Demography, foreclosure, and crime:

Abstract

The present research evaluates the possibility of spatial heterogeneity in the effects on neighborhood crime rates of both traditional demographic indicators—immigrant concentration, racial composition, socioeconomic disadvantage, and residential instability—and a contemporary aspect of housing transition—foreclosure rates—that has garnered significant attention in recent scholarship. Geographically weighted regression results indicate significant variation across Chicago census tracts in the estimates of logged percent black, immigrant context, and foreclosure for both robbery and burglary rates. The observed effects of socioeconomic disadvantage on robbery rates and residential stability on burglary rates also are found to vary across local neighborhood clusters in Chicago. Visual inspection of these effects illuminates the importance of supplementing current approaches by “thinking locally” when developing theoretical explanations and empirical models of how demographic context shapes crime rates.