Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment

This paper uses data from a randomized housing-mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime. Our outcome measures are juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data. We find that providing families with the opportunity to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods substantially reduces violent criminal behavior by teens. We also find that moves to very low-poverty areas (with rates under 10 percent) may cause an increase in property crime offending, at least in the short term. <p> To download a Brookings Institution policy brief of this paper, please visit the Brookings Institution's site.