The Effects of Permanent Supportive Housing Facilities on Neighborhood Crime: Evidence from Los Angeles County

• In Event: Homelessness and the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

The provision of permanent supportive housing (PSH), deeply subsidized affordable housing with associated case management and social services, represents a major policy option in responding to chronic homelessness. However, attempts to develop new PSH facilities often encounter local resistance based on concerns that the presence of such facilities poses a public safety risk to nearby residents. Despite such concerns and their implications for the growing use of this increasingly popular strategy to address chronic homelessness, there has been little research exploring the relationship between PSH and crime. In this preregistered observational study, we examine whether PSH facilities causally affect crime levels in the surrounding area. We provide new, robust evidence on this important policy question by focusing on Los Angeles County, home to the United States’ largest unsheltered homeless population as well as a rapidly increasing number of PSH facilities. Drawing on crime data from the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and housing data from state and local government sources covering a 14-year period from 2010 through 2023, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences design that compares changes crime in the area surrounding newly opened PSH facilities to contemporaneous changes in areas where PSH facilities will open in the future. We find precise null effects for total crime, violence, and property crime (for example, we can rule out increases in total crime of greater than 6 percent), and imprecise null effects for drug and disorder crimes. These results are robust to a wide array of alternative modeling decisions and sample restrictions. As an alternate measure, we apply the same modeling approach to publicly subsidized affordable housing that is not targeted to chronically homeless individuals and find virtually identical null effects on property, violent, and total crime, but much more precise null effects on drug and disorder crimes. We conclude that opening supportive housing facilities does not lead to an increase in levels of crime, particularly property or violent crime. However, it is possible that PSH openings increase local levels of disorder, leading to reduced perceptions of safety.

Author

• Rosanna Smart, RAND Corporation
  Presenting Author