“What’s remarkable, though, isn’t just the aesthetics. It’s that the neighborhoods where these lots have been turned into green spaces have seen a twenty-nine-per-cent drop in gun violence. Twenty-nine per cent! The people haven’t changed. The pathologies haven’t changed. The same police force still patrols the neighborhood. The only new variable is that someone comes by to mow the lawn once or twice a month. As economists like to say: How do you model that?”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/unforgiving-places-jens-ludwig-book-review