GTA: Gentry City. Gentrification and crime across the American Metropolis

This study investigates the effects of gentrification on criminal behaviour to assess whether this phenomenon is destructive to communities. To identify gentri-fied neighbourhoods in the 2010s, I employed a newly constructed, unique data set of geo-referenced crime records from 14 major American cities paired with Census data. To examine the effect of gentrification on crime, I adopted state-of-the-art event study models to evaluate the consequences of gentrification, accounting for variations in the timing of this process between cities and neighbourhoods. The results show that gentrified neighbourhoods faced a significant increase in crimes estimated around six to eight crimes, with property crimes showing the most significant increases, up to 13%. Overall, the study indicates that gentrification may have a criminalizing influence on areas, underlining the need for additional policy consideration of this issue by urban planners and scholars.