Panel Paper: Do Housing Choice Voucher Recipients Import Crime?

Saturday, November 9, 2013 : 4:30 PM
DuPont Ballroom H (Washington Marriott)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Michael Stoll, University of California, Los Angeles
Over the recent decade Housing Choice Voucher Recipients have increasingly shifted their residential locations to the suburbs for a variety of reasons.  Despite some evidence that their moves are influenced by search for greater opportunity broadly defined, many have alleged that HCVRs  import crime in doing so, without good empirical evidence to support this claim. This paper is intended to examine whether shifts in HCVR recipient locations are followed by shifts in local crime rates.  To examine this, we intend to use data from HUD’s Picture of Subsidized Housing for 2000 and 2008.   This data set describes the characteristics of HUD assisted housing including the type of program, and population characteristics of the assisted households, at the census tract level.  We will aggregate census tracts to larger places in order to match this data with crime data from the  2000 and 2008 Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Offenses Known and Cleared by Arrest data sets compiled by the FBI. (Places will refer to incorporated jurisdictions - such as cities, towns, and villages - as well as census-designated places - unincorporated areas delineated by the U.S. Census Bureau for statistical purposes). The UCR data provide counts of crimes reported to the police for each police agency (referred to as a reporting unit in the UCR data)  by month. We will use the UCR data to estimate rates of serious felony crimes, and to calculate crime rates by aggregating 12 months of crime data to create annual estimates for 2000, and 2008.  We will use first difference (and cross-sectional) regression analysis to examine whether and to what extent changes in the percentage of HCVR are related to changes in crime rates at the level of place, controlling for a host of relevant place characteristics such as size, percent black (or Latino), whether in city or suburb, region, and other relevant socio-economic and physical characteristics of place.