CJRC seminar
This study examines the longitudinal relationship between crime and processes of urban revitalization, or gentrification, in the Seattle metropolitan area. Criminological theories hold competing hypotheses for the connections between gentrification and crime, and not since the late 1980’s have criminologists quantitatively tested these links in an American context. Drawing on recent urban demography research, we assert that gentrification of the downtown core progressed rapidly in many American cities in the late 1990’s, and that these changes had implications for the spatial distribution of urban crime over time. Using twenty years of tract-level home mortgage and crime data for the city of Seattle, we use fixed-effects estimators to test the gentrification-crime link in previously disadvantaged neighborhoods. We hypothesize a curvilinear relationship between gentrification and crime, such that revitalization initially increases crime due to increased social conflict, instability, and criminal opportunities, but then reduces crime due to population turnover and increased formal controls backed by the state, corporate, and new resident interests.