Lauren J. Krivo

Disadvantage and Neighborhood Violent Crime: Do Local Institutions Matter?

This article explores whether local institutions matter for controlling neighborhood violence. Disadvantaged neighborhoods have difficulty attracting and maintaining conventional institutions that help control crime. At the same time, institutional settings that are conducive to violence are more prevalent. This article assesses whether certain local institutions provide a mechanism linking economic deprivation and residential instability to criminal violence. Rates of total and individual violent crimes are examined for census tracts in Columbus, Ohio for 1990. The findings show that communities may reduce violent crime somewhat by developing a larger base of certain types of local institutions (e.g., recreation centers) and preventing the encroachment of others (i.e., bars). Still, such institutional mechanisms do not explain why economic deprivation and residential instability are strongly linked to violent crime. This suggests that efforts to substantially reduce violence in local communities must counter the macro-structural forces that increase economic deprivation and lead to innercity decline.

The structural context of homicide : Accounting for racial differences in process

Previous research demonstrates differences in the processes that generate black and white rates of criminal violence. Analyses of race-specific urban homicide offending rates for 1990 test the hypothesis that racially different effects occur because the crime-generating process itself is conditioned by the social situations of blacks and whites. Results show that when African Americans and whites have similar low levels of concentrated disadvantage, the effects of disadvantage and homeownership are relatively comparable. (Abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 2000. Copyright

Immigrant characteristics and Hispanic-Anglo housing inequality

This paper seeks to explain why Hispanic households in the United States live in housing markedly inferior to Anglos’. I argue that immigrant characteristics of Hispanic households and the metropolitan areas in which Hispanics live play important roles in determining such inequality in the housing market. Empirical analyses of homeownership, household crowding, and housing costs demonstrate that immigration plays a role in explaining relatively low homeownership and high household crowding for each of four large Hispanic populations (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Hispanics). The role of immigrant characteristics in determining housing costs is much weaker.

Housing and wealth inequality: Racial-ethnic differences in home equity in the United States

In our study, we took a first step toward broadening our understanding of the sources of both housing and wealth inequality by studying differences in housing equity among blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and non-Hispanic whites in the United States. Using data from the American Housing Survey, we found substantial and significant gaps in housing equity for blacks and Hispanics (but not for Asians) compared with whites, even after we controlled for a wide range of locational, life-cycle, socioeconomic, family, immigrant, and mortgage characteristics. Furthermore, the payoffs to many factors are notably weaker for minority than for white households. This finding is especially consistent across groups for the effects of age, socioeconomic status, and housing-market value. Blacks and Hispanics also uniformly receive less benefit from mortgage and housing characteristics than do whites. These findings lend credence to the burgeoning stratification perspective on wealth and housing inequality that acknowledges the importance of broader social and institutional processes of racial-ethnic stratification that advantage some groups, whites in this case, over others.

Racial Segregation, the Concentration of Disadvantage, and Black and White Homicide Victimization

Discriminatory housing market practices have created and reinforced patterns of racial residential segregation throughout the United States. Such segregation has racist consequences too. Residential segregation increases the concentration of disadvantage for blacks but not whites, creating African-American residential environments that heighten social problems including violence within the black population. At the same time, segregation protects white residential environments from these dire consequences. This hypothesized racially inequitable process is tested for one important type of violence—homicide. We examine race-specific models of lethal violence that distinguish residential segregation from the concentration of disadvantage within racial groups. Data are from the Censuses of Population and Federal Bureau of Investigations homicide incidence files for U.S. large central cities for 1980 and 1990. Our perspective finds support in the empirical analyses. Segregation has an important effect on black but not white killings, with the impact of segregation on African-American homicides explained by concentrated disadvantage.

Segregation, Racial Structure, and Neighborhood Violent Crime

Drawing on structural racism and urban disadvantage approaches, this article posits a broad influence of citywide racial residential segregation on levels of violent crime across all urban neighborhoods regardless of their racial/ethnic composition. Multilevel models based on data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study for 7,622 neighborhoods in 79 cities throughout the United States reveal that segregation is positively associated with violent crime for white and various types of nonwhite neighborhoods. Nonetheless, there is a lack of parity in violence across these types of communities reflecting the larger racialized social system in which whites are able to use their privileged position to reside in the most advantaged neighborhoods, while African‐Americans and Latinos live in the most disadvantaged urban communities and therefore bear the brunt of urban criminal violence.

Race, Segregation, and the Concentration of Disadvantage: 1980–1990

This article examines variation across cities in the geographic concentration of poverty, male joblessness, and female-headed families for Blacks and Whites. For each racial group, we describe the scope and analyze the sources of concentrated disadvantage along these dimensions for 1980 and 1990, and for changes between these two years. We explore whether patterns found in past research regarding poverty concentration are generalizable to the concentration of other aspects of disadvantage, including joblessness. Analysis of the sources of concentrated disadvantage focus on the differential role of racial residential segregation for explaining variation in concentrated disadvantage between Blacks and Whites. These relationships are evaluated while accounting for other economic and sociodemographic conditions. We find that: between 1980 and 1990 Black and White disadvantage became more geographically concentrated along some dimensions (poverty and female-headed families) but not others (male joblessness); no matter which dimension is explored, African Americans have a substantially higher concentration of disadvantage than Whites; and, racial residential segregation is critical for understanding concentrated disadvantage and especially for explaining why disadvantaged Blacks are so much more geographically concentrated than disadvantaged Whites.

Commercial Density, Residential Concentration, and Crime: Land Use Patterns and Violence in Neighborhood Context

Drawing on Jacobs’s (1961) and Taylor’s (1988) discussions of the social control implications of mixed land use, the authors explore the link between commercial and residential density and violent crime in urban neighborhoods. Using crime, census, and tax parcel data for Columbus, Ohio, the authors find evidence of a curvilinear association between commercial and residential density and both homicide and aggravated assault, consistent with Jacobs’s expectations. At low levels, increasing commercial and residential density is positively associated with homicide and aggravated assault. Beyond a threshold, however, increasing commercial and residential density serves to reduce the likelihood of both outcomes. In contrast, the association between commercial and residential density and robbery rates is positive and linear. The implications of these findings for understanding the sources of informal social control in urban neighborhoods are discussed.

How low can it go? Declining black-white segregation in a multiethnic context.

We extend research on whites’ neighborhood contact with blacks, population composition, and prospects for desegregation by developing a new measure of the floor of racial residential segregation under conditions of low black-white contact. The measure incorporates the way in which multi ethnic contexts further constrain levels of black-white segregation. The results show that black-white desegregation is likely when the black population is small, but is unlikely otherwise. Yet, when multiple ethnic groups are sufficiently large, a moderate level of black-white segregation is necessary for whites to maintain low neighborhood contact with blacks, even when the proportion of African Americans is small.

Segregated Spatial Locations, Race-Ethnic Composition, and Neighborhood Violent Crime

How can we understand the dramatic linkages among race, ethnicity, place, and violence in the United States? One contention is that differences in violence across communities of varying race-ethnic compositions are rooted in highly differentiated social and economic circumstances of the segregated neighborhoods inhabited by whites, African Americans, Latinos, and other groups. Here, the authors draw upon and expand this perspective by exploring how inequality in the character of internal and nearby neighborhood conditions leads to patterned racial and ethnic differences in violence across areas. Using data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study to examine the racial-spatial dynamic of violence for neighborhoods in thirty-six U.S. cities, the authors demonstrate that along with the social and economic conditions that exist within neighborhoods, proximity to more disadvantaged and especially racially privileged (heavily white) areas is particularly critical in accounting for the large and visible differences in violence found across neighborhoods of different colors.