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.
Alessandro Corvasce (Sat,) studied this question.