Broken windows

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway slices diagonally from the magnificent Philadelphia Art Museum to a City Hall that will rival any building in Europe. It is anchored with fountains and trimmed with the colorful banners of many nations, and I feel very French when I drive down that boulevard. You can be sure the area is kept up.

Another story is told just off the gleaming avenue, where the perennial bugbear of the city is what to do with abandoned houses. When I drive through those areas I have other fantasies. I like to imagine the boarded up windows restored, and I wonder what difference just that one improvement would make in the morale of the town.

The March 1982 Atlantic Monthly ran an article from which I quote:

Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

Broken things are better fixed right away before the damage to the soul is done. I keep telling my son: the worse your room gets the worse it will get. He thinks it's a tautology but it's just human nature.