Community Careers in Crime

Urban ecologists have documented the stages through which residential communities in American metropolitan areas move as they undergo physical and social deterioration. Criminologists have documented the roles of deteriorated urban neighborhoods as areas of high rates of crime and delinquency. Less is known about how neighborhoods evolve into high-crime areas. Using a developmental model, this research investigated the twenty-year histories of Los Angeles County's highest-crime-rate neighborhoods in 1970. Three distinct stages were identified: emerging, transitional, and enduring. Use of cross-sectional and time-series analyses revealed that neighborhood deterioration precedes rising crime early in the cycle but that, as neighborhoods move into the later enduring stage, rising crime rates precede further neighborhood deterioration. Among the changes signaling neighborhood deterioration and rising crime rates were a shift from single- to multiple-family dwellings, a rise in residential mobility, unrelated individuals and broken families, the ratio of children to adults, minority group populations, females in the labor force, and nonwhite and Spanish surname population with advanced education. Early in the cycle, the speed of change in neighborhood characteristics exceeds the rate of increase in crime, while later, the accelerating crime rise outstrips the velocity of neighborhood change. Efforts to prevent the development of new high-crime areas must focus on neighborhoods in the emerging stage of the deterioration cycle.