Harrisburg’s explosive growth in violent crime over the past few years isn’t just a local trend. Cities nationwide are reporting substantial jumps in violent crime, and the three-year-old trend is threatening the revival of downtowns across the country. This is especially bad news to the Reed-bashers, because it demonstrates that crime problems are not limited to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But it’s bad news all around — and especially to those who have an interest in anything downtown — as it marks the end of an era of white-hot development against a backdrop of relatively low, scattered crime.

I wasn’t here for the Harrisburg of the 80s, but I’m told it was pretty craptastic. I was barely here for Harrisburg of the 90s, having moved down here in 1997. But I was here for the past ten years, and they’ve been great. For being a small city, Harrisburg offers a lot of the benefits of urban living and working without much of the negative. We have pizza shops that deliver and 24-hour stores everywhere (things you don’t appreciate until you’ve spent 20 years living in rural Pennsylvania). We have employment at all positions on the economic scale. We have loft condos and eight-bedroom houses. And for the most part, we lack gangs. We lack pervasive drug trade. We can still walk through most of the city without fear of getting shot.

But is all that about to end? Have we truly traded hometown security for homeland security? One of the big reasons for the revival of so many downtowns nationwide (it’s not just a Harrisburg thing) was the reduction in crime. Businesses and homeowners that steadily flowed out of downtown parcels over the past three decades now saw properties that were previously unsellable due to high crime become available at severely undervalued prices. Starting in the mid-90s, downtown revitalization became the “in thing”, with dozens of cities launching renaissance initiatives every year. Most of those downtowns are still flourishing, but the recent nationwide spike in crime begs the question:

What next?

Do we give up on downtown and try again elsewhere? We’ve got some burgeoning development on the West Shore, after all. Do we draw battle lines, freeze future development, and clamp down on a few downtown blocks of the city? It’s worked so far; downtown crime is still virtually nonexistent. Should we flood the city with police funding? I don’t think anyone disagrees that increasing the number of police officers on patrol makes a spectacular first line of defense against trouble.

Mayors around the country are trying to figure out how to save their cities from skyrocketing crime rates. What would you tell them?