This article investigates whether and how residential loans that accrue to neighborhoods in US urban areas vary in their influence on violent and property crime across distinct race–ethnic communities, and depend on neighborhood levels of socioeconomic disadvantage. Building on recent literature on residential loans and crime, and drawing on racial structure and social disorganization perspectives, we posit that non-White and more disadvantaged neighborhoods gain more “bang” (i.e., crime reduction) for the investment dollars that they accrue than White and less disadvantaged areas. Using data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study for over 8,000 neighborhoods across 87 US cities, our multilevel analyses of violent and property crime for four types of neighborhoods revealed support for these hypotheses. While all types of neighborhoods benefit from a larger influx of residential loans, the payoff for African American and Latino areas is considerably greater than for White communities, and this is especially true for reductions in violent crime. In addition, the more disadvantaged the community, the larger the negative association between lending and both violent and property crime.
BaumerE. P.WolffK. T.ArnioA. N. (2010). The contemporary foreclosure crisis and U.S. crime rates. Unpublished paper. College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University.
2.
BeveridgeA. A. (2008). A century of Harlem in New York City: Some notes on migration, consolidation, segregation, and recent developments. City and Community, 7, 358–365.
3.
BoboL. (2004). Inequalities that endure? Racial ideology, American politics, and the peculiar role of the social sciences. In KrysanM.LewisA. E. (Eds.), Changing terrain of race and ethnicity (pp. 13–42). New York: Russell Sage.
Bonilla-SilvaE. (2001). White supremacy and racism in the post-civil rights era. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner.
6.
BrowningC. R.ByronR.CalderA.KrivoL. J.KwanM-P.LeeJ-Y.PetersonR. D. (2010). Commercial density, residential concentration, and crime: Land use patterns and violence in neighborhood context. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 47, 329–357.
7.
BursikR. J.Jr.GrasmickH. G. (1993). Neighborhoods and crime: The dimensions of effective community control. New York: Lexington.
CarrP. J. (2005). Clean streets: Controlling crime, maintaining order, and building community activism. New York: New York University Press.
10.
CrutchfieldR. D.GluskerA.BridgesG. S. (1999). A tale of three cities: Labor markets and homicide. Sociological Focus, 32, 65–83.
11.
FeaginJ. R. (2006). Systemic racism: A theory of oppression. New York: Routledge.
12.
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. (2001). Home Mortgage Disclosure Act raw data 2000. Washington, DC: Federal Reserve System.
13.
GothamK. F. (2002). Race, real estate, and uneven development: The Kansas City experience, 1900-2000. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
14.
GraifC.SampsonR. J. (2009). Spatial heterogeneity in the effects of immigration and diversity on neighborhood homicide rates. Homicide Studies, 13(3):242–260.
15.
HippJ. R. (2007). Income inequality, race, and place: Does the distribution of race and class within neighborhoods affect crime rates. Criminology, 45, 665–698.
16.
HollowayS. R.WylyE. K. (2001). The color of money expanded: Geographically contingent mortgage lending in Atlanta. Journal of Housing Research, 12, 55–90.
17.
ImmergluckD.SmithG. (2006). The impact of single–family mortgage foreclosures on neighborhood crime. Housing Studies, 21(6):851–866.
18.
KatyalN. K. (2002). Architecture as crime control. Yale Law Journal, 111, 1039–1139.
19.
KellingG. L.ColesC. M. (1996). Fixing broken windows: Restoring order and reducing crime in our communities. New York: Martin Kessler Books.
20.
KrivoL. J.PetersonR. D. (1996). Extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods and urban crime. Social Forces, 75, 619–650.
21.
KrivoL. J.PetersonR. D. (2000). The structural context of homicide: Accounting for racial differences in process. American Sociological Review, 65, 547–559.
22.
KrivoL. J.PetersonR. D.KuhlD. C. (2009). Segregation, racial structure, and neighborhood crime. American Journal of Sociology, 114, 1765–1802.
23.
MartinezR.Jr. (2002). Latino homicide: Immigration, violence and community. New York: Routledge Press.
24.
MartinezR.Jr.StowellJ. I.LeeM. T. (2010). Immigration and crime in an era of transformation: A longitudinal analysis of homicides in San Diego neighborhoods, 1980-2000. Criminology, 48, 797–829.
25.
MasseyD. S.DentonN. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
26.
McNultyT. L. (2001). Assessing the race-violence relationship at the macro level: The assumption of racial invariance and the problem of restricted distributions. Criminology, 39, 467–490.
27.
MearsD. P.BhatiA. S. (2006). No community is an island: The effects of resource deprivation on urban violence in spatially and socially proximate communities. Criminology, 44, 509–548.
28.
MorenoffJ. D.SampsonR. J.RaudenbushS. W. (2001). Neighborhood inequality, collective efficacy, and the spatial dynamics of urban violence. Criminology, 39, 517–559.
29.
OliverM. L.ShapiroT. M. (2006). Black wealth/White wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality, tenth anniversary edition. New York: Routledge.
30.
OmiM.WinantH. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.
31.
OsgoodD. W. (2000). Poisson-based regression analysis of aggregate crime rates. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 16, 21–43.
32.
PetersonR. D.KrivoL. J. (2009). Segregated spatial locations, race-ethnic composition, and neighborhood violent crime. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 623, 93–107.
33.
PetersonR. D.KrivoL. J. (2010a). Divergent social worlds: Neighborhood crime and the racial-spatial divide. New York: Russell Sage.
34.
PetersonR. D.KrivoL. J. (2010b). National neighborhood crime study (NNCS), 2000 [Computer file]. ICPSR27501–v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter–university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2010–05–05. doi:10.3886/ICPSR27501.
35.
RossS.YingerJ. (2002). The color of credit: Mortgage discrimination, research methodology, and fair-lending enforcement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
36.
RughJ. S.MasseyD. S. (2010). Racial segregation and the American foreclosure crisis. American Sociological Review, 75(5):629–651.
37.
SampsonR. J. (2008). Rethinking crime and immigration. Contexts, 7, 28–33.
38.
SampsonR. J.RaudenbushS. W. (1999). Systematic social observation of public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 603–651.
39.
SampsonR. J.WilsonW. J. (1995). Toward a theory of race, crime, and urban inequality. In HaganJ.PetersonR. D. (Eds.), Crime and inequality (pp. 37–54). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
40.
ShawC.McKayH. (1969). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas (Rev. ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
41.
ShihadehE. S.ShrumW. M. (2004). Serious crime in urban neighborhoods: Is there a race effect?Sociological Spectrum, 24, 507–533.
42.
SilverE.MillerL. (2004). Sources of informal social control in Chicago neighborhoods. Criminology, 42, 551–583.
43.
SkoganW. G. (1992). Disorder and decline: Crime and the spiral of decay in American neighborhoods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
44.
SquiresG. D.KubrinC. E. (2006). Privileged places: Race, residence, and the structure of opportunity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
45.
VélezM. B. (2001). The role of public social control in urban neighborhoods: A multilevel analysis of victimization risk. Criminology, 39, 837–864.
46.
VélezM. B. (2006). Toward an understanding of the lower rates of homicide in Latino versus Black neighborhoods: A look at Chicago. In PetersonR. D.KrivoL. J.HaganJohn (Eds.), The many colors of crime: Inequalities of race, ethnicity and crime in America (pp. 91–107). New York: New York University Press.
47.
VélezM. B. (2009). Banks and the racial patterning of homicide: A study of Chicago neighborhoods. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 3(2):154–171.
48.
VélezM. B.RichardsonK. (2010). The political economy of neighborhood homicide in Chicago: The role of bank investment. Paper presented at the Sociology Faculty-Student Speaker Series, University of New Mexico.
49.
WilliamsR.NesibaR.McConnellE. D. (2005). The changing face of inequality in home mortgage lending. Social Problems, 52, 181–208.
50.
WilsonW. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
51.
WilsonW. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
52.
YingerJ. (1995). Closed doors, opportunities lost: The continuing costs of housing discrimination. New York: Russell Sage.
