The costs of urban property crime

This paper estimates the impact of recorded domestic property crime on property prices in the London area. Crimes in the Criminal Damage category have a significant negative impact on prices. Burglaries have no measurable impact on prices, even after allowing for the potential dependence of burglary rates on unobserved property characteristics. A one-tenth standard deviation decrease in the local density of criminal damage adds 1 per cent to the price of an average Inner London property. One explanation we offer here is that vandalism, graffiti and other forms of criminal damage motivate fear of crime in the community and may be taken as signals or symptoms of community instability and neighbourhood deterioration in general.