Scenes like the one Mata describes also form the prevailing media image of low-income housing developments. But a new study of San Antonio suggests that, despite its fearsome reputation, most low-income housing isn’t dangerous at all, either to residents or neighbors who live nearby. The great majority of crime in the city’s projects is concentrated in just a few high-risk developments.
When researchers Marie Skubak Tillyer and Rebecca Walter looked at data from the San Antonio Housing Authority, they found that 72 percent of violent crime, 87 percent of drug crime, and 72 percent of property crime occurred at just 5 percent of all properties, the study, published by Crime and Delinquency, reports. “It’s not the case that they’re all sort of equally dangerous,” Tillyer told me. “A small proportion of places account for an overwhelming majority of crime.”
These findings are consistent with a wide range of previous research on crime and place. It turns out that low-income housing developments that are “hot spots” for crime tend to share certain characteristics. Some are large-scale, structural factors, like concentrated disadvantage and residential instability in the properties’ surrounding neighborhoods. But others are smaller-scale—and more easily fixable—matters of place, like a lack of basic security and design features. The study looked at the presence of practical (if depressingly carceral-seeming) features like secured entrances, strongly enforced visitor policies, bars or lattices on the windows, surveillance cameras, and routine patrols. The safer developments were equipped with more of them; the more dangerous ones had fewer.
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