Social ecology and the diffusion of crime and violence in and around public housing in New York City

Public housing has not always been associated with the tangle of social pathologies that are often associated with these areas. It is only in recent years that public housing has become conflated with a variety of social ills, including serious crime. Owing perhaps to public housing's more benevolent origins, criminologists have tended to overlook the unique socioeconomic context of public housing. Conspicuously absent from most research is a consideration of social factors in the genesis and spread of crime in these areas. Informal social control theory suggests that certain social factors differentially affect a neighborhood's ability to regulate itself. In other words, the social context plays a significant role in determining a neighborhood's collective capacity to control the conduct of its residents, including their criminal activity. Informal social control identifies a variety of considerations that are relevant in this regard, including population mobility, segregation, inequality, and family structure. As neighborhoods in their own right, public housing developments may be categorized along a continuum of informal social control. Contrary to the prevailing folk wisdom, projects are not unitary social constructs; different projects demonstrate distinctions in their social control capabilities. Public housing projects, both in their structural design and sociodemographic make-up, constitute “neighborhoods.” These neighborhoods may be characterized by social factors that are implicated in crime rate discrepancies. Public housing neighborhoods do not, however, exist in a vacuum. While they sometimes display a distinctive physical appearance, they are nonetheless an integral part of their surrounding environment. On one hand, neighborhoods adjacent to public housing areas are likely to be affected by its proximity. Conversely, influence in these areas is not unidirectional; there are reciprocal relationships at work such that public housing is similarly affected by its immediate neighbors. Using spatial autocorrelation analysis, the study finds evidence of spatial patterning of crime in public housing and public housing neighborhoods. Generalized estimating equations reveal the presence of both outward and inward diffusion that is sometimes, but not always, mediated by sociostructural factors. Finally, the policy implications of this nonrecursive diffusion are discussed.