The Impact of Violence Surges on Neighbourhood Business Activity

Abstract

Theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that fear of violence will cause consumers, employees and entrepreneurs to alter their routine activities in areas that experience a surge in violent activity. This paper argues that understanding how businesses respond to violence has important implications for understanding community crime cycles and offers further evidence of how crime impacts the choices individuals make with regard to where they live, shop and work. Using newly available longitudinal business data and homicide data disaggregated to the ZIP code level, an examination is made of the impact of violence surges on the creation, destruction and growth of business establishments in five large US cities between 1987 and 1994. Controlling for pre-existing levels of violence, it is found that increased violence has the greatest consequences for service-related establishments in low-crime neighbourhoods. This finding is consistent with the notion that the fear of victimisation imposes additional indirect costs to society through its negative impact on local business establishments.

Determining the Impact of Residential Neighbourhood Crime on Housing Investment Using Logistic Regression

“…This, in agreement with Greenbaum & Tita [18] and Lynch & Rasmussen [25] was due to the fact that violent crimes attract more fear of crime than burglary and other street incivilities. They affirmed that though residents believed burglary is more frequent in residential neighbourhood crime more than violent crimes.…”

Reducing Gun Violence: Results from an Intervention in East Los Angeles

“…According to criminological theory, places with similar attributes should experience similar levels of crime and similar changes in these levels over time. Greenbaum and Tita (2002) demonstrated the utility of this approach in examining how "surges" in local levels of violence affected local business activity. As Greenbaum and Tita did, we first estimated a probit model where the dependent variable is coded "1" if a Census block group receives the intervention and "0" if it does not.…”

“…The estimated probability of a block group being selected for the intervention is the propensity score (Rosenbaum and Rubin, 1983Rubin, , 1984, or the predicted probability that a particular place, given its characteristics, will adopt a particular program (Bartik, 2002). This method has been used to evaluate enterprise zones for economic development (Greenbaum and Engberg, 1998;Engberg and Greenbaum, 1999;Bondonio and Engberg, 2000), job training programs (Dehejia and Wahba, 1999), and how violence affects local business decisions (Greenbaum and Tita, 2002).…”

Contributions of Behavioral Systems Science to Leadership for a New Progressive Movement

“…While levels of violence nationally are declining, in the urban centers in which violence is currently concentrated, the resulting social disruptions are severe. Violence and incarceration carry enormous costs at every level of society, including the costs of treating gunshot victims, declining property values, diminished economic activity, disruptions of family and community life, and serious mental health and child development impairments-not to speak of the loss of life (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2012; Cullen and Levitt 1999;Greenbaum and Tita 2004;Lynch and Rasmussen 2001;Singer, Anglin, Song, and Lunghofer 1995). Racial tensions, always a powerful undercurrent in US society, have recently resurfaced.…”