Street Egohood: An Alternative Perspective of Measuring Neighborhood and Spatial Patterns of Crime

Objectives: The current study proposes an approach that accounts for the importance of streets while at the same time accounting for the overlapping spatial nature of social and physical environments captured by the egohood approach. Our approach utilizes overlapping clusters of streets based on the street network distance, which we term street egohoods. Methods: We used the street segment as a base unit and employed two strategies in clustering the street segments: (1) based on the First Order Queen Contiguity; and (2) based on the street network distance considering physical barriers. We utilized our approaches for measuring ecological factors and estimated crime rates in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Results: We found that whereas certain socio-demographics, land use, and business employee measures show stronger relationships with crime when measured at the smaller street based unit, a number of them actually exhibited stronger relationships when measured using our larger street egohoods. We compared the results for our three-sized street egohoods to street segments and two sizes of block egohoods proposed by Hipp and Boessen (Criminology 51(2):287–327, 2013) and found that two egohood strategies essentially are not different at the quarter mile egohood level but this similarity appears lower when looking at the half mile egohood level. Also, the street egohood models are a better fit for predicting violent and property crime compared to the block egohood models. Conclusions: A primary contribution of the current study is to develop and propose a new perspective of measuring neighborhood based on urban streets. We empirically demonstrated that whereas certain socio-demographic measures show the strongest relationship with crime when measured at the micro geographic unit of street segments, a number of them actually exhibited the strongest relationship when measured using our larger street egohoods. We hope future research can use egohoods to expand understanding of neighborhoods and crime

Fast and slow change in neighbourhoods: characterization and consequences in Southern California

Due to data limitations, most studies of neighbourhood change within regions assume that change over the years of a decade is relatively constant from year-to-year. We use data on home loan information to construct annual measures of key socio-demographic measures in neighbourhoods (census tracts) in the Southern California region from 2000 to 2010 to test this assumption. We use latent trajectory modelling to describe the extent to which neighbourhood change exhibits temporal nonlinearity, rather than a constant rate of change from year to year. There were four key findings: (1) we detected nonlinear temporal change across all socio-demographic dimensions, as a quadratic function better fit the data than a linear one in the latent trajectories; (2) neighbourhoods experiencing more nonlinear temporality also experienced larger overall changes in percent Asian, percent black, and residential stability during the decade; neighbourhoods experiencing an increase in Latinos or a decrease in whites experienced more temporal nonlinearity in this change; (3) the strongest predictor of racial/ethnic temporal nonlinearity was a larger presence of the group at the beginning of the decade; however, the racial and SES composition of the surrounding area, as well as how this was changing in the prior decade, also affected the degree of temporal nonlinearity for these measures in the current decade; (4) this temporal nonlinearity has consequences for neighbourhoods: greater temporal nonlinear change in percent black or Latino was associated with larger increases in violent and property crime during the decade, and the temporal pattern of residential turnover or changing average income impacted changes in crime. The usual assumption of constant year-to-year change when interpolating neighbourhood measures over intervening years may not be appropriate

Drugs, Crime, Space, and Time: A Spatiotemporal Examination of Drug Activity and Crime Rates

To take stock of the “neighborhood effects” of drug activity, we combined theoretical insights from the drugs and crime and communities and place literatures in examining the longitudinal relationship between drug activity and crime rates at more spatially and temporally precise levels of granularity, with blocks as the spatial units and months as the temporal units. We found that drug activity on a block one month “pushes” assaultive violence into surrounding blocks the next month. Integrating perspectives form social disorganization theory with Zimring and Hawkins’ (1997) contingency causation theory, we also found that the economic resources and residential stability of the “the larger social environment”—that is, the surrounding quarter-mile egohood area—moderate drug activity’s block-level relationship to crime. These results suggest that drug activity increases assaultive violence and serious acquisitive crime rates on structurally advantaged blocks, producing a significant ecological niche redefinition for such blocks relative to others in Miami-Dade County, Florida

Micro-Scale, Meso-Scale, Macro-Scale, and Temporal Scale: Comparing the Relative Importance for Robbery Risk in New York City

We compare the relative importance of four dimensions for explaining the micro location of robberies: 1) the micro spatial scale of street segments; 2) the meso spatial scale surrounding the street segment; 3) the temporal pattern, and 4) the macro-scale of the surrounding 2.5 miles. This study uses crime, business, and land use data from New York City and aggregates it to street segments and hours of the day. Although the measures capturing the micro-scale of the street segment explained the largest amount of unique variance, the measures capturing temporal scale across hours of the day (and weekdays) explained the next largest amount of unique variance. The measures of the characteristics in the 2.5 miles macro scale explained the next largest amount of unique variance, and combined with the measures at the meso-scale explained nearly as much of the variance as the street segment measures

Nested loyalties: Local networks' effects on neighbourhood and community cohesion

Recent scholarship has suggested that cohesion at the neighbourhood level may not translate into greater cohesion for the broader community and may even have detrimental effects. Employing a sample from a recently developed 'new urbanist' community within a southern US city, the paper simultaneously explores the determinants of perceived cohesion with the local neighbourhood and with the broader community. It is found that there is indeed a positive relationship between the two in this sample. However, the determinants of the two differ: while both strong and weak informal ties in the neighbourhood increase perceived neighbourhood cohesion, only weak ties foster perceived cohesion with the broader community. No effect is found of residents' structural positions within local networks on perceived cohesion beyond the effect of strong and weak ties. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the broader literature viewing the effects of bridging and bonding social capital

A two-stage model for a two-stage process: How biographical availability matters for social movement mobilization

We model differential participation in protest as a two-stage mobilization process: willingness to engage in protest and conversion of willingness into participation. Treating mobilization as a two-stage process resolves an important puzzle in the literature on differential participation: the lack of constraining effects for biographical unavailability. Using a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States, we find that while our measures of biographical unavailability have no effect on the second stage of the mobilization process (converting willingness to protest to actual behavior), they show robust negative effects on the first stage of the mobilization process, removing people from the pool of willing protest participants. We also find that gender moderates the relationship between some of our measures of biographical unavailability - particularly marital status - and protest willingness. © Mobilization: An International Journal

From bad to worse: How changing inequality in nearby areas impacts local crime

Recognition is growing that criminogenic neighborhood effects may not end at the borders of local communities, that neighborhoods are located relative to one another in ways that shape local crime rates. Inspired by this insight, this research explores the changing spatial distribution of race and income around a location and determines how such changes are associated with crime patterns and trends in neighborhoods in Los Angeles. We examine how changes from 2000 to 2010 in the income composition, racial composition, and intersection of these two constructs are linked with changes in levels of crime across local areas. We find that neighborhoods experiencing greater increases in spatial inequality in a broader area (two and a half miles around the neighborhood) experience greater increases in crime levels in the focal area over the decade, and that this pattern is strongest for neighborhoods simultaneously experiencing increasing average household income or increasing inequality. We also find that neighborhoods simultaneously experiencing increases in inequality and racial-ethnic heterogeneity experience increases in crime

The Effect of the Physical Environment on Crime Rates: Capturing Housing Age and Housing Type at Varying Spatial Scales

This study introduces filtering theory from housing economics to criminology and measures the age of housing as a proxy for deterioration and physical disorder. Using data for Los Angeles County in 2009 to 2011, negative binomial regression models are estimated and find that street segments with older housing have higher levels of all six crime types tested. Street segments with more housing age diversity have higher levels of all crime types, whereas housing age diversity in the surrounding ½-mile area is associated with lower levels of crime. Street segments with detached single-family units generally had less crime compared with other types of housing. Street segments with large apartment complexes (five or more units) generally have more crime than those with small apartment complexes and duplexes