Though Ray Oldenburg's (1989) notion of "third places", or places conducive to sociality outside of the realms of home and work, has received both scholarly and popular attention over the past several decades, many of the author's central claims remain empirically untested. The present study considers the association between neighborhood third places, cohesion and neighbor interaction. Drawing on various literatures regarding interaction in public space and neighborhood use-value, we consider how the role of third places might vary according to neighborhood socioeconomic context. Using data from Wave I of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study (LAFANS) and data on third places from the point-based business data of ReferenceUSA, we test the effect of third places on cohesion and neighbor interaction across neighborhood poverty strata. We find support for the hypothesis that third places are associated with greater cohesion and neighbor interaction, and that neighbor interaction mediates the relationship between third places and cohesion in poor neighborhoods.

Whereas existing research typically treats variability in residents' reports of collective efficacy and neighboring as measurement error, the authors consider such variability as of substantive interest in itself. This variability may indicate disagreement among residents with implications for the neighborhood collectivity. The authors propose using a general measure of social distance based on several social dimensions (rather than measures based on a single dimension such as racial/ethnic heterogeneity or income inequality) to help understand this variability in assessments. The authors use data from wave I (2001) of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (n = 3,570) to aggregate respondents into egohoods of two different sizes: quarter-mile and half-mile radii. Consistent with expectations, neighborhoods with higher levels of general social distance have higher variability in reports of neighboring and the two components of collective efficacy, cohesion and informal social control.

A growing body of research has documented the consequences of neighborhood crime for a myriad of individual, household, and community outcomes. Given that neighborhood businesses figure into the link between neighborhood structure and crime as sources of employment or sites for neighbor interaction, the present study examines the extent to which neighborhood crime is associated with the survival, mobility, and destination locations of businesses in the subsequent year. Using business data from Reference USA (Infogroup 2015) and crime data from the Southern California Crime Study (SCCS) we assess this question for neighborhoods across cities in the Southern California region. We find that in general, higher violent and property crime are significantly associated with both business failure and mobility, and that higher crime in a destination neighborhood reduces the likelihood that a business locates there. We also present findings specific to industries, and discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

This review takes stock of recent advances, as well as enduring and emerging challenges, in the area of spatial criminology. Although the notions of place and space are fundamentally intertwined, spatial criminology is distinct in its attempt to measure and theorize explicitly spatial processes and relationships. This review highlights three key themes. First, the use of increasingly smaller geographic units in recent research creates an even greater need to account for spatial behavior of persons when studying the location of crime. Second, although the explosion of spatially precise data in recent years presents exciting possibilities, we argue that theory is falling behind in guiding us in analyzing these new forms of data, and explicitly inductive approaches should be considered to complement existing deductive strategies. Third, an important direction for spatial criminology in the next decade is considering the extent to which micro- and mesolevel processes operate invariantly across different macro contexts.

Objectives: Criminological scholars have long been interested in how macro-level characteristics of cities, counties, or metropolitan areas are related to levels of crime. The standard analytic approach in this literature aggregates constructs of interest, including crime rates, to the macro geographic units and estimates regression models, but this strategy ignores possible sub-citylevel processes that occur simultaneously. Methods: One solution uses multilevel data of crime in meso-level units within a large number of cities; however, such data is very difficult and time intensive to collect. We propose an alternative approach which utilizes insights from existing literature on meso-level processes along with meso-level socio-demographic measures in cities to impute crime data from the city to the smaller geographic units. This strategy allows researchers to estimate full multilevel models that estimate the effects of macro-level processes while controlling for sub-city level factors.Results: We demonstrate that the strategy works as expected on a sample of 91 cities with mesolevel data, and also works well when estimating the multilevel model on a sample of cities different from the imputation model, or even in a different time period.Conclusions: The results demonstrate that existing studies aggregated to macro units can yield considerably different (and therefore potentially problematic) results when failing to account for meso-level processes.