Debunking the "East of Adelaide" stigma

East of Adelaide: London's own Jane and Finch. Put an orange couch in a yard, and it could very well look like a scene from the TV series The Wire.

But is East of Adelaide really as bad as everyone says it is?

Adelaide Street is one of the longest streets in London. Going north, the street goes all the way up to Elginfield Road past the city limits. To the south, it stops short of the 401; it stretches for more than 10 km within the city limits alone.

“It literally runs almost from north to south,” said London native Const. Ken Steeves, the London Police Service media relations officer. “How big is East of Adelaide? … Is it a one-block radius? Does it go all the way to Argyle [Mall] or Airport Road? … I don't know what the true definition of EOA is. All I can say is, EOA is east of Adelaide.”

If East of Adelaide is in fact everything east of Adelaide Street up to the city limits, the so-called “bad” part of London then covers about a quarter of the city's area. And that quarter contained almost 40 per cent of London's population in 2011.

“I remember when I first moved here, it just had this awful stigma around it,” said Amy Van Es, a third-year Graphic Design student at Fanshawe College who has lived in London for 10 years. “The stigma around is that it's not a safe place to be at all.”

But here's the thing: East of Adelaide had a lower reported violent crime rate per 100,000 people in the past three months than north west London — west of Adelaide Street and south of Commissioners Road. Violent crimes are homicides and attempted homicides, sexual assaults and offences, robberies, aggravated assaults and other types of assaults.

In the period spanning from May 7 to August 5, there were a total of 141 violent crimes reported east of Adelaide and 184 reported in northwest London. This means the reported violent crime rate per 100,000 people in East of Adelaide was about 102.01 compared to about 131.32 in northwest London.

“It's so surprising,” Van Es said. “Everybody always tells you all the bad people live in East of Adelaide.”

There are of course shortcomings to this data. For one, the numbers only span the months of May, June and July, which is not only a short period of time but could also be an outlier. LPS only makes available reported crime statistics for the past three months on RAIDS Online, the service used to gather the data. These three months also happen to be the summer months when post-secondary students leave the city — there are over 50,000 post-secondary students in London.

It's also important to consider that the population statistics, though they are the most recent city hall has, are already three years old.

“That is just a snapshot of what's occurred or what's been reported,” Steeves said. “Even with that, regardless of the area of the city, the three months can't be a definitive indicator of the crime rate within the city as a whole.”

“If we were to do it three months from now, it may vary,” he said. “It's very unpredictable.”

The Interrobang plans to revisit this story in three months from now to see whether the months of May, June and July were outliers or north west London actually has a higher reported violent crime per 100,000 people than the East of Adelaide.

While the reported violent crime rate east of Adelaide might have been lower in the past three months than in the northwest area, it doesn't change that the area looks rundown.

But that's slowly changing.

In the years after World War II, the Old East Village area — the downtown area east of Adelaide — saw a decline in industrial and factory jobs, said Paul Seale, the secretary of the Old East Village Community Association.

“One of the really characteristic problems of that era was absentee landlords,” he said. “A lot of business and residential buildings in this neighbourhood were owned by people who weren't residents in the neighbourhood and didn't necessarily have an emotional investment here. They just had a financial investment.”

Seale said that in the past decade, people have started seeing the potential of the Old East Village and that families have started purchasing residential properties and fixing them up. The area has also attracted shop owners and merchants who have increasingly taken longer-term leases and even bought properties, he said.

One example is the team behind On The Move Organics and The Root Cellar Organic Café, which has been operating in the area for six years.

Ellie Cook, the general manager of The Root Cellar Organic Café, called the Old East Village a “resilient mixed community,” pointing out the area's various art centres, cafés, bakeries, social services and farmer's markets, among other things.

“Nearly all of us at On The Move Organics and The Root Cellar live here,” she said in an email. “We love the Old East Village.”