Metropolitan Expansion and Black Social Dislocation: The Link between Suburbanization and Center-City Crime

Abstract

A long-standing though unexplained finding is that the degree of suburbanization in a metropolitan area is positively related to the rates of serious crime in the incorporated center city. The authors account for this relationship by integrating theoretically two underlying features of urban life in the U.S. First, from a human ecology standpoint, suburbanization is part of a a broader metropolitan expansion process that undermined and isolated many center-city black communities. Second, serious crime in cities is disproportionately concentrated in black communities. They reexamine the suburbanization/city-crime link using racially disaggregated models fir cities and SMSAs in 1980. The findings show that the rate of suburbanization among the total SMSA population is strongly related to the center-city rates of serious crime among blacks, but not among whites. This supports the view that suburbanization increased black center-city crime rates by socially isolating black communities and engendering a variety of social problems. Indeed, upon controlling for potential mediators of the suburbanization-crime link, the relationship between suburbanization and black city-crime rates virtually disappeared