples. These places were filling in and urbanizing in a way that somehow became impossible in the 70′s and 80′s, it is like looking at urban suspended animation. San Francisco is not the worst offender in this regard — it didn’t stop the expansion of low- to mid- rise urbanism until the “Richmond special” battles of the 80′s, but now it is as bad as everywhere else. Residential towers are maybe nice but more fundamentally we just need to rediscover whatever it was that once let us replace smaller buildings with bigger ones. You can get plenty of density in 3-5 story apartment buildings, unfortunately you can’t currently build those anywhere in the Bay Area that makes sense — say within walking distance of West Portal or Bernal Heights or Los Gatos or the North Berkeley BART. I am aware how crazy that sounds and that it is taken for granted that we will literally burn our atmosphere before we offend the sensibility of NIMBYs, but the density question really begins and ends with them.

This is a capt. obvious response to a thoughtful post, but the socialist architecture of the 40s and 50s was largely borne out of an impulse to organize and control human behavior (note how nearly every design, like the image you posted, has highly-cordoned-off ‘green, exercise’ areas- blegh), and the verdict of history has been that such attempts to control people through urban planning only make them go more ape-shit. Which actually sort of reassures me about human nature somewhat. So, maybe the reality is that while it’s possible to combine high density and safety, the more you TRY to do it harmoniously, the more disastrous the results. The calamity of Pruitt-Igoe is a fine case study, for one.

Of course, East Bloc countries had the totalitarian social controls to enforce the types of behaviors they wanted to invoke, so I don’t think the plentitude of box housing caused any rise in violence over here, but rather just made people yet more depressed.