Noxious Housing or Temporary Havens: Single Room Occupancy (SROs) Facilities and Crime

• In Event: Housing and Crime

Abstract

An unintended consequence of the housing market crash in the mid-2000s has been a surge in working class families seeking low-cost housing, many of whom still earn too much for conventional public housing. These families have increasingly turned to single room occupancy facilities (SROs) where they rent an individual room in a multi-tenant building, often a former hotel in a disadvantaged community. While some SROs resemble extended-stay hotels, they typically connote modern-day tenements and are commonly considered nuisance properties and crime havens. Little criminological scholarship, however, has investigated the degree to which SROs live up to their reputation as hotbeds of poverty and crime. In this study we examine SROs in a representative, mid-sized city to determine (1) whether these establishments anchor crime with resident offenders, (2) attract crime by importing non-resident offenders, or (3) generate crime in the surrounding neighborhoods. We test these relationships using a rich data set of incidents and arrests for a three year time period and for a number of crimes ranging from nuisance offenses such as drug use and prostitution to violence.

Authors

• Lyndsay Boggess, University of South Florida

• Julie Krupa, University of South Florida

• Alyssa Chamberlain, Arizona State University

• Tony Grubesic, Arizona State University