 American murder mystery revisited: do housing voucher households cause crime?Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael C. Lens and Katherine O'Regan Housing Policy Debate, 2012, vol. 22, issue 4, 551-572 Abstract: Potential neighbors often express worries that Housing Choice Voucher holders heighten crime. Yet, no research systematically examines the link between the presence of voucher holders in a neighborhood and crime. Our article aims to do just this, using longitudinal, neighborhood-level crime, and voucher utilization data in 10 large US cities. We test whether the presence of additional voucher holders leads to elevated crime, controlling for neighborhood fixed effects, time-varying neighborhood characteristics, and trends in the broader sub-city area in which the neighborhood is located. In brief, crime tends to be higher in census tracts with more voucher households, but that positive relationship becomes insignificant after we control for unobserved differences across census tracts and falls further when we control for trends in the broader area. We find far more evidence for an alternative causal story; voucher use in a neighborhood tends to increase in tracts that have seen increases in crime, suggesting that voucher holders tend to move into neighborhoods where crime is elevated. Date: 2012 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:houspd:v:22:y:2012:i:4:p:551-572 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/10511482.2012.697913 Access Statistics for this article Housing Policy Debate is currently edited by Tom Sanchez, Susanne Viscarra and Derek Hyra More articles in Housing Policy Debate from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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