Publications Tagged ‘crime’
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Article
Crime and Urban Flight Revisited: The Effect of the 1990s Drop in Crime on Cities PDF
For most of the twentieth century, concerns about safety and high crime rates have beset U.S. cities. Researchers and policymakers pointed to these high urban crime rates as one of the chief ‘urban blights’ from which middle class, mobile (and typically white) households fled during the post-War period, fueling suburbanization. But this picture changed dramatically in the 1990s, a decade during which the crime rate in the U.S. fell by a remarkable thirty percent, and crime rates in many U.S. cities declined even further. This paper builds on the ‘flight from blight’ literature, and considers what effect (if any) the 1990s drop in crime rates had on urban population changes.
Ingrid Ellen & Katherine O'Regan. Journal of Urban Economics. April 2010.
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Chapter
Exploring Changes in Low-Income Neighborhoods in the 1990s PDF
While there has been much talk of the resurgence of lower-income urban neighborhoods in the United States over the past ten to fifteen years, there has been surprisingly little empirical examination of the extent and nature of the phenomenon. Our chapter aims to address these key questions. In the first half, we undertake a broad empirical investigation of income changes in low-income neighborhoods in U.S. cities during the 1990s, comparing them to the changes that occurred during the two previous decades. In the second half of the chapter, we explore some reasons why the fortunes of lower-income urban neighborhoods improved during the 1990s.
Ingrid Gould Ellen & Katherine O'Regan. December 2009.
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Working Paper
Crime and U.S. Cities: Recent Patterns and Implications PDF
For most of the twentieth century, U.S. cities – and their high-poverty neighborhoods in particular—were viewed as dangerous, crime-ridden places that middle class, mobile (and typically white) households avoided, fueling suburbanization. While some pundits and policy analysts bemoaned this urban flight, others voiced concern over the potential impact of crime-ridden environments on the urban residents who were left behind. In the past decade or so, the media has instead highlighted the dramatic reductions in crime taking place in many large cities. In this paper we explore these crime reductions and their implications for urban environments.
Ingrid Gould Ellen & Katherine O'Regan. January 2009.
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Article
Has Falling Crime Driven New York City’s Real Estate Boom? PDF
We investigate whether falling crime has driven New York City’s post-1994 real estate boom, as media reports suggest. We address this by decomposing trends in the city’s property value from 1988 to 1998 into components due to crime, the city’s investment in subsidized low-income housing, the quality of public schools, and other factors. We use rich data and employ both hedonic and repeat-sales house price models, which allow us to control for unobservable neighborhood and building-specific effects. We find that the popular story touting the overwhelming importance of crime rates has some truth to it. Falling crime rates are responsible for about a third of the post-1994 boom in property values. However, this story is incomplete because it ignores the revitalization of New York City’s poorer communities and the large role that housing subsidies played in mitigating the earlier bust.
Schwartz, Amy Ellen, Scott Susin and Ioan Voicu. Journal of Housing Research, 14(1), pp. 101-135. December 2002.
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Article
Race-Based Neighborhood Projection: A Proposed Framework for Understanding New Data LINK
This paper outlines the race-based, neighbourhood projection hypothesis which holds that, in choosing neighbourhoods, households care less about present racial composition than they do about expectations about future neighbourhood conditions, such as school quality, property values and crime. Race remains relevant, however, since households tend to associate a growing minority presence with structural decline. Using a unique data-set that links households to their neighbourhoods, this paper estimates both exit and entry models and then constructs a simple simulation model that predicts the course of racial change in different communities. Doing so, the paper concludes that the empirical evidence is more consistent with the race-based projection hypothesis than with other common explanations for neighbourhood racial transition.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould. Urban Studies, 37(9), pp. 1513-1533. July 2000.
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Working Paper
Nativity Differences in Neighborhood Quality Among New York City Households PDF
In this paper we add to the literature on locational attainment of immigrants by focusing on a broader range of neighborhood quality indicators that has been done before and by examining the foreign-born contingent of a given ethnic group separately from the native-born contingent of that group. Specifically, we evaluate in New York City how immigrant households compare to native-born households, overall and by race and ethnicity, with respect to neighborhood characteristics such as crime, health outcomes, poverty, and unsafe housing.
Rosenbaum, Emily, Samantha Friedman, Michael H. Schill and Hielke Buddelmeyer. Housing Policy Debate, Volume 10, Issue 3, Fannie Mae Foundation, (1999). November 1998.
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Article
Public Characteristics and Expenditures on Public Services: An Empirical Analysis LINK
This article investigates the provision of police and education services using a new method of indexing quantities of local public services that isolates movements in shadow prices and quantities in expenditure data. Demand equations for two public characteristics (the crime safety rate and high school reading test pass rates) and two categories of expenditures (education and police services) are simultaneously estimated for New Jersey municipalities. The relationship between public services and public characteristics is estimated, and both the “own” and the “cross “-effects of public services are found to be empirically significant. Increases in expenditures between 1982 and 1983 are found to largely reflect increases in quantities of education services and in prices of police services.
Schwartz, Amy Ellen. Public Finance Review, 25(2), pp. 163-181. February 1997.