The mortgage foreclosure crisis has generated increasing concerns about the effects of foreclosed properties on their surrounding neighborhoods, and on criminal activity in particular. There are a number of potential ways in which a foreclosed property might increase the payoffs to committing...

Over the past two decades, crime has fallen dramatically in cities in the United States. We explore whether, in the face of falling central city crime rates, households with more resources and options were more likely to move into central cities overall and more particularly into low income...

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 paper aims to do just this, using longitudinal, neighborhood-level crime and...

The ‘flight from blight’ and related literatures on urban population changes and crime have primarily considered times of high or increasing crime rates. Perhaps the most cited recent work in this area, Cullen and Levitt (1999), does not extend through 1990s, a decade during which crime...

Low-income individuals arrested on criminal charges face disproportionately high rates of pretrial detention and conviction. We study a novel approach to addressing this inequity: providing low-income individuals with access to legal counsel immediately following their arrest. Focusing on a...