Gentrification and Crime in the Tampa Bay Area

• In Event: Saving the Neighborhood?: Private Crime Control, Gentrification, and the Collateral Consequences of Mass Incarceration

Abstract

From the perspective of the ecology of crime, the relationship between the growth of cities and the characteristics of crime has been considered as interlocked each other. Within the geographical or psychological boundary of their neighborhoods or communities, the residents who remain strongly tied each other or hold strong collective efficacy in the groups are less likely break the rules of the society. The social disorganization theories or control theories grounded their causal explanation of crime on the social dynamics and structural factors.
In the recent decades, contrast to the original hypothesis of the expansion of urban areas, the gentrifying efforts of central business district or peripheral areas in the metropolitan cities have succeeded to seduce middle class population to move into the central districts of cities. The changes of structural factors of neighborhoods may lead to the differential social dynamics between residents, in turn that changes may result in the change of the level of informal social control and the rates of crime.
In this study, we try to examine that the effects of gentrification in the Tampa bay metropolitan areas – Tampa, St. Petersburg, Cleawater – on the rates of crime.

Author

• Gyeongseok Oh, Florida State University