First, Norman Brown bought a pressure washer to blast away the swastikas and obscenities local teenagers kept painting on the concrete path that passes behind his house.
The graffiti kept coming.
Then he bought a halogen spotlight, hoping to scare away the young criminals who periodically throw empty wallets, stolen cameras and used condoms over the 5-foot fence into his backyard.
They broke the bulb with a rock.
This summer, he bought a gun.
“I’ve always been anti-gun, personally,” said Brown, 60, who has been taking National Rifle Association shooting lessons at nearby English Pit. “I have had to purchase a handgun because my wife is scared.”
Brown’s battle against the petty burglars and racist vandals who frequent the path behind his house shows how deeply crime can scar a dense, lower-cost subdivision far from the city center.
But it’s also a lesson to developers and urban planners: a walking path that doesn’t fit its neighborhood, within view of streets and windows, can be worse than no path at all.
It’s all happening in this still-unnamed neighborhood near Pacific Park, one of the surge of new subdivisions that transformed the east county in the late 1990s.
Four thefts, three car prowls, a break-in, an auto theft and a marijuana charge have been reported within five blocks of Brown’s house since Sept. 1, county sheriff’s statistics show.
It’s even worse in summer, Brown said. He estimates that two-thirds of the 50-odd houses on his loop have been hit by property crime in the past year.
The culprits spend their time on his path, he says.
“During the spring and summer, on any given day, you can find hypodermics, beer cans, bottles,” Brown said. “I’ve run into kids having sex.”
Brown knows people, not the path itself, are really to blame. But after confronting one young hood’s family, he despaired of changing the culprits’ behavior directly.
“His parents were like, ‘The kid’s on drugs. What do you think I can do about it?’” Brown recalled.
Sgt. Scott Schanaker, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said the number of crimes in Brown’s 200-home subdivision since Sept. 1 is “not an unusually high number of incidents.”
“But it certainly doesn’t negate the fact that there might be something going on,” Schanaker added.
‘Act of God’ required?
Brown and some of his neighbors think they can make things better by permanently closing the path, which runs along a 3-acre drainage pit behind their homes and sends a spur beside Brown’s house to connect with the main road.
Just putting a tall gate across the spur, Brown said, would prevent criminals from escaping police by darting around the corner as they flee.
“It would eliminate an avenue of escape,” Brown said.
This summer, at a deputy sheriff’s advice, Brown gathered 34 signatures from his neighbors asking for the path to be closed. He sent it to County Commissioner Marc Boldt but never heard back.
Earlier in the summer, Brown said a county worker told him it’d basically take an “act of God” to close a pedestrian path that connects to an elementary school, as this one does.
In an interview Friday, after Brown contacted The Columbian about his problem, county transportation manager Steve Schulte said the county is considering neighbors’ request for a fence.
Brown says he doesn’t think the path is heavily used by students, in part because it’s perceived as dangerous.
Eyeball shortage
Anyone who builds a path away from its neighbors’ eyes is “immediately asking for trouble,” said Mark Fenton, a national expert on pedestrian design who visited Vancouver last week.
Vancouver development lawyer Randy Printz agreed.
“There’s nothing wrong with trails, but if they either are not maintained or they become sort of fenced canyons, then they are problematic,” said Printz, who in 1996 helped persuade the county to approve the subdivision that is now Brown’s home. “Like a lot of things, they need to be put in the right place or done in the right way.”
But 11 years after this path was built, advice like theirs is little help to Brown.
For now, he’s sleeping lightly and waiting for the next night he has to personally chase young hoodlums down the path, away from his home.
His wife tries to persuade him not to confront them.
“She’s afraid I’ll get in a fight,” Brown said.
But he feels it’s his responsibility. “I don’t want to let those kids just run riot,” Brown said.
Michael Andersen: 360-735-4508 or michael.andersen@columbian.com.
