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Working Paper

Blowing It Up and Knocking It Down: The Local and Citywide Effects of Demolishing High-Concentration Public Housing on Crime

Despite popular accounts that link public housing demolitions to spatial redistribution of crime and possible increases in crime, little systematic research has analyzed the neighborhood or citywide impact of demolitions on crime. In Chicago, which has conducted the largest public housing demolition program in the United States, I find that public housing demolitions are associated with a 10 percent to 20 percent reduction in murder, assault, and robbery in neighborhoods where the demolitions occurred. Furthermore, violent crime rates fell by about the same amount in neighborhoods that received the most displaced public-housing households relative to neighborhoods that received fewer displaced public-housing households, during the period when these developments were being demolished. This suggests violent crime was not simply displaced from the neighborhoods where demolitions occurred to neighborhoods that received the former public-housing residents. However, it is impossible to know what would have happened to violent crime in the receiving neighborhoods had the demolitions not occurred. Finally, using a panel of cities that demolished public housing, I find that the mean public-housing demolition is associated with a drop of about 3 percent in a city’s murder rate and about 2 percent in a city’s assault rate. I interpret these findings as evidence that while public-housing demolitions may push crime into other parts of a city, crime reductions in neighborhoods where public housing is demolished are larger than crime increases in other neighborhoods. A caveat is that while the citywide reduction in the assault rate appears to be permanent, the citywide reduction in the murder rate seems to last for only a few years.

Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System.


Suggested Citation

Aliprantis, Dionissi, and Daniel A. Hartley. 2015. “Blowing It Up and Knocking It Down: The Local and Citywide Effects of Demolishing High-Concentration Public Housing on Crime .” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 10-22R. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201022r