Ashoka's Community Greens has sought to measure the impact that the Alley Gating and Greening Initiative is having in the Baltimore area. With the guidance of the University of Maryland and College of William and Mary research faculty and with the help of volunteers from the University of Maryland and John Hopkins, ACG carried out sociological surveys to determine the kind of impact that the Alley Gating and Greening Project was having.

ACG is currently processing all the data that it has collected but preliminary findings show that:

• ALL the people in the retro sample said that their alley and neighborhood had become ‘better’ after the alley gating and greening.
• The three most used words by the retro sample to describe the gated alley are: Clean, Safe and Attractive.
• People who had moved onto the blocks with the gated alley mentioned the presence of the alley as an incentive to move into the neighborhood.
• People living on the gated blocks found that there is constantly a lack of parking space on the main street as people from other blocks come to park in their street, due to an increased perception of safefy.
• A significant number of the people living on the gated neighborhood use the gated alley for parties, as a safe playground for kids and a place to walk their pets.
• Except for a couple of instances of relatively minor thefts (which the people attribute to negligence on behalf of the neighbors who forgot to lock the gate), there has been no reported cases of major crimes in the alleys