NEW ORLEANS - Hundreds of blighted homes and lots in the city are targeted for beautification.
That's after a Tulane researcher was awarded a grant to study violence prevention.
It stems around the Broken Windows Theory, that states crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder, encourage more crime and disorder.
Ask Hollygrove neighbors about an overgrown lot before it was manicured, and after it was cleaned up, and opinions go beyond the obvious visual change, to feelings and emotions.
"Yes, you could breath a little easier, you know. It feel much better. It feels good. It really do," said one woman.
Cleaning the lot even changed behavior.
"'Especially when it's high like that. They have people that just come here and they just dump trash on there, mattress, sofas, any kind of junk they got," said another woman.
Tulane researcher Katherine Theall was just awarded a $2.3 million grant from the NIH for a first-of-its-kind study. The study seeks to learn if cleaning up 600 empty lots and blighted houses can impact young people and family violence. Other studies have already shown just greening junky lots, reduced gun violence by almost 10 percent.
"If we can do the same intervention and replicate some of the findings they're seeing in Philadelphia and Detroit, then this could be a model for other cities to use for violence prevention," said Dr. Katherine Theall, who has the Cecile Usdin Professorship in Women’s Health at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine.
Dr. Theall will partner with the city over the next five years. Communities will not know which properties are part of the study in order to measure the outcomes accurately.
"The sense of improving disorder can, can do a lot for sense of community and stress reduction," Dr. Theall explained.
One resident said she has stress every day, just from walking by overgrown grass.
"You don't know somebody going to come out the bushes or you're going to get attack, or something like that, so I walk in the street," she said.
The clean up and repairs will be paid for by the federal grant and will begin in the spring in Orleans Parish.