American murder mystery revisited: do housing voucher households cause crime?

Abstract

Potential neighbors often express worries that Housing Choice Voucher holders heighten crime. Yet, no research systematically examines the link between the presence of voucher holders in a neighborhood and crime. Our article aims to do just this, using longitudinal, neighborhood-level crime, and voucher utilization data in 10 large US cities. We test whether the presence of additional voucher holders leads to elevated crime, controlling for neighborhood fixed effects, timevarying neighborhood characteristics, and trends in the broader sub-city area in which the neighborhood is located. In brief, crime tends to be higher in census tracts with more voucher households, but that positive relationship becomes insignificant after we control for unobserved differences across census tracts and falls further when we control for trends in the broader area. We find far more evidence for an alternative causal story; voucher use in a neighborhood tends to increase in tracts that have seen increases in crime, suggesting that voucher holders tend to move into neighborhoods where crime is elevated.

Composition or Context

“…Thus, even if great care is taken to implement an intervention the same way across cities (2) and all relevant individual-level variables are accounted for, an intervention may still not be transportable due to differences in context. Given that social experiments like MTO are embedded within complex social settings, the potential for nontransportable effects due to differences in context may not be surprising, and is aligned with sociological research demonstrating the importance of considering multiple levels of contextual influence (36–39).…”

Neighborhood Disinvestment, Abandonment, and Crime Dynamics

“…Brown et al, 2004;Kurtz, Koons, & Taylor, 1998;Perkins, Wandersmann, Rich, & Taylor, 1993;Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999;Taylor, 2001;Taylor, Shumaker, & Gottfredson, 1985 ). Recent evidence indicates the importance of concentrations of housing choice voucher holders (Ellen, Lens, & O'Regan, 2011;Mast & Wilson, 2013;Popkin, Rich, Hendey, Parilla, & Galster, 2012) in predicting crime rates nearby. Finally, the evidence examining the impact of housing stock characteristics suggests that violent and property crime rates are higher in neighborhoods with higher housing vacancy rates (Krivo & Peterson, 1996;Roncek, 1981), foreclosed homes (Cui, 2010;Ellen, Lacoe, & Sharygin, 2012;Goodstein & Lee, 2010;Immergluck & Smith, 2006;Katz, Wallace, & Hedberg, 2011;Williams, Galster, & Verma, 2013) and more abandoned, unsecured buildings (Spelman, 1993), although with one exception (Plerhoples, 2012).…”

Public Works Programs and Crime: Evidence for El Salvador

“…An analysis of daily reported incidents of major crimes in 12 U.S. cities reveals an increase in crime over the course of monthly welfare payment cycles (Fritz Foley 2008). Ellen et al (2011) also find that additional voucher holders lead to elevated rates of crime, controlling for census tract fixed effects. And a study by Kling et al (2005) on housing vouchers also finds that they can increase problem behavior and property crime arrests among recipient males.…”