Home Foreclosures and Neighborhood Crime Dynamics

We advance scholarship related to home foreclosures and neighborhood crime by employing Granger causality tests and multilevel growth modeling with annual data from Chicago neighborhoods over the period 1998-2009. We find that completed foreclosures temporally lead property crime and not vice versa. More completed foreclosures during a year both increase the level of property crime and slow its decline subsequently. This relationship is strongest in higher income, predominantly renter-occupied neighborhoods, contrary to the conventional wisdom. We did not find unambiguous, unidirectional causation in the case of violent crime and when filed foreclosures were analyzed.