The Reciprocal Relationship Between Crime and Neighborhood Structural Characteristics
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UC Irvine UC Irvine Previously Published Works Title A Dynamic View of Neighborhoods: The Reciprocal Relationship between Crime and Neighborhood Structural Characteristics Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0204z868 Journal Social Problems, 57(2) Author Hipp, John R Publication Date 2013-12-10 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California A Dynamic View of Neighborhoods: The Reciprocal Relationship between Crime and Neighborhood Structural Characteristics John R. Hipp, University of California, Irvine Prior research frequently observes a positive cross-sectional relationship between various neighborhood structural characteristics and crime rates, and attributes the causal explanation entirely to these structural char- acteristics. We question this assumption theoretically, proposing a household-level model showing that neighbor- hood crime might also change these structural characteristics. We test these hypotheses using data on census tracts in 13 cities over a ten-year period, and our cross-lagged models generally find that, if anything, crime is the stronger causal force in these possible relationships. Neighborhoods with more crime tend to experience increas- ing levels of residential instability, more concentrated disadvantage, a diminishing retail environment, and more African Americans ten years later. Although we find that neighborhoods with more concentrated disadvantage experience increases in violent and property crime, there is no evidence that residential instability or the presence of African Americans increases crime rates ten years later. Keywords: neighborhoods, crime, longitudinal models, spatial effects, reciprocal effects. Social scientists have long been concerned with the role of certain key structural char- acteristics in explaining the generation of crime in neighborhoods. Numerous studies have built on the insights of social disorganization theory from the Chicago School in positing that these structural characteristics affect the relations among residents, resulting in a higher rate of crime (Bellair 1997; Sampson and Groves 1989; Warner and Pierce 1993). It is notable that the vast majority of studies in this tradition have used cross-sectional data to test these posited relationships, ignoring the possible directionality of this relationship. However, insight from the neighborhood satisfaction literature showing the negative effect crime can have on such assessments, along with the residential mobility literature showing the effect of neigh- borhood satisfaction on household mobility outcomes, suggests that crime may play a role in changing neighborhood structural characteristics through its effect on the residential mobility outcomes of households. As a consequence, cross-sectional designs attempting to explain the “mechanisms” through which such structural characteristics affect neighborhood crime may be premature if the directionality of the causal relationship itself is unclear. There is a growing awareness among scholars that if residential mobility outcomes are made in response to crime, then crime itself may play a role in how neighborhoods change (Bursik 1988; Felson 2002; Miethe and Meier 1994; Skogan 1990). A burgeoning literature suggests that some neighborhoods are locked in a cycle of disadvantage in which certain structural characteristics (concentrated disadvantage, residential instability, and racial/eth- nic heterogeneity) and neighborhood crime and disorder reciprocally influence one another (Bursik 1988; Felson 2002; Miethe and Meier 1994; Skogan 1990). This possibly reciprocal relationship between key neighborhood structural characteristics and crime rates implies a Direct correspondence to: John R. Hipp, Department of Criminology, Law, and Society, University of California, Irvine, 3311 Social Ecology II, Irvine, CA 92697. E-mail: [email protected]. Social Problems, Vol. 57, Issue 2, pp. 205–230, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533. © 2010 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.2.205. SP5702_03.indd 205 3/30/10 2:48:35 PM 206 HIPP vicious cycle for such neighborhoods, a cycle in which the residential mobility of the most disadvantaged residents may play a substantial role (Sampson and Sharkey 2008). We suggest that to understand this dynamic neighborhood process requires a multilevel theoretical model that explicitly takes into account the actions of households, consistent with the recent call to theoretically integrate the interrelationship between crime and residential mobility (Liska and Bellair 1995:604; South and Messner 2000). We develop such a model here, and an important implication is that to the extent households adopt an exit strategy in response to the level of crime, this can help explain the existence of various structural charac- teristics of neighborhoods. For instance, if households choose to leave neighborhoods when the crime rate increases, the rate of residential instability will increase. If households of dif- ferent racial/ethnic backgrounds have differential abilities to leave high crime areas, this will change the racial/ethnic composition of the neighborhood. And to the extent that households prefer areas with less crime, we show below how this can give rise to residential mobility outcomes that result in high crime areas containing a high number of households in poverty. In all three instances, it is the higher level of crime that causes these structural characteristics, rather than a causal relationship from these structural characteristics to crime as postulated by the social disorganization model. Nonetheless, few empirical tests exist of these possible reciprocal effects at the neighbor- hood level. Although two studies tested for a reciprocal relationship between crime rates and residential mobility flows utilizing large cities and metropolitan areas as the units of analysis and found that higher levels of crime resulted in a greater concentration of nonwhite popula- tion (Liska and Bellair 1995; Liska, Logan, and Bellair 1998), using large cities as the unit of analysis is arguably too large to capture the more meso level of neighborhoods at which these processes work. Prior studies using neighborhood-level data focusing on the co-occurrence of neighborhood residential instability and crime do not explicitly attempt to tease out this causal process (Bursik and Webb 1982). One of the few studies to test the effect of crime on population loss and racial/ethnic change assumed no reverse effect on crime rates, and was constrained to studying such change within a single midwestern city (Morenoff and Sampson 1997). Likewise, few studies have tested whether crime also leads to a clustering of those living in concentrated disadvantage. Thus, few empirical tests of whether crime can play a role in changing neighborhood structural characteristics exist, or whether this role may in fact be even greater than the effect of these structural characteristics on neighborhood crime. Furthermore, by testing these processes on a sample of tracts in 13 cities our results are more generalizable than those from a single city. This article takes the following course. We first briefly consider the explanation of social disorganization theory for why neighborhood structural characteristics will affect the level of crime in a neighborhood. We then discuss theoretical reasons why household mobility out- comes in response to levels of crime might lead to changes in neighborhood structural conditions. Following that, we describe our data and our analytical approach employing cross-lagged mod- els that test the effect of neighborhood crime on these structural characteristics ten years later, and likewise the effect of these structural characteristics on crime ten years later. We close with a discussion and consider implications of the findings for theories of neighborhoods. Theories of Neighborhood Structural Characteristics and Crime Rates Neighborhood Structural Characteristics Cause More Crime The social disorganization theory has a long history and was developed from the pio- neering work of scholars in the Chicago School (Shaw and McKay 1942). This early work conceptualized the city as an ecology in which residents moved to more desirable neighbor- hoods, and as a consequence certain neighborhoods became characterized by a high level of SP5702_03.indd 206 3/30/10 2:48:35 PM A Dynamic View of Neighborhoods 207 social disorganization and high levels of crime and delinquency. More recent work in this framework has focused on explicating the mechanisms through which certain neighborhood structural characteristics might lead to social disorganization (Sampson and Groves 1989). Specifically, Robert Sampson and Byron Groves (1989) emphasized that neighborhoods with more racial/ethnic heterogeneity, residential instability, and economic disadvantage had lower levels of formal and informal social control and therefore higher levels of both property and violent crime. Thus, the cohesion of residents enhances their willingness to confront possible deviants, and hence reduce the level of crime. It is important to emphasize that the bulk of studies testing social disorganization theory, and variants of it, have employed cross-sectional tests. Thus, a common