How to Predict Gentrification: Look for Falling Crime
Everyone has theories for why well-educated, higher-income professionals are moving back into parts of cities shunned by their parents’ generation.
Perhaps their living preferences have shifted. Or the demands of the labor market have, and young adults with less leisure time are loath to waste it commuting. Maybe the tendency to postpone marriage and children has made city living more alluring. Or the benefits of cities themselves have improved.
“There are all sorts of potential other amenities, whether it’s cafes, restaurants, bars, nicer parks, better schools,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University.
“But a huge piece of it,” she said, “I think is crime.”
New research that she has conducted alongside Keren Mertens Horn, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Davin Reed, a doctoral student at N.Y.U., finds that when violent crime falls sharply, wealthier and educated people are more likely to move into lower-income and predominantly minority urban neighborhoods.
Their working paper suggests that just as rising crime can drive people out of cities, falling crime has a comparable effect, spurring gentrification. And it highlights how, even if many Americans — including, by his own words, President-elect Donald Trump — inaccurately believe urban violence is soaring, the opposite long-term trend has brought wide-ranging change to cities.
“We’re trying to help people understand what a dramatic difference the reduction in violent crime in particular has made in our environment,” Ms. Ellen said. “That has repercussions far beyond what we think of. The homicide rate has gone down — that’s directly the most important consequence. But there are all sorts of repercussions as well. This really has been a sea change.”
Nationally, violent crime peaked in 1991. It fell precipitously for the next decade, then more slowly through the 2000s (and there’s a whole other set of theories about why that has happened). While homicides have increased recently in some cities, rates remain far below what they were 25 years ago, including in Chicago. (Another end-of-year fact-check, while we’re at it: Mr. Trump claimed during the campaign that the homicide rate in his new home in Washington rose by 50 percent. In fact, it fell by 17 percent in 2016.)
The new research looked at confidential geocoded data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and more recent American Community Surveys, to identify the neighborhoods where more than four million households moved. Using citywide violent crime data from the F.B.I., the scholars tracked the changing probability of different demographic groups moving into central cities, as opposed to suburbs, as crime fell.
Higher-income and college-educated movers — and to a lesser degree, whites — appeared significantly more sensitive to changing crime levels in their housing decisions than other groups. Lower-income and minority households, for instance, didn’t become more likely to move to cities as they grew safer.
That may reflect the fact, Ms. Ellen suggested, that lower-income families have more experience or confidence in their ability to navigate crime. Or it may suggest that attention to violence is a luxury in housing decisions that the poor and minorities may not have. A household facing racial discrimination, high housing costs or the need to be near supportive family members simply has fewer options — and less leeway to be choosy — than the higher-income, college-educated households that this research identifies.
“When cities feel safer, that opens people’s eyes,” Ms. Ellen said of the willingness of new groups to consider these neighborhoods.
It’s entirely likely that the arrival of more affluent residents affected crime, too — either by increasing opportunities for property crime in the short term, or by adding eyes on the street and pressure on the police in the long run. Because this research looked at moves that occurred after crime was already falling, the authors believe the movers were reacting to changes in crime and not simply causing it themselves.
But the relationship between crime and gentrification in particular is complex. Wealthier residents may bring new tensions to neighborhoods, fearing — and reporting — criminal activity where none exists. And such demographic change in cities could play a role in pressuring the police to pursue tactics that feel unduly aggressive to the people who preceded the newcomers.
This study also doesn’t offer evidence that existing residents were displaced by the new arrivals. Many of the urban neighborhoods studied had lost population, so they had room to grow again without pushing existing residents out. But the possibility that these trends portend higher housing costs and more housing demand in the future in poorer, minority neighborhoods adds a cautionary note, Ms. Ellen said, to the declining crime trend.
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/upshot/how-to-predict-gentrification-look-for-falling-crime.html
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