Nonresidential Crime Attractors and Generators Elevate Perceived Neighborhood Crime and Incivilities

Abstract

Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about the impacts of local nonresidential land uses on perceived incivilities. This study advances work in this area by developing a land-use perspective theoretically grounded in Brantingham and Brantingham's geometry of crime model in environmental criminology. That focus directs attention to specific classes of land uses and suggests relevance of land uses beyond and within respondents' neighborhoods. Extrapolating from victimization and reactions to crime, crime-generating and crime-attracting land uses are expected to increase perceived neighborhood incivilities and crime. Multilevel models using land use, crime, census, and survey data from 342 Philadelphia heads of households confirmed expected individual-level impacts. These persisted even after controlling for resident demographics and for neighborhood fabric and violent crime rates. Neighborhood status and crime were the only relevant ecological predictors, and their impacts are interpreted in light of competing perspectives on the origins of incivilities.

How Safe Is Your Neighborhood? Iranian Women’s Perception of Safety and Security

“…Since the grid pattern creates a clearer mental image in people. This has also been confirmed in previous studies as residents in neighborhoods with more perceived disorder have higher levels of fear (Ross and Jang, 2000), and higher status neighborhoods are associated with less disorder and crime (McCord, et al 2007).…”

Constructing crime: Neighborhood characteristics and police recording behavior

“…The data for "percent commercial" were a "land use and valuation" file provided by the Bexar County Tax Assessors Office in San Antonio. This variable was included because recent research on neighborhoods and crime suggests that features of land use often shape people's perceptions of and responses to crime (McCord, Ratcliffe, Garcia, & Taylor, 2007). Percent CFS on Fridays and Saturdays also accounts for temporal characteristics of police work load.…”

Exploring the conditional effects of bus stops on crime

“…For example, Authors (2009) found that the presence of industrial land uses dampened the effect of disadvantage on crime. Social disorganization/collective efficacy perspectives suggest that neighborhood characteristics may enhance or impede the ability to maintain informal social control by affecting the number of strangers in an area and reducing the ability of residents to distinguish locals from outsiders or increasing disorder (see Kurtz, Koons, & Taylor, 1998;McCord, Ratcliffe, Garcia, & Taylor, 2007;Taylor, Koons, Kurtz, Greene, & Perkins, 1995;Wilcox et al, 2004;Wilcox, et al, 2003). Thus, one might hypothesize that bus stops in disadvantaged areas could be more likely to be sites of crime because there are more strangers in proximity or fewer people willing / able to maintain informal social control.…”