Broken Windows

In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict: a broken window.

A broken window.

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it. and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

The "Broken Window Theory" has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.

Don't leave "broken windows" unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered.

Sources:

Pragmatic Programmer, p4-5

The Police and Neighborhood Saftey, The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling

I really liked this. I thought about it and decided to adopt the idea and to fix all my "broken windows" as soon as I could. I suggest we all follow this set of thinking and never let anything go unfixed for too long, otherwise we might end up with an "old abandoned building" when all we needed to fix was a "broken window".