Disentangling the Relationship between Gentrification and Crime

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Displacement and Eviction

Abstract

Researchers have long grappled with explaining spatial distributions of crime and the role of neighborhood factors in producing or reducing levels of crime. The trend for many central city neighborhoods was disinvestment and decline in the mid-twentieth century, and criminologists document higher crime rates in these neighborhoods, following early human ecological theories developed by Chicago School scholars. Yet, in more recent decades, central cities are increasingly transformed by gentrification–the movement of middle- and upper-class residents to poor or working-class neighborhoods--a change to the structural conditions Shaw and McKay (1942) found to be stable (and predictive of crime) for decades. More recent research has not fully reached a consensus on the size, direction, or causal ordering of the relationship between gentrification and crime, nor the potential influence of urban contexts on these. In this paper, we analyze the location and type of crime incidents in two cities with different economic and racial contexts, St. Louis, Missouri and San Francisco, California, to disentangle the relationships between crime, gentrification, and urban context.

Authors

• Elaina Johns-Wolfe, Saint Louis University

• Kelsey Cundiff, University of Missouri-St. Louis