Ahead of a public hearing Tuesday regarding permanently blocking points on 20 streets in the East Lake neighborhood, residents and business owners are expressing mixed reactions to a six-month-long pilot program aimed at reducing crime and making the streets safer.

The public hearing will be at 9:30 a.m. on the third floor of City Hall, at 710 20th St. N. The City Council could vote after the hearing on whether to continue some or all of those changes.

Mayor Randall Woodfin’s office developed Project Safe Streets, saying the initiative is modelled on successful strategies in other cities to reduce violent crime, illegal dumping, theft, speeding, prostitution and other violations by limiting the number of entry and exit points to a particular area. In addition to placing the barricades in early July, the city has added stop signs, improved sidewalks and removed trash and litter.

Richard Drake, president of the East Lake Neighborhood Association, said the city has also demolished more than 40 abandoned houses, many of which were being used for criminal activity.

Drake said community members’ opinions about the street barricades are split.

“There’s some that like it and want them to stay there, and there’s some that want to take it down,” he said.

Those in favor of the barriers say they have succeeded in reducing crime, and their neighborhood is quieter because not as many drivers speed through the streets, Drake said. He said one woman told him she never let her grandchildren play outdoors before the barricades were installed.

Those opposed to the barriers say they worry about access to emergency services and don’t like the inconvenience of longer driving routes.

City Council President Darrell O’Quinn, whose district includes East Lake, said all the comments he’s heard from residents about the Safe Streets Project have been positive, and he’s heard complaints only indirectly.

“For the people who live within the perimeter of the streets that have been barricaded … all those folks appear to be very enthusiastic about the project and are very appreciative the neighborhood’s getting that type of attention from city government,” O’Quinn said.

Why East Lake, Why Now?

In 2024, Birmingham recorded more homicides than in any year since 1933 – at a time when many U.S. cities are reporting decreases in violent crimes.

According to the city, the Birmingham Police Department identified East Lake as a neighborhood with a high rate of calls for incidents including shootings into occupied dwellings, property theft and speeding.

Residents and business owners differ on whether they think the pilot project has helped reduce crime in the neighborhood.

Rebecca Diallo, manager of Humble Hearts Thrift Store, questioned the effectiveness of the barriers.

“Is it really going to reduce crime or is it just restricting the good citizens?” she asked. “It does nothing for crime.”

E. Waie, who owns the store, agreed. “There’s been a couple murders since then,” he said. “Same thing it would have been had they not been there.”

But Louise White, an elderly resident who lives on a street with barricades, said she doesn’t hear gunshots as often since the barriers were installed and she supports the mayor’s plan. “It really has changed,” she said.

White said her daughter was concerned about her ability to navigate the area while driving, but it hasn’t been a problem for her. She said she told her daughter, “Let them block it off if it will slow down the killings and the crime.”

Tim Bennett, general manager of East Lake Tire Center on First Avenue North, said the road closures likely have reduced the kind of criminal activity he’s witnessed near the center, which has been in business for 25 years.

“I think it’s a good idea, because this neighborhood is prone for a lot of criminal activity,” Bennett said. “I see it a lot. I see guys walking, stealing stuff and then getting into their car and going.” Barricades deter that activity because people know they can only go so far before they get pinned in, he continued.

Although some have questioned whether other methods such as installing security cameras would have more effect on crime without restricting residents, O’Quinn said that constructing barriers is a technique society has used for thousands of years.

“Since the dawn of civilization, when people want to protect something, one of the most common means that they do that is to put up barriers around whatever they’re trying to protect, whether that be moats or walls or fences,” he said.

Under ideal circumstances, barriers would not be needed, O’Quinn continued.

“If the community wasn’t having a significant number of shootings into occupied dwellings, or people coming into the community to dump waste in alleys or a number of other negative things, then this project would not have happened,” he said. “One of the things that enabled those things to go on was the porosity of the neighborhood — the large amount of ingress and egress points that contributed to an individual’s ability to do those things and get away undetected.”

With dozens of ways to enter and exit the neighborhood, cameras and the people or technology needed to monitor them would be an expensive option, O’Quinn said.

“Barricades are actually a low-tech, lower-cost, I would argue, solution to addressing these issues,” he said.

Concerns Persist for Businesses, Emergency Response Times

But Waie said the barricades also have had a detrimental effect on the Humble Hearts’ business, reducing customer traffic to the 11-year-old store on First Avenue North by about 20%. He said many of his customers live in the residential area behind the store, and streets between that area and First Avenue North are now blocked.

Deliveries he could have made in 2 minutes now take much longer on a circuitous route, he said. He also said he worries separating the businesses on First Avenue from the rest of the neighborhood could increase theft.

“You block them off and make people think maybe this is the other side of the tracks,” Waie said. “Now the curiosity makes them want to come over here and break into more stuff.”

Bennett said the barricades haven’t affected the East Lake Tire Center, which is adjacent to 67^th Street North, because the nearest ones are a couple of blocks away.

“If they had come one more block down, I’d probably have had a problem with that because I have so much traffic that comes up and down this road (67^th Street) to get here,” he said. “We run three or four trucks out of here, moving tires around, and we go that way a lot.”

Concerns have been raised about the barriers slowing response of first responders during emergencies.

Waie said his staff had to call 911 last week for a customer, and the emergency-response vehicle blocked traffic on First Avenue because the driver couldn’t use a side street. He said he often sees fire trucks and ambulances delayed because they encounter a barrier on 71^st Street, which borders his business, or try unsuccessfully to maneuver a narrow alley that runs behind the property.

“I don’t know if they have new drivers, but they have come down that street 20 or 30 times and had to back all the way up,” Waie said.

O’Quinn said that, based on what he’s been told, Birmingham Fire and Rescue and the police department were involved in planning for the Safe Streets Project and took into consideration response times.

“I have a hard time, frankly, believing that that’s the case, that a Birmingham Fire and Rescue or paramedic unit would not be familiar with the street closures,” O’Quinn said.

The mother of Lakiyah Luckey, an 18-year-old who died in August after having trouble breathing, told WVTM she believes her daughter’s life could have been saved if paramedics had reached her sooner. Her mother believed it took 13 minutes for firefighters to respond, though city officials at the time said the response time was 7 minutes and there was no delay in response times.

Traffic Patterns, Neighborhood Appeal Questioned

Erma Gray, an East Lake resident who lives about half a mile from the barricades but encounters them on most of her routes, said she knows senior citizens who are opposed to the barriers, but she finds them helpful. She said the barriers and additional stop signs have slowed traffic on the streets she travels.

“You got to go a little bit out of the way,” she said. “But the way it’s going, it’s fine. It makes you more cautious when you go down through there. You don’t just stomp your foot on the gas and go like a lot of people had been doing on Second Avenue.”

Gray said she hopes to attend the public hearing to advocate for the Safe Streets Project and more stop signs.

Waie, who grew up in East Lake and lives in nearby Roebuck, said it’s been difficult for many elderly residents who have lived in the barricaded area for decades or their entire lives to reprogram their minds with different directions for getting to familiar places.

“I understand the mayor, but it’s about time to let these old folks go back to some kind of normalcy,” he said. “Think about being in the last stage of your life and all of a sudden, boom, they throw up new barriers.”

Waie said his own route to and from Roebuck is much more complicated now. “They made it inconvenient for everybody,” he said.

He also said he believes the barricades create a negative perception of the area.

“When people see barriers, they automatically think, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ It kind of devalues the neighborhood when you set stuff up like that,” he said. “You have to deal with people’s minds. Everybody doesn’t think, ‘Well, it’s all for safety.’”

When barriers go up, Waie said, people wonder if they are meant to keep crime out or criminals in.

O’Quinn acknowledged the concrete barriers are not particularly attractive. He said they are a temporary measure and more visually pleasing curb extensions — also known as bulb-outs — will be constructed if the City Council decides to permanently block streets.

O’Quinn said the mayor’s office has been collecting data that shows the negative activities the city was trying to reduce with the project have decreased significantly. Tracked information includes data from the police department’s Shot Spotter program, 911 calls and incidents of illegal dumping.

In October, Woodfin told the council that in the first two months of the pilot, police had seized 19 firearms, made 140 arrests and issued 559 traffic citations while city officials had established five drug nuisance abatement cases and crews had collected more than 600 loads of debris and 400 bags of litter.

Significant public opposition to the barriers could sway council members, O’Quinn said, but if the council moves forward with permanent closure, the construction timeline for bulb-outs is uncertain. It could begin within a few months or more than a year from now, depending on how long the design and funding phases last, O’Quinn said.