How to predict gentrification: Look for falling crime
Everyone has theories for why well-educated, higher-income professionals are moving back into parts of cities shunned by their parents’ generation.
Perhaps their living preferences have shifted. Or the demands of the labor market have, and young adults with less leisure time are loath to waste it commuting. Maybe the tendency to postpone marriage and children has made city living more alluring. Or the benefits of cities themselves have improved.
“There are all sorts of potential other amenities, whether it’s cafes, restaurants, bars, nicer parks, better schools,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. “But a huge piece of it,” she said, “I think is crime.”
New research that she has conducted alongside Keren Mertens Horn, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Davin Reed, a doctoral student at New York University, finds that when violent crime falls sharply, wealthier and educated people are more likely to move into lower-income and predominantly minority urban neighborhoods.
Their working paper suggests that just as rising crime can drive people out of cities, falling crime has a comparable effect, spurring gentrification. And it highlights how, even if many Americans — including, by his own words, President-elect Donald Trump — inaccurately believe urban violence is soaring, the opposite long-term trend has brought wide-ranging change to cities.
“We’re trying to help people understand what a dramatic difference the reduction in violent crime in particular has made in our envi- ronment,” Ellen said. “That has repercussions far beyond what we think of. The homicide rate has gone down — that’s directly the most important consequence. But there are all sorts of repercussions as well. This really has been a sea change.”
Nationally, violent crime peaked in 1991. It fell precipitously for the next decade, then more slowly through the 2000s, and there’s a whole other set of theories about why households moved. Using citywide violent crime data from the FBI, the scholars tracked the changing probability of different demographic groups moving into central cities, as opposed to suburbs, as crime fell.
Higher-income and college-educated movers — and to a lesser degree, whites — appeared significantly more sensitive to changing crime levels in their housing decisions than other groups. Lower-income and minority households, for instance, didn’t become more likely to move to cities as they grew safer.
That may reflect the fact, Ellen suggested, that lower-income families have more experience or confidence in their ability to navigate crime. Or it may suggest that attention to violence is a luxury in housing decisions that the poor and minorities may not have. A household facing racial discrimination, high housing costs or the need to be near supportive family members simply has fewer options — and less leeway to be choosy — than the higher-income, college-educated households this research identifies.
It’s entirely likely that the arrival of more affluent residents affected crime, too — either by increasing opportunities for property crime in the short term, or by adding eyes on the street and pressure on the police in the long run.