In this research project, I aimed to investigate the contribution of housing instability to violent crime in California. The main social theoretical question that drove this research project was:
Specifically, I examined the interactions between violent crime counts and housing instability (through evictions data) in three groups of counties in California. This included a group of three counties with high housing instability (HG), a group of three counties with median levels of housing instability (MG), and lastly a group of three counties with the least housing instability (LG). Why three groups? Through exploratory analysis, I found that different counties have different reasons for high housing instability. In some counties, there is a great amount of instability amongst a small population whereas in other counties there is a great amount of instability amongst a very large population. Since the data I used in this project does not contain information that allows us to calculate population density and population distribution amongst the county, I included three counties in each of the three groups with varying population to instability ratios.
The empirical research questions that oriented this project were: From the years 2000 to 2016 what is the correlation between violent crime and eviction filings? Is the distribution of eviction filings across these groups correlated with the distribution of crime? How do violent crime counts covary with eviction filings?
To address these empirical research questions, I explored violent crime and clearances data collected by the California Department of Justice’s Open Justice program. Specifically, I surveyed the data for the years 2000 to 2016, by county in California. In addition to the crimes and clearances data, I studied evictions data collected by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, for the years of 2000 to 2016. Lastly, to understand the demographic component of evictions and violent crime, I utilized census data that is included in the Eviction Lab’s dataset for each county in each year of interest. I focussed on the distribution of violent crime and the distribution of evictions across these county groups in California.
The sixteen year period that I focussed on in this paper is critical to explore the relationship between housing instability and violent crime as the issue of housing instability has increasingly become a mainstream issue in this time period. This is especially true in the large metropolitan areas of the state such as Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Moreover, this time period is one of the only time periods where there exists rich data on both violent crimes and evictions.
In terms of relevance, data collected by the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) indicates that housing instability has been an important factor in decreasing access to livable housing conditions for certain, often marginalized, vulnerable communities (i.e. the homeless). For example, on a given night in 2016, 22% of the entire nations homeless population was from California (SHA_Final_Combined.pdf, n.d.). Eviction itself is an interesting indicator of housing instability as there is subjective measure involved in deciding whether a tenant continues to occupy a property or not (i.e. a landlord’s opinion of a tenant), as compared to other causes of housing instability such as rent increases. There is also a large body of research on how marginalized communities are often the ones that are impacted the most by crime. For example, individuals who live in deprived urban areas, or are members of an ethnic minority group “have a particularly high risk of being victims of burglary, car crime and violence” (Jones & Maguire, n.d.). Putting these two ideas together, it is constructive to explore the hypothesis that housing instability contributes to crime rates.
This topic is important to study right now as rising housing instability is becoming a larger problem, especially in places like the San Francisco Bay Area where in San Francisco almost 85% of the total population was homeless in 2017 (“Homelessness in the Bay Area,” 2017). These astonishingly large numbers of people experiencing some form of housing instability provokes fear that it might lead to other detriments to people’s lives, such as violent crime and becoming victims of violent crime. Specific concerns about housing instability include the volatility of changing schools for children and a lack of financial resources leading to petty theft or other crimes, and more. Studying this topic will contribute to our understanding of how housing instability interacts with crime and what populations are most affected by it across California’s most impacted counties.
Additionally, more research into this relationship poses a valuable opportunity for policy makers to design housing policy that takes into account the proxy-effects of housing instability on the larger well being of a community, beyond just the access to housing itself.