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Articles

Is Investor Purchasing of Foreclosures Related to Neighborhood Crime? Evidence From a Phoenix Suburb

, &
Pages 67-90
Received 06 Jul 2013
Accepted 09 May 2014
Published online: 21 Aug 2014
 

Little is known about how investors purchasing foreclosures during the recent U.S. housing crisis are affecting neighborhood crime. While they may decrease crime by reducing vacancies or bettering neighborhood conditions, they may increase it by escalating neighborhood turnover. Combining local police department data on calls for service with foreclosure, home sales, and sociodemographic data, this research uses longitudinal modeling to assess the relation between the purchasing of foreclosures by investors and calls for service in neighborhoods in Chandler, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb where investors are renting former foreclosures. Neighborhoods where foreclosures were more often purchased by investors had more calls for service about violent crime the following year.

Acknowledgments

We thank the ASU Institute for Social Science Research and the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation for providing resources to purchase foreclosure and sales data. We are grateful to the Chandler Police Department for giving us timely access to the CFS data. Research assistants Fasil Tiru (formerly of the ASU School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning) and Janne Gaub (of the ASU School of Criminology and Criminal Justice) contributed to data geocoding and cleaning.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deirdre Pfeiffer

Deirdre Pfeiffer is an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. She researches the effect of housing planning and policymaking on the well-being of diverse groups.

Danielle Wallace

Danielle Wallace is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. She researches how neighborhood disorder impacts various aspects of neighborhood life, including crime and neighborhood decay.

Alyssa Chamberlain

Alyssa Whitby Chamberlain is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. She researches spatial and temporal relationships among neighborhood structural characteristics, social inequality, and crime and how those factors shape how neighborhoods change over time.

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