Lab publication on business survival and relocation

June 18, 2019 by hippj

Although neighborhood crime levels can be impacted by the presence of businesses nearby, it is also the case that crime in the neighborhood can impact businesses. High levels of crime can reduce patronage of businesses, which can result in them going out of business, or choosing to relocate. This study uses rich annual data on businesses and crime events in the Southern California region over a number of years to explore how nearby crime events impact business decisions to go out of business, move, or even where to move. The study finds that in general, higher violent and property crime are significantly associated with both business failure and mobility, and that higher crime in a destination neighborhood reduces the likelihood that a business locates there. The study also presents findings specific to industries.

You can access the article by Dr. John R. Hipp, Seth Williams, Dr. Young-an Kim, and Dr. Jae Hong Kim in Social Science Research entitled, “Fight or Flight? Crime as a Driving Force in Business Failure and Business Mobility”.

Get it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235218303775

Lab publication on temporal crime patterns

May 22, 2019 by hippj

Given that crime events exhibit both a spatial and a temporal pattern, this study explores whether certain social and physical environment characteristics have varying relationships with crime at different times of day. The study uses a flexible nonlinear parametric approach on a large sample of street segments (and surrounding spatial area) in Southern California. The study finds different temporal and spatial patterns for key measures. The presence of total employees in the surrounding area is associated with a reduced robbery risk during the daytime, but not at night. The risk of a robbery is elevated on a high retail segment on weekends during the daytime, and on high restaurant segments into the early evening on weekends. Furthermore, the presence of retail and restaurants in the surrounding area (evidence of shopping districts) was associated with elevated robbery risk in the afternoon and well into the evening.

You can access the article by Dr. John R. Hipp and Dr. Young-an Kim in Journal of Criminal Justice entitled, “Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Robbery: Differences across Measures of the Physical and Social Environment”.

Get it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235218303775

Lab publication on third places and cohesion

May 22, 2019 by hippj

Though Ray Oldenburg’s (1989) notion of “third places”, or places conducive to sociality outside of the realms of home and work, has received both scholarly and popular attention over the past several decades, many of the author’s central claims remain empirically untested. The present study considers the association between neighborhood third places, cohesion and neighbor interaction. Drawing on various literatures regarding interaction in public space and neighborhood use-value, we consider how the role of third places might vary according to neighborhood socioeconomic context. Using data from Wave I of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study (LAFANS) and data on third places from the point-based business data of ReferenceUSA, we test the effect of third places on cohesion and neighbor interaction across neighborhood poverty strata. We find support for the hypothesis that third places are associated with greater cohesion and neighbor interaction, and that neighbor interaction mediates the relationship between third places and cohesion in poor neighborhoods.

You can access the article by Seth A. Williams and Dr. John R. Hipp in Social Science Research entitled, “How Great and How Good?: Third places, neighbor interaction, and cohesion in the neighborhood context”.

Get it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X17310116

Lab publication on parks and crime

May 22, 2019 by hippj

Although neighborhood studies often focus on the presence of some particular entity and its consequences for a variety of local processes, a frequent limitation is the failure to account more broadly for the local context. This paper therefore examines the role of parks for community crime, but contributes to the literature by testing whether the context of land use and demographics nearby parks moderate the parks and crime relationship. A key feature of our approach is that we also test how these characteristics explain crime in the park, nearby the park, and in other neighborhoods in the city with data from nine cities across the United States (N= 109,808 blocks). We use multilevel Poisson and negative binomial regressions to test our ideas for six types of street crime. Our findings show that nearby land uses and socio-demographic characteristics are a key driver of crime being located within the park or nearby the park. Our results also show a clear distance decay pattern for the impact of various land uses and socio-demographics nearby parks. The results emphasize a need for research to consider the broader socio-spatial context in which crime generators/inhibitors are embedded.

You can access the article by Dr. Adam Boessen and Dr. John R. Hipp in Social Science Research entitled, “Drugs, Crime, Space, and Time: A Spatiotemporal Examination of Drug Activity and Crime Rates”.

Get it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X18301303

Lab publication on Drug Activity and Crime Rates

May 3, 2019 by hippj

To take stock of the neighborhood effects of drug activity, we combined theoretical insights from the drugs and crime and communities and place literatures in examining the longitudinal relationship between drug activity and crime rates at more spatially and temporally precise levels of granularity, with blocks as the spatial units and months as the temporal units. We found that drug activity on a block one month “pushes” assaultive violence into surrounding blocks the next month. Integrating perspectives form social disorganization theory with Zimring and Hawkins’ (1997) contingency causation theory, we also found that the economic resources and residential stability of the “the larger social environment”—that is, the surrounding quarter-mile egohood area—moderate drug activity’s block-level relationship to crime. These results suggest that drug activity increases assaultive violence and serious acquisitive crime rates on structurally advantaged blocks, producing a significant ecological niche redefinition for such blocks relative to others in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

You can access the article by Christopher Contreras and Dr. John R. Hipp online first in Justice Quarterly entitled, “Drugs, Crime, Space, and Time: A Spatiotemporal Examination of Drug Activity and Crime Rates”.

Get it here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2018.1515318