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The costs of demolishing a vacant building are often justified on the grounds of crime reduction. I explore this claim by estimating the spatial and temporal effects of demolitions on reported crime in the city of Saginaw, Michigan. To do so, I estimate a model that uses within-block group variation to compare crime after a demolition occurs to before the permit for that demolition was issued. Results indicate that demolitions reduce crime by about 8 percent on the block group in question and 5 percent on nearby block groups, with the largest impact concentrated one to two months after the demolition occurs.

Governments and nonprofits routinely partner to launch place-based initiatives in distressed neighborhoods with the goal of stabilizing real estate markets, reclaiming vacant properties, abating public nuisances, and reducing crime. Public health impacts and outcomes are rarely the major policy drivers in the design and implementation of these neighborhood scale initiatives. In this article, we examine recent Health Impact Assessments in Baltimore, Maryland and Memphis, Tennessee to show how public health concepts, principles, and practices can be infused into existing and new programs and policies, and how public health programs can help to improve population health by addressing the upstream social determinants of health. We provide a portfolio of ideas and practices to bridge this classic divide of housing and health policy.

We undertake the first study of the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program that estimates the impacts of different types of projects on expected outcomes. We also explore an enhanced set of outcome measures that allows us to understand the mechanisms behind the impacts of the program and how it affects the composition of neighborhoods. To do so, we first create a typology of NMTC project types and then use a difference in differences approach to estimate the impact of NMTC projects on their expected outcomes, including firms, jobs, residents with jobs, median income, poverty rate, population, population with a bachelor's degree, and turnover rate. For each project that we expect would lead to an increase in the number of firms in a neighborhood, we find that an average of 18 new firms enter. Similarly, for projects with anticipated job and income effects, we find 101 new jobs in the community and 27 more residents in the neighborhood with jobs, along with modestly higher incomes and a decline in neighborhood poverty rate of 0.7%. However, we cannot determine whether there are economic gains for pre-existing residents since we also find an increase in the number of adults with a college degree large enough to account for the increases in residents with jobs and wages and for much of the estimated decline in poverty. An event study analysis shows that for firms, pre-existing trends might threaten a causal