Eviction and Neighborhood Concentrated Disadvantage: Impact on Crime Victimization in a U.S. Mid-Sized Town

• In Event: Neighborhoods, Cohesion, and Disadvantage

Abstract

Criminal activity and victimization are more prevalent in neighborhoods with higher levels of concentrated disadvantage.  Housing market conditions also impact neighborhood-level crime.  In this study, we explore how housing market factors complicate the relationship between concentrated disadvantage and crime by accounting for evictions. Using Knoxville, Tennessee as a case study and police, court, and census data, we examine the relationship between eviction and crime rates at the tract level, accounting for concentrated disadvantage. Furthermore, we examine whether concentrated disadvantage mediates the relationship between eviction and crime. We also investigate whether eviction is a dimension of concentrated disadvantage. Finally, we examine whether eviction in one neighborhood is associated with crime in neighborhoods adjacent and nearby. Our results show that eviction is associated with crime rates, but it does not improve the power of concentrated disadvantage to predict crime. Concentrated disadvantage fully mediates the relationship between eviction and crime, meaning that evictions increase neighborhood concentrated disadvantage and at least one of the myriad social ills associated with it. Eviction is spatially clustered with crime in the center of Knoxville.

Author

• Jiayi Li, Jiangsu Open University