Neighborhood Change and Crime in the Modern Metropolis (From Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, V 39, P 441-502, 2010, Michael Tonry, ed. - See NCJ-242292)

• NCJ Number: 242299
• Author(s): David S. Kirk; John H. Laub
• Date Published: 2010
• Length: 62 pages
• Sale Source: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Format: Book Chapter
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Few empirical studies of crime have treated neighborhoods as dynamic entities by examining how processes of growth, change, and decline affect neighborhood rates of crime.

Abstract

From a small yet burgeoning collection of dynamic research related to population migration - including population loss, gentrification, development, and demolition of public housing, home ownership and home foreclosure, and immigration - one knows that neighborhoods change, even when it leads to socioeconomic improvements, tends to have a destabilizing influence that results in increases in crime in the short term. This occurs, in part, because residential turnover undermines informal social control. There is evidence across a variety of neighborhood changes, including population loss from central cities and gentrification, that population migration is a cause and consequence of crime. However, too few studies pay adequate attention to how methodological choices affect inferences about the effects of neighborhoods on crime, and not much is known about the relationship between neighborhood change and crime, especially regarding causal mechanisms. Longitudinal data on neighborhood social and cultural processes and population migration are needed to advance our understanding of neighborhood change and crime. (Published Abstract)