Community Facilities, Disorder, and Neighborhood Crime

• In Event: Roundtable: Empirical Tests of Community-Level Theories of Crime

Abstract

This paper focuses on identifying whether the presence of human service facilities, such as alcohol/drug treatment centers and mental health centers, are associated with higher levels of residential fear, lower levels of neighborhood collective efficacy, and higher levels of crime and victimization. There is a substantial literature that investigates residential perceptions toward proposed group homes and a less developed, but more recent, focus on the empirical association between group quarters and neighborhood crime. While both bodies of literature touch on the concept of Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) processes, theoretical explanations for the proposed relationship has been lacking. Using the community survey from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) series, this study draws from broken windows theory and hypothesizes that human service group quarters are viewed as disorderly. In particular, the proposed project will test the ideas that 1) residents in neighborhoods with human service facilities report more fear than residents in neighborhoods without such facilities; 2) human service facilities are negatively associated with neighborhood collective efficacy; and 3) neighborhoods with human service facilities are associated with higher levels of crime and personal victimization than residents in neighborhoods without such facilities.

Author

• Kelly McGeever, University of Hartford