NCJ Number
182547
Date Published
2000
Length
15 pages
Annotation
It is not known whether there are housing projects with stable low violence rates in the midst of increasing rates in the nearby neighborhoods; these "edge" problems are difficult to measure, and there has been no research on the issues of proximity and contagion within and around public housing; through a case study of one densely populated borough of New York City, this chapter addresses some of the issues raised by previous research and expands the base of empirical knowledge regarding the association between public housing and crime.
Abstract
The study examined the spatial distribution of interpersonal violence in public housing projects and the immediate surrounding areas in Bronx County, one of the five boroughs of New York City. First, the study computed estimates of violence rates in public housing and compared them to the surrounding areas. This allowed for a detailed description of the variation in violent crime rates across public housing projects. Second, the study assessed the characteristics of housing projects that explain variation in their rates of violence. Third, the research analyzed the role that public housing may play in explaining rates of violence in the immediate and larger ecological areas. This included examining the potentially nonrecursive relationship between violent crime rates in public housing and their geographic contexts. Findings show that for this urban county, variation between public housing sites appears to be only weakly related to their compositional or structural characteristics. The limited support for these factors as predictors of violence rates in public housing sets the stage for more sophisticated conceptual analysis and theoretical development. 4 tables, 2 notes, and 40 references