The Effect of the Physical Environment on Crime Rates: Capturing Housing Age and Housing Type at Varying Spatial Scales

Abstract

This study introduces filtering theory from housing economics to criminology and measures the age of housing as a proxy for deterioration and physical disorder. Using data for Los Angeles County in 2009 to 2011, negative binomial regression models are estimated and find that street segments with older housing have higher levels of all six crime types tested. Street segments with more housing age diversity have higher levels of all crime types, whereas housing age diversity in the surrounding ½-mile area is associated with lower levels of crime. Street segments with detached single-family units generally had less crime compared with other types of housing. Street segments with large apartment complexes (five or more units) generally have more crime than those with small apartment complexes and duplexes.

Neighborhood change from the bottom Up: What are the determinants of social distance between new and prior residents?

“…Studies have shown that this process plays out slowly over a long period of time (Hoyt 1933;Rosenthal 2008), but nonetheless older housing units tend to experience turnover in which residents are replaced by those of modestly lower income (Rosenthal 2014). As further evidence of this deterioration, a recent study showed that street segments with older housing had higher levels of crime, which is consistent with this deterioration leading to disorder, which is posited to increase crime (Hipp, Kim, and Kane 2019). The implication is that transitions occurring when households move out of an older housing unit will have greater potential for inducing social distance, and therefore are important to study for understanding neighborhood change.…”

Urban Crime Occurrences in Association with Built Environment Characteristics: An African Case with Implications for Urban Design

“…On the other hand, BWT links serious crimes to the social and physical disorders, positing that the prevalence of disorder creates fear in the minds of citizens who are convinced that the area is unsafe [16]-which might play an important role in their attitude and behaviors [26]. More recently, many other experimental studies have concluded that in fact there is a significant association between built environment and crimes [1,2,9,13], specifically that poor physically designed urban environment is associated with an increase in crime rates.…”

“…The effect of the built environment on crime intensity is consequential and has received growing attention in the literature in crime place studies [1,2]. Crimes depend on demographic and socioeconomic factors, but they also depend on the built environment, which acts as an external force affecting an individual's behavior and attitude [3][4][5][6][7][8][9].…”

“…The relationship between the urban built environment and crime has been widely explored in many developed countries [1,2,5,[11][12][13] but with much less attention in developing countries [14,15]. In general, research has been conducted at three levels-micro (buildings), meso (neighborhoods), and macro (city/town)-with more attention given to the micro-level using sampled buildings.…”

“…The observed relationships are mostly at the microscale and related to reduced types of crimes, i.e., burglary [4], residential robbery [22], and violent crimes. An exception is Hipp et al [1], who analyzed the effect of the physical environment on the rates of several types of crimes, i.e., aggravated assault, robbery, homicide, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and larceny; however, these are also at the microscale. Therefore, there is a need to explore the relationship between the urban built environment and different types of crime at the neighborhood scale in order to deepen our understanding of the topic, since empirical evidence shows that the effect of the urban built environment may be different depending on the types of crime.…”